I have also written about my experience of shifting baselines on my humble substack. It’s awful when decline is happening so fast the shifting baselines effect is actually weakened such that we can now see it within our lived experience. And it is an experience which is unrepeatable because generations can let declines go unnoticed but now we are registering disappearances and there’s no way to make “zero” into a new baseline.
We can't expect to change our extractivist relationship with nature if we don't change our extractivist (surplus) relationship with humans.
As with many of the problems we face today, education is important. But we need an overhaul of what education means. Schooling today is about creating the next generation of workers. In that framework, conservation of experience is unimportant. As long as we live in a work-based society, that will be the case.
It's paramount that we start living differently. We need to start creating post-growth, post-work societies.
Thank you, Ramiro. Lots of good stuff here. Yes, our destructive relationship with the land is mirrored in the structured inequity between social/economic classes. Yes, education needs to completely reimagined, as with the rest of culture, to recognize and value how life actually works. And yes, post-growth and post-work society. Those will come one way or another, and we'd be wise to get ahead of it.
‘Recovery begins with remembering and remembering begins with experience’ - wow how beautifully you articulated it. Thank you for writing this powerful essay!
I've just come across your important work. I've been worried about the shifting baseline for some years but I didn't know this name for it. Not long ago, having an open door was an open invitation to flying insects; food had to be covered, stinging insects were ushered out and daddy longlegs set up home in the bathroom. Where have they all gone??? Outside, the car windscreen is no longer plastered with insects. The list goes on.
The list does go on, Nicola, at an ever-increasing pace. If I had a magic wand to wave at things, I'd hardly know where to start... But stabilizing insect populations would be a good choice. I see recent news like the massive incentives in the budget bill to increase biofuel production - rather than ban the practice outright, as should happen - and foresee yet another large-scale pulse of erasures.
Thank you for the note. I did a piece a while back (a few years ago, and then republished last year) called The Windshield Phenomenon (https://jasonanthony.substack.com/p/the-windshield-phenomenon-fb8) that might interest you, though it sounds like you're already deeply aware.
Thanks for the link, Jason. I’ll read it. Your writing reminds me of Michael McCarthy’s beautiful book The Moth Snowstorm, but you’ve probably already read it.
Brilliant. I believe there’s a parallel with this piece at it relates to our anthropomorphic tendency to forget our own history as well. Though not as debilitating from a “survival of species and thus the human race” perspective, it does erode our quality of life and instills a forgetfulness of civic education. Well done.
Thank you, Dave. That's well said. Ecological amnesia and historical amnesia are bound together, I think. Anthropocene culture has forgotten what previous (and current Indigenous) cultures knew was important: the story-telling that helps us live in relation to deep time.
Outstanding piece! Thank you for sharing it with us. I’m one of a small percentage of people who actually was already aware of the examples you chose - even the freshwater mussels, but even so there are I’m sure many examples I am unaware of. Education about the natural world and its diversity is an important part of the answer, but it must be done at the scale needed - and it needs to include expensive and hard-to-provide real world experience. Learning about biodiversity from videos is not enough.
I spent my career helping young people (college students ) learn about the biological world, but sadly I see little evidence that my life’s work made any difference. Things continue to get worse. Current attempts to underfund public education and control what is taught will not help. It is hard to hold on to any optimism. It is true that humans lack the power to completely extinguish life on Earth, but being the cause of the 6th great mass extinction (likely including our own) does not reflect well on our species.
Thanks for your kind words… I suppose I should consider how much worse things might be without my, and many other people’s, efforts…🤷. I do think you’re correct about decreases in the numbers of students interested in biodiversity/conservation. And - who can blame them - not many jobs and they don’t pay well, which very clearly shows what our civilization values. Also many young people today grow up with little chance to actually engage with nature in a meaningful way.
Thanks, Jim. I'm so glad folks like you are out there learning and teaching about the natural world. We need so many more, but I think the numbers of students interested in, say, conservation biology or natural history, are dwindling. This time of year, I always wish people giving graduation speeches were offering that kind of message, that we need young people directing their lives not just upward but outward into the real world.
Of course your work made a difference. But there are much larger forces pushing the other direction, and as you say they've recently become much more forceful.
