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.
What drives me a little crazy is in my metro the cheapest living is essentially in the burbs. I live at the end of the metro system basically which balances cost and access. If we subsidized high rises there would be so many people like myself that would go live downtown. I am old enough to have seen a lot of change. One thing that gets me is how areas that if you drove to when I was young would be farmland is not basically extended burbs. If people really want to live like that im fine but it should be cheapest to live in the highest density living area on a per square feet of finished indoor space to encourage less wasted living space.
The trend here seems to be converting old warehouses and factories to residential units, but they’re all trendy high rent things. Other than that, it’s still all single family McMansion neighborhoods that are around 500-800,000. Not sure where all these rich people are coming from, but I know I’m not in that club! 😄
I bought my condo at a terrible time, but it feels like a steal now compared to what I could afford today. I’m surrounded by trees, 2 parks, and a swamp, so it’s pretty quiet, there’s still a fair bit of wildlife, and a moderately good use of space. They keep building dang giant warehouses though, which stinks and brings truck traffic to roads that are way too narrow and full of tight turns.
I feel that. Things are selling near me and even if I was working I could not afford it and as the prices rise the taxes do to so may not be able to afford what I have now for much longer unless things change massively.