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.
We seem to be finally starting to wake up a little bit. We've brought back alligators, buffalo, and wolves. Probably still losing more than we're saving, but we're still pretty new at treating animals as more then NPCs. Formalized animal rehabs with standards only really became a thing in the 1970s and 80s. Even Roosevelt making national parks took until the start of the last century.
We are getting better; the problem is getting too bad to ignore.
I know for a fact that the coffee I'm drinking is responsible for destroying a few sq. micrometers of rain forest, but it's hard to stop. We would need a fascist government to impose self-control.
I'm enjoying the coffee while I can too. I keep hearing that's soon going to be a victim of climate change.
Going authoritarian would be the fastest way to turn things around, but I don't really relish that idea. We were able to do beneficial ecological things in the past without going to that extreme. I'm just scared what point is going to take sinking to before saving the only planet we can live on to become apolitical again.