Nature’s Eden? The Production and Effects of ‘Pristine’ Nature in the Galápagos Islands
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Best known for inspiring Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, the Galápagos Islands are often referred to as an "evolutionary Eden" and celebrated as one of the world's few remaining bastions of "pristine" nature.However, recent concerns of a crisis of overdevelopment prompted UNESCO to put the Galápagos on its list of World Heritage Sites "In Danger."In this paper, we interrogate the conception of pristine nature which undergirds the recent crisis discourse and argue that such understandings of nature are not in fact natural, but are social productions that reflect particular ways of understanding island space.We then explore the material and political effects of understandings of "pristine" nature by showing how they work to structure the tourism industry and investment in public infrastructure in ways that have created social inequalities as well as negative environmental impacts.We then briefly discuss measures taken so far to address the crisis situation, arguing that they would benefit from critical attention to the complexity of social-environmental relations in the Galápagos and a re-thinking of the nature of the islands.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".