Deep gratitude for this compelling and heartbreaking call to action. It’s a must read for all. And a bow to Heather for the important work she is doing. Thank you both. 🙏
As for the 4th of the four-part interactive solution, educating the public, I am finding the excellent nature writing on Substack, including yours, very valuable. I'm learning so much. Thanks for covering a topic very dear to my heart, the extinction of nature and the extinction of our experience of it, in such depth.
Thank you, Jessica. That's very kind of you to say. There's so much more to say about these things, as you know. And the need to say it grows by the day.
I am so impressed by your essay “The Extinction of Experience” that I decided to upgrade to paid subscription and support you. We need more people like you.
Thank you very much for your support, Christopher. It means a lot. I'll do my best to live up to the praise.
FYI, I received two notices from Substack about your upgrade to paid. You might want to verify that you didn't upgrade twice. If so, let me know and we'll sort it out.
I've personally experienced this. I grew up in the Caribbean (Puerto Rico) and I'm in my 60s now. As a kid, I snorkeled shallow reefs every weekend. I used to see thousands of fish and other marine life every time. We returned to the mainland in the early 70s. My father went back in the late 90s.
Nothing was the same. The beaches were "developed." The reefs were gone. He didn't have the heart to snorkel out to see what little was left. I was in Mexico and Honduras about two years ago. I went snorkeling and was broken hearted to hear that the areas that required technical diving skills and scuba diving were the only places left that weren't a faded shadow of themselves. My children and grandchildren are denied ever seeing what I saw as a child paddling around in the shallows with a mask and snorkel. Every time I think of it, I'm glad I had the experiences I had, but feel a sense of loss and grief for what is gone.
Thank you for this real-world example, Gregg. I imagine that the generations before your father might have grieved what was lost by his time as well. I'm reminded of the terms "solastalgia" and "soliphilia", both coined in the early 2000s by Glenn Albrecht. Solastalgia is "the emotional distress we feel at witnessing the destruction of beloved homelands", and soliphilia (related to E.O. Wilson's biophilia) is "the notion of political commitment to the saving of loved home environments." And then we have to imagine that some equivalent sense of loss is happening in other consciousnesses as well, as their populations and habitats diminish.
Very much so. I think it was more common starting in my grandparent's day, because that's around the time when our technological civilization really accelerated. My grandparents literally went from horse and buggies to the moon landings. My Dad went from a time of basic manufacturing to CAD/CAM, PCs, and nuclear energy. I went from Sputnik to today's marvels, but also climate change, pollution, and AI.
Each one of us also lost so much to the passage of time, though. The thought that "you can never go home," so to speak, can be melancholy at times. Entire landscapes, social mores, and animals are simply... gone. Childhood homes and neighborhoods disappear in the blink of the eye.
I strongly suspect that semi sentient/sentient, long lived animals like whales, elephants, and the higher apes may dimly sense it as well.
Funny you should phase it that way. I always think of my grandmother traveling through time from the horse-and-buggy to the space shuttle. And now I look at population through my own life, from peak growth in 1967 to half the growth but twice the number now.
The blink of an eye, indeed. I think of this too as the "new normal problem," which I wrote about some time back. We've normalized the rapid and constant arrival of new normals even though 99.9% of human history was characterized by stability (punctuated by chaos).
We'll always struggle to understand other minds, even as we improve in translating other species' languages. My sense is that grief and loss (however articulated) are as common as joy and pain. Species with millions of years of experience of upheaval at a population level have probably evolved a conscious response to it.
Another wonderful essay. This is something I've never really considered before, though I often find myself trying to imagine what the natural world was like and what the air felt like to breathe, in distant times. I couldn't agree more about this kind of education being necessary for everyone. I spent a long year trying to get an outdoor education program started at my kids' school, and in the end had to give it up, after feeling like I was banging my head against the wall over and over again. I don't think most of our institutions are capable of caring (what would it mean for an institution to care??!) and even individuals who could have made different decisions seemed uninterested in the problem we were trying to address. Another vicious circle - because we don't have that education, we don't care, and because we don't care, we don't get that education. I guess we just have to be determined about it. Maybe I need to try again...
