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.
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.