THE ANT, THE GRASSHOPPER OR SCHRÖDINGER'S CAT: AN EXPLORATION OF CONCEPTS OF SUSTAINABILITY
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Living within the limits imposed by a finite earth may be the predominant challenge of the 21st century; however there is no agreement on what this means economically or politically. Continually increasing population and per capita consumption within a finite environment is a biologic impossibility. Today many of nature's resources are being harvested at rates where growth is uneconomic and damaging to future production. This paper explores linkages between economics, society and nature as complex adaptive systems in a world of uncertainty. To understand that these self organising systems exist in equilibrium, dependent on feedback loops, is to understand that as humanity destroys system equilibrium we push the entire system to the edge of criticality and perhaps chaos. Consequences of criticality and chaos theory are now thought to follow power laws; wherein the size of any single system disruption is impossible to predict, especially when inter-relationships with other systems are not understood. Understanding the biosphere from a holistic perspective is critical when considering priorities and making wise choices. Thoughts of some environmental thinkers are reviewed for a perspective on the meaning of true sustainability, where it may lead and how we must redesign human systems to adapt to a sustainable world. The authors believe holism exists; that similarities with other fields of study exist in the environmental issues of today; and, that ideas and solutions may be also found in unexpected places. Although no recommendations are made it is hoped that interest is stimulated in answering the question when are we going to act collectively to address some of the present day myriad issues.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".