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.
There were a lot of places in the world that went in reverse from this scene. Managed/coppiced woodlands date to the Middle Ages, and resemble the first picture much more than the third.
I would also point out that there are plenty of completely natural areas that have resembled the first picture since time immemorial. Savannahs, scrublands, steppes, and prairies are naturally sparse in terms of large vegetation, due to the grazing of large herds of ungulates. These voracious herbivores rapidly destroy young trees, leaving wide gaps between the larger trees that have beat the odds to reach the critical size needed to survive.
In North America, the disappearance of bison (due to European settlers’ destruction of their populations) has led to woody forest encroachment on areas that were previously prairie grasslands with no trees. So in that case the whole progression shown in these pictures is running in reverse.
https://www.scotsman.com/news/opinion/columnists/fifty-years-ago-david-attenborough-changed-the-way-we-see-the-world-now-we-must-heed-his-warning-8294239
In my lifetime – and even more so in Sir David’s – the natural world has suffered an extraordinary and devastating decline. Since the spread of industrial agriculture, the planet has lost more than two-thirds of its wildlife populations. Today, 96 per cent of all mammal biomass on Earth is made up of humans and farmed animals. Just four per cent is wild.
At COP26, he ended his address with words that deserve to be remembered: “If working apart we are a force powerful enough to destabilise our planet, surely working together we are powerful enough to save it… In my lifetime I’ve witnessed a terrible decline. In yours, you could – and should – witness a wonderful recovery.”
It would become a very long cartoon if we included everywhere. 😁
Wherever the environment changes, it benefits some organisms at the cost of others. The Northern Spotted Owl vs Barred Owl situation has really highlighted that here.
Like you said, nature itself is always changing, and things will adapt or fall off to accommodate the new reality. A healthy and natural ecosystem doesn’t need to look like the picture, it just tried to highlight how we can lose an understanding of how things could or should be over generations.
Yeah, my purpose is not to suggest that we haven’t affected the environment; we have, dramatically. It’s just to say that there is way more than 1 kind of natural state.
We haven’t even gotten into the ways many other animals shape environments. Ungulates can destroy trees, yes, and wolves can limit ungulate populations, so more wolves tend to lead to thickets, whereas more ungulates lead to more clearings.
Beavers are another shaper of habitats, by their damming of rivers, creation of lakes, and the silt deposits in those flood plains which can lead to the ecological succession of forests.
My mom sent me this today, looks like they got a beaver! 🦫
I highly suggest people listen to this song about the birth of the conservation movement of you ever need a little hope.
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/wild-ones-live/
They mentioned the diamondback terrapin! She’s been one of my fav animals this season!
Sadie Sink
That was a long song! If it’s too long for anyone, there is a transcript, but of course you don’t get the music part, which did set a good mood for the story.
It doesn’t sound like Hornaday enjoyed certain people as much as he came to enjoy animals, so you may want to skip his wikipedia page, just as a heads up.
I found the storytelling very inspiring though!
Someone recently recommended to me The Dollop #386 - The War on Squirrels. While many of us in the US still see lots of squirrels, there used to be so many the government paid a cash bounty on them. Some real crazy stuff in there, and a strange history I’d never heard. Look it up on your podcast platform of choice.
In apology for our country’s former squirrel hatred, here is one of my squirrels drinking upside down.
That is so cool! I hope your mom and the beaver are able to keep the peace. I know some folks get really frustrated by them!
Yeah, she’ll figure it out haha. Probably will need to wrap some trees but that’s ok.
I guess you just wrap them in hardware cloth?
Ah, I got ya now. The balance of creatures can certainly affect the ecosystem more than many will give them credit for.
We’re raising funds to build a new beaver pen, so I’m hoping I’ll get to know those guys better soon. They look like loads of fun.