From Parklane Landscapes
Shifting Baseline Syndrome (SBS) is what happens when we forget how vibrant the natural world used to be. Each generation grows up with a more depleted environment and calls it “normal,” simply because it’s all they’ve ever known.
Think about walking through a park and thinking, “This seems healthy.” But maybe 30 years ago that same park had twice as many birds, wildflowers, or insects. If you never saw that version, you don’t feel the loss - and that quiet forgetting becomes the new baseline. Over time, we start accepting degraded ecosystems as normal.
Researchers warn that this shift lowers our expectations, increases our tolerance for decline, and reduces our urgency to protect what’s left.
What helps:
Intergenerational conversations that reconnect us with what nature used to be.
Direct experiences with nature that sharpen our awareness of change.
Remembering (knowing) the past is the first step to restoring the future.
Not a sponsor, I don’t think it’s an AI graphic, and I think it has something important to say. Plus it does have an owl. We can’t save our animals if we don’t save them the spaces they need to thrive.
One of the issues with this is that the previous generation that knows this best in my country is currently the least interested in talking about climate change. My parents grew up in a noticably different climate but they don’t want to hear or say anything about this because to them confronting climate change means giving up convenience and if there’s one thing boomers hate it’s giving up convenience.
I’m only 40 years old and I remember how different it was. If you went on a weekend trip your car would be splattered with insects all over. Our garden used to be full of butterflies and other insects. I’ve been stung so many times but for my kids it’s a really rare occasion.
Not to mention the weeks of snow instead of the scattered few days we have now. And hardly anybody seems to care.
I’m around the same age and notice the same things. I miss the fireflies and butterflies so much. Even the unloved bugs are gone. In summer the car always was plastered with dead bugs, and now that doesn’t happen. A lot of notice things are gone, but even more unnoticed things are.
I feel that even though the collective “we” caused this, we as individuals have very little say on a lot of this. I can’t get Coke to stop using plastic, I can’t get Nestle to stop stealing groundwater, etc, and with decades of elected leaders letting us down, it’s hard to come up with a plan of action. Individual actions like adding native plants back into your yard (that’s what the company that shared this graphic does, which was why I was ok with sharing a business post), providing artificial animal nests and shelters, and just minding your own consumerism feels like a drop in the ocean, but I believe thousands or millions of us doing those tiny things is sadly going to be more effective in the near term than waiting for people in power to do the right thing. But it’s often times hard to convince regular people of that.
It is dejecting to realize what a small drop we are. However, I feel like all I can do is make my contribution and push aside thinking about whether I matter.
My yard was mostly invasive species when I moved into my place, and now I’ve gotten it to about 75% native species and the other 25% are not strictly native to me but I kept them because they appeared to be “bee’s choice” (rhododendrons for example). On any day in the summer I can find butterflies and bees in my yard, and I often sprinkle the seeds into the local park in the hope that the peripheries might grow wild with asters and goldenrod instead of buckthorn and dog strangling vine. Actually, I’d say the guerilla gardening has been a lot of fun - I’ve got some native black cherries in the local park that are establishing nicely and some native roses as well!
The constant drop wears away the stone. :3
Be proud of what you’ve done! Everything you’ve done, no one else was going to do, and so the world is that much better.
Working the animal rescue makes me feel a little hopeless sometime. It takes a lot of time and energy and money to fix these guys up, and are we just releasing them to get killed by pets, hit by cars, crash into buildings, poisoned, or shot all over again? But nothing will get better if we don’t at least give fixing things an effort.
Working for a better world is never a foolish endeavor if you ask me!
That’s wonderful work that you are doing - you’re giving them a chance, even if the world they have to live in feels like it isn’t interested in them.
What are the best items to donate to animal rescues? The one near us asks for acorns in the fall, which I can usually find at that time of year. But are there any things you find are always running out?
The answer changes a bit based on what type of rescue it is. Rehabbers get licensed for different animals, and centers can specialize. Some will only do, say, bats and nothing else. Some will do any animals except rabies vectors, and other will do only rabies vectors, and so on.
The easy answer is cleaning supplies! No matter what rescue it is, we need cleaning stuff since animals are messy. Bleach, disinfecting wipes, paper towels, Dawn dish soap, laundry detergent, Simple Green, Rescue concentrate, tissues, toilet paper, trash bags. Animals make a surprising amount of laundry and dishes. This year we have started taking volunteers to purely do housekeeping. These things are great because they’re always needed, and usually pretty cheap.
If you want to purchase other things to either mail order or to buy and drop off in person, check their website or social media and they will usually share Amazon or Chewy.com or local dropoff wishlists. Here you can find more specialized things they need. Feeding tools, incubators, the right types of bird cages (we use butterfly cages since the fine mess keeps their feet, beaks, and feathers from being snagged), and wet and dry food components they need for whichever animals they care for.
For those with means, labor donations can also be great too, if you have a family business for example. We always need event sponsors, or people that can do things to keep our sites safe and operational, like tree trimming was a recent thing we needed. We have a large wooded property that needs some things cut back or removed safely, and that’s a big expense, but they were looking to see if any volunteers had a connection.
And if you feel comfortable with it, cash is always appreciated. No animal rescue in the world gets public money, so everything we get comes from generosity, or the workers and volunteers pay for stuff ourselves. I don’t get paid to be there, but I have donated stuff and given what to me is a good chunk of money because I see firsthand all the good we do. Giving money lets the directors get exactly what we need when we need it. You can send gift certificates to vendors they use, like RodentPro or Chewy are usually big ones. There are just so many options.
Lol I always intend to keep replies short, but I get so few outlets to talk to people about this stuff, so I take it out on you guys! 😆
You’re right- I needed the squeegee every time I got gas to clean the bugs off my windshield. Now I think I use it once per year
And admitting they were wrong!
Both of these also count for most people
My parents continue to try to rationalize the bonkers-ass weather we’ve been having every year.
I try to explain some concepts to them, like artic jets that cause flash freezes in otherwise mild winters, or the unseasonably warm weather we have throughout most of the winter, or the rarity of snowfall we’ve had over the past few years. Even ten or twenty years ago, it wasn’t like this.
And yet whenever I try explaining these things, I can practically see the layers of cognitive dissonance they’re spinning it through in their heads before they give a non-committal “yeah” in one of those insincere “everything is fine because I wasn’t actually paying attention” sort of ways…
I know exactly what you’re talking about. After dismantling all their bogus arguments it’s just this empty look on their faces for a brief moment and then they push it all away again and continue as usual.
I had a dream last night where a family member asked who I think should be the next president and I started listing a bunch of progressives, so they said “whoa whoa whoa, let’s keep politics out of this.”
It was just a dream, but it was incredibly salient. Well played, subconscious.