Worlding the end: A story of colonial and scientific anxieties over beavers' vitalities in the Castorcene
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines a technoscientific project for eradicating the North American beaver in Tierra del Fuego (TDF), an austral region known as “The End of the World.” Introduced from Canada into TDF in 1946 to promote a fur industry, beavers are today classified as an alien and invasive species that severely threatens the pristine native ecosystems of TDF. We analyze the environmental history of beavers in TDF to explore the many partial losses that have shaped beaver-human relations across hemispheres. We argue that various ends of the world have mediated different technoscientific responses to beavers’ vitalities, reflecting multiple forms of human anxiety over loss and extinction. Thinking with the beavers and their environmental history in TDF, we explore the “Castorcene” as the human anxiety that emerges from beavers' vitalities. As an analytical concept, the Castorcene de-universalizes the Anthropocene, decolonizes extinction horizons, displaces human exceptionalism, and situates and singularizes imaginaries of the end of the world.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.028 | 0.037 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".