Doing Whole Earth justice: a reply to Cafaro et al.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Doing Whole Earth justice: a reply to Cafaro et al.We are grateful to receive Cafaro et al.'s () response to our article (Büscher et al., ).They clarify some of the principal tenets of the Nature Needs Half movement, and there are important issues we agree on.The outlook for biodiversity is bleak and we share a deep concern about this.Non-humans should be able to exist and thrive, and this is something that we also fully affirm.Equally important is the acknowledgement by Cafaro et al. that the neoliberal growth economy needs to be challenged if we are to make headway in addressing the extinction crisis.This position is significant given that it differs from that of the main champion of the Half Earth concept, E.O.Wilson (), who appears to have blind faith in the ability of free market capitalism to correct its social and environmental problems.It also opens up the potential for conservation to support efforts to resist the ravages of neoliberal capitalismsomething that has become more urgent in light of the Trump presidency (Büscher & Fletcher, ).Nevertheless, we remain unconvinced by the proposal to set aside half of the planet in protected areas.Cafaro et al. may be correct in saying this would save many species (although arguably only if the effects of climate change on biodiversity prove to be less severe than predicted).However, it will not address the destruction of nature that is fundamental to the global economy.Cafaro et al. acknowledge that setting aside half of the planet needs to be accompanied by an end to 'human misbehaviour' in the other half, but they offer no strategy for how to achieve this.We worry that focusing only on protected area expansion will make such changes less likely.It could distract from any search for mechanisms to redress an inherently unsustainable political economy or, worse, provide an excuse for doing nothing.This is why we argue for a Whole Earth vision.There are parallels here with the question of human population growth, raised by Cafaro et al.This is an important issue, but one that cannot be treated separately from the question of unequal levels of environmental impact.To do so provides a convenient rationale for focusing attention on the reproductive habits of the poor rather than the more environmentally damaging consumption habits of the rich.Most significant is the human cost of the Half Earth proposal.Moving from c. % to % of the globe in protected areas across all biomes would have a tremendous social impact through processes of physical, economic and symbolic displacement.This could have desirable implications in some wealthier parts of the world (for example, through rewilding), but many of the new protected areas would be in places whose inhabitants have contributed least to the problem of global environmental change.It is all well to suggest that 'local communities should be actively involved in conservation efforts', but what power will their interests, voices and rights have in the face of the claims of supporters of the Nature Needs Half movement?The lack of a clear and operationalized commitment to global justice is a profound flaw in the Nature Needs Half vision.Setting aside half of the planet does not help us learn how to live with nature (Turnhout et al., ) in an unjust world.Rather,
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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 | 0.018 | 0.086 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.096 | 0.135 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.006 |
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".