Webs of ordered complexity help to stabilize plant and animal communities. From caves to con dominiums, from Lascaux to Luxor to the Louvre, material civilization is most fundamentally characterized by creating more complex systems that counter the physical-chemical tendency for material disorder. With important artistic and spiritual exceptions, there is a close linkage between added order and added value. With Ross mired in his word-painting of a farragoed fresco of insinuation and innuendo, expect few remedies from him that inform cogent decisions. To sail out of our modern miasma will require captains with more pro found notions than tinkling a bell to cross the ocean.
Scientists can feel and care.
Consider driving north of Halifax with me to stop in a once-quaint fishing village. The cod have been netted, removed and rendered. Sold, abandoned, sunka schooner embedded and tilted in muck that dribbles over her gunnel beneath her heaved, rusting, brindled belly. Examine the aban doned clapboard houses. These gray, warped shells with rough, pachydermed surfaces in cheerier times held hearts that fell with the receding mast and rose joyously on its return.