Thank you, Jo. It is enormously frustrating how little outdoor/nature ed is happening, and how foreign the idea seems to be to staff and parents. Most of the kids, esp. the younger ones, still seem to have an intuitive understanding that it's important. I'm impressed that you've done the work to make it happen, am sorry that it didn't, and I hope you're successful if you try again. The formula around here that Heather is part of is a partnership between conservation groups and the schools. The nonprofits have active nature ed programs that incorporate schoolkids either on school property or at land trust properties. It's tenuous economics to keep it all juggled, but great work is being done.
You do such important work, Jason, so much heavy lifting. I'm grateful and have some idea of what it costs you, energetically to carry this burden and transform it into, sometimes, ...poetry.
Thank you for understanding the warp and woof of information, and then weaving it into these thoughtful, informative essays. I am in your debt.
Thank you, David. As for the work/burden, it's certainly self-inflicted. I was always the guy with the overstuffed backpack on trails and travels, so it seems to be a habit. Still working on the art of traveling light, which you do so elegantly in your photoessays.
Thank you, thank you, thank you! Shifting baseline syndrome is a fundamentally important concept. I once presented testimony to a legislative committee here in Vermont that used historical photographs of sites juxtaposed against photos of their current state. I was able to use materials made available by the University of Vermont’s Landscape Change Program website: https://landscape.uvm.edu/landscape_new/. I hope folks can use this link because it uses paired photos - old vs. new — that powerfully illustrate your point. I even recommended that the committee invite testimony from the UVM folks who put this resource together. Alas, the committee never did, and that, though, is the problem: Even when presented with visual evidence of monumental damage to the land over time, the gazes of too many people, including legislators and others in a state like Vermont, go blank. They have other agendas, and they want to move on.
And, we don’t have to rely on photos alone to see evidence of shifting baselines. For several years, my wife and I would stay for a week or two in Chatham, Cape Cod. Without fail, we regularly visited the National Fish and Wildlife Service station on Morris Island. We’d park in the small parking lot, walk along a boardwalk on top of the tree-lined bluffs and take the long wooden stairway down to the beach to hike along the shore. Once the pandemic hit, we stayed away from Chatham for a few years. In that interim, we read stories and saw photos of the erosion of the sandy bluffs and the effects on the structures above. It was disturbing but we remained somewhat consciously remote from the full effect of what was happening. Then, three years ago, we returned to Chatham. Again, we drove to Morris Island. Normally, as we would turn into the FWS site, our view of the offshore barrier island and waters of the Atlantic would be blocked by trees. This time, however, almost everything was gone: trees, buildings, boardwalk, and stairs. The barrier island had been breached, and the unsheltered bluffs were eaten away, proving once more that time and tide wait for no man.
Thank you, Bruce. That VT landscape change site looks fascinating. Its layout could use some updating for today's users, but I'd love to see the idea replicated all over.
I've seen that glazed look in the eyes of public officials shown perfectly good evidence of the larger problem, and it's not a good feeling. "There is always the path to forgetfulness," as Wade Davis noted. Thanks for putting in the effort, though.
I once knew the outer Cape well, and those Atlantic-facing dunes are definitely a good place for watching accelerated erosion. That acceleration will only accelerate over the next several decades. Of course, the Cape isn't the most solid of landscapes to begin with.
Great essay! I wonder also about our democratic process and ability to affect change as a contributor to baseline syndrome. It can be exceedingly hard to care about something you don’t see changing, or feel too distracted by day to day survival to come together to change. I wonder also how we can become empowered enough to imagine, and remember.
Thank you, Lyca. Shifting the political baseline in a progressive direction always seems much harder than tearing the whole thing down to give our darker forces more power - as the present moment too clearly illustrates - and yes, empowering others to imagine and remember the Earth's true abundance is the key. It has to feel directly relevant to our lives, which are increasingly abstract. It's uphill work, but must be done.
One of the most easily digestible explanations I have read about shifting baseline syndrome in a long time. You highlight the essentialness of being outside and observing. Understanding the backstory to the correct observation as a cultural acceptance.
Jason, imagine a world where you stood on a vast grassy plain , but there were no birds in the air nor insects or other life in the soil. There was no wind And no clouds overhead, just you and the grass.
You close your eyes.
When you reopen them again, the plain is dotted with copses of trees, birds fly in the air, clouds sail aloft and in the distance herds of grazing animals are visible. You close your eyes.
