Changing Nature: The Myth of the Inevitability of Ecosystem Management
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this article, the author argues that ecosystem management is a policy choice masquerading as an inevitability. Ecosystem management is a process that measures, controls and changes ecosystems to produce the most desirable environment in human terms. The article begins with a discussion of two developments from which ecosystem management derives its legitimacy, the theory of nonequilibrium in ecosystems and the extinction of pristine systems: ecosystems exist in a fluid and dynamic state, and there are no ecosystems that are completely unaffected by human impact. Therefore, according to the prevailing view, it is not possible to preserve ecosystems in a natural state. The author questions the logic of that conclusion, arguing that neither nonequilibrium nor the absence of pristine systems dictates that ecosystems must be controlled and deliberately changed. The article's contention is not that natural is preferable, but that it is possible, and that the debate between ecological preservation and environmental utilitarianism can and should occur. If science and law dictate that there are no options but to deliberately change ecosystems, as the managers believe, then the debate has no relevance. Thus, the thesis is not that ecological preservation is a better choice than ecosystem management, but that there is a choice to make.
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.
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 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 it