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to save what we do not love (but only appreciate in some abstract sense). So let them all continue—the films, the books, the television programs, the zoos, the little half acre of ecological preserve in any community, the primary school lessons, the museum demonstrations, even (though you will never find me there) the 6:00 A.M. bird walks.
    Let them continue and expand because we must have visceral contact in order to love. We really must make room for nature in our hearts. Consider one last image of Ezio Pinza as Emil De Becque in South Pacific , and accept the traditional characterization of nature as female (if this convention offends you, then make nature male and fall “in love with a wonderful guy”). The words may be banal (and Pinza was only extolling Mary Martin, while I speak of all nature), but the emotional setting is incomparable and still can bring tears to any unjaded eye. Think of this greatest of bassos as he soars up to the tonic of his chord:
    Once you have found her, never let her go.
    Once you have found her, NEVER LET HER GO!

2 | The Golden Rule: A Proper Scale for Our Environmental Crisis
    PATIENCE ENJOYS a long pedigree of favor. Chaucer pronounced it “an heigh vertu, certeyn” (“The Franklin’s Tale”), while the New Testament had already made a motto of the Old Testament’s most famous embodiment: “Ye have heard of the patience of Job” (James 5:11). Yet some cases seem so extended in diligence and time that another factor beyond sheer endurance must lie behind the wait. When Alberich, having lost the Ring of the Niebelungen fully three operas ago, shows up in Act 2 of Götterdämmerung to advise his son Hagen on strategies for recovery, we can hardly suppress a flicker of admiration for this otherwise unlovable character. (I happen to adore Wagner, but I do recognize that a wait through nearly all of the Ring cycle would be, to certain unenlightened folks, the very definition of eternity in Hades.)
    Patience of this magnitude usually involves a deep understanding of a fundamental principle, central to my own profession of geology but all too rarely grasped in daily life—the effects of scale. Phenomena unfold on their own appropriate scales of space and time and may be invisible in our myopic world of dimensions assessed by comparison with human height and times metered by human lifespans. So much of accumulating importance at earthly scales—the results of geological erosion, evolutionary changes in lineages—is invisible by the measuring rod of a human life. So much that matters to particles in the microscopic world of molecules—the history of a dust grain subject to Brownian motion, the fate of shrunken people in Fantastic Voyage or Inner Space—either averages out to stability at our scale or simply stands below our limits of perception.
    It takes a particular kind of genius or deep understanding to transcend this most pervasive of all conceptual biases and to capture a phenomenon by grasping a proper scale beyond the measuring rods of our own world. Alberich and Wotan know that pursuit of the Ring is dynastic or generational, not personal. William of Baskerville (in Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose ) solves his medieval mystery because he alone understands that, in the perspective of centuries, the convulsive events of his own day (the dispute between papacies of Rome and Avignon) will be forgotten, while the only surviving copy of a book by Aristotle may influence millennia. Architects of medieval cathedrals had to frame satisfaction on scales beyond their own existence, for they could not live to witness the completion of their designs.
    May I indulge in a personal anecdote on the subject of scale? I loved to memorize facts as a child, but rebelled at those I deemed unimportant (baseball stats were in, popes of Rome and kings of England out). In sixth grade, I had to memorize the sequence of land acquisitions that built America. I could see the rationale behind learning