If you’re not familiar with shifting baselines syndrome you should be. It’s when people’s accepted thresholds for environmental conditions are continually being lowered. In the absence of past information or experience with historical conditions, members of each new generation accept the situation in which they were raised as being normal. It’s a syndrome that is very prevalent among some of the recreational fishing community.
Two decades ago, renowned fisheries expert Daniel Pauly introduced “shifting baselines syndrome” to explain our generational blindness to environmental destruction. In recent years the idea has found a particular advocate in George Monbiot, a respected environmental writer.
Oceana spoke with Monbiot and Pauly to learn how much we’ve lost, and what it will take to make abundance the ocean’s new baseline.
LINK (via: Oceana)
A downloadable BBC World Service radio broadcast that I was sent by a British biologist friend first thing this morning (3rd Jan.). Posted without any comment from myself, except, perhaps, that I have noticed that there are far fewer bugs, birds, animals and fish around these days compared to, well, numbers even as little as only a decade or two back…
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3cswqvf