The sugar-cane landscape of the Caribbean islands: resilience, adaptation and transformation of the plantation social–ecological system
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction The plantation sugar-cane landscape has been the most distinctive cultural landscape in a number of Caribbean islands since colonisation, surviving in its basic form for over 500 years. We regard it as the physical manifestation of a well-defined social–ecological system that has demonstrated remarkable resilience – defined as ‘the capacity of a system to experience shocks while retaining essentially the same function, structure, feedback and, therefore, identity’ (Walker et al ., 2006). While the landscape has survived in its general form for centuries, the plantation system it reflects has undergone dynamic changes in space and time that have facilitated resilience, changes that have included a transition from the system’s most notorious feature – slavery – to the current period of rationalisation and decline. This chapter illustrates how one can understand the sugar-cane landscape through the lens of resilience thinking – and through reference to the heuristics of adaptive cycles and panarchy, in particular. It also offers interpretations of different forms of sugar-cane landscape as cultural landscapes, and illustrates how this perspective can be combined with resilience thinking to enrich our understanding of landscape character and change. Caribbean sugar-cane cultural landscape Sugar-cane has been grown commercially in the Caribbean islands (Figure 10.1) since the early sixteenth century. The plantation is both an agricultural and an industrial site, and buildings important to production (e.g. mills, housing for workers) and populations supplying the labour form important components of the cultural landscape. At one time, most inhabited islands of the Caribbean produced cane, but the dates when cultivation was first introduced and then terminated, the technologies used in the agricultural/industrial process, the inclusion of non-sugar land uses in the landscape and the populations forming the labour supply have varied significantly from island to island. Even within individual islands, sugar-cane landscapes have reflected local variation. Large plantations, owned by individuals, companies or governments, have dominated the areas of sugar production, tending to occupy the land with the highest quality, but small properties, sometimes using traditional techniques on marginal lands, have coexisted. Thus, while the distinctive light-green sugar-cane component of the landscape has persisted for centuries, its dominant visual impact has tended to obscure important space/time variations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".