This treatise is focused on biology and the imponderable; ecosystems lost and found. The problem of human consciousness in the Anthropocene, which is a very different crisis for the planet than ever posed before by our thinking, and the reactive thoughts and feelings of all Others (a word we use to guide one's image and interior sense of every individual of every other taxonomic rank on earth). We cannot offer something otherwise, that would connote a validation of philosophical speculation. To do so is to live in a falsity, where the authentic, integral and protracted Consciousness that aspires to a facet of biology (and for some, physics) imports every buttress that can attempt to stave off, or at least delay reality, involving itself in everybody's business, believing fiercely that its very Being matters. When -though who can say - by all evidence it does so only in negative numbers and exponents. In square roots whose expressions are largely disastrous, save for the moments of kindness, the unstinting gestures, first responders, museums, those who have sworn to a Hippocratic Oath in whatever honest and virtuous form, all those cherished byproducts of this unlikely species. Recognition that our species' capacity to venerate nature in all her quirks and ellipses, stochastic incalculables and steadfast patterns, her graces and unimagined diversity, is our only chance of at least partial survival into an unknown future. Not that it matters in the least, whether we survive as a species, that is. Although, given the currents of our collective behavior - not to be entirely foregone in our conclusions - the one fact that appears to stand out in biological history is that the quicker we are gone, the better it will be. That is not a mean-spirited approach to a text, but a necessarily sobering one.