Now when you reopen them the grass is gone, you stand on plowed ground, a combine harvester is in the distance, jet contrails are in the milky sky above and a fence line separates you from a dirt road. Trash is in the ditch.
You close your eyes and reopen them. This time nothing has changed the road, the fence, the field and combine and contrails all remain as before. You have traveled through time but at the present you can go no further.
An inspiration strikes you. Time is change. Nothing more. If there is no change, time ceases to be. It is meaningless. Another thought arises. If time is change and if the past is the record of change, then all time is in the past and the future does not exist, and cannot exist and you are constantly moving not into the future but a past you are creating moment by moment. It is not behind you but in front of you. You aren't a comet trailing a long tail. Instead you are a searchlight projecting the past into the dark.
Time is the central mystery. You, I, the Anthropocene are all moving steadily into the past and with us all the vanished species. Why mourn? We have always been in good company. We dream each other in mutuality.
I think this is my swan song here. I turn my back to my past and face....what?
This is a lovely exercise, Michael. Thank you. I'm reminded first of learning about a culture that imagines the past is ahead of us - because we can see it - while the unseen future is always behind us.
I'll have to sit with this for a bit, but "time is change, nothing more" resonates. The way a child's (or our own childlike) wonder slows time, for example.
The mourning isn't about change, or even loss, per se. An asteroid bearing down wouldn't bother me the way our path does. What bothers me is the collateral damage of all these other living beings who are much more highly evolved than we are because of our own mistakes and intentional cruelty. We have been in good company, but we are no longer good company.
Keep your candle burning and your searchlight on, Michael. They're always welcome here.
I have also written about my experience of shifting baselines on my humble substack. It’s awful when decline is happening so fast the shifting baselines effect is actually weakened such that we can now see it within our lived experience. And it is an experience which is unrepeatable because generations can let declines go unnoticed but now we are registering disappearances and there’s no way to make “zero” into a new baseline.
We can't expect to change our extractivist relationship with nature if we don't change our extractivist (surplus) relationship with humans.
As with many of the problems we face today, education is important. But we need an overhaul of what education means. Schooling today is about creating the next generation of workers. In that framework, conservation of experience is unimportant. As long as we live in a work-based society, that will be the case.
It's paramount that we start living differently. We need to start creating post-growth, post-work societies.
Thank you, Ramiro. Lots of good stuff here. Yes, our destructive relationship with the land is mirrored in the structured inequity between social/economic classes. Yes, education needs to completely reimagined, as with the rest of culture, to recognize and value how life actually works. And yes, post-growth and post-work society. Those will come one way or another, and we'd be wise to get ahead of it.
‘Recovery begins with remembering and remembering begins with experience’ - wow how beautifully you articulated it. Thank you for writing this powerful essay!
Thank you, Ankita, for your kind words and your attention to the writing.
I've just come across your important work. I've been worried about the shifting baseline for some years but I didn't know this name for it. Not long ago, having an open door was an open invitation to flying insects; food had to be covered, stinging insects were ushered out and daddy longlegs set up home in the bathroom. Where have they all gone??? Outside, the car windscreen is no longer plastered with insects. The list goes on.
The list does go on, Nicola, at an ever-increasing pace. If I had a magic wand to wave at things, I'd hardly know where to start... But stabilizing insect populations would be a good choice. I see recent news like the massive incentives in the budget bill to increase biofuel production - rather than ban the practice outright, as should happen - and foresee yet another large-scale pulse of erasures.
Thank you for the note. I did a piece a while back (a few years ago, and then republished last year) called The Windshield Phenomenon (https://jasonanthony.substack.com/p/the-windshield-phenomenon-fb8) that might interest you, though it sounds like you're already deeply aware.
Thanks for the link, Jason. I’ll read it. Your writing reminds me of Michael McCarthy’s beautiful book The Moth Snowstorm, but you’ve probably already read it.
That book has been on my list for a long time, Nicola. Thank you for the reminder.
Brilliant. I believe there’s a parallel with this piece at it relates to our anthropomorphic tendency to forget our own history as well. Though not as debilitating from a “survival of species and thus the human race” perspective, it does erode our quality of life and instills a forgetfulness of civic education. Well done.
Thank you, Dave. That's well said. Ecological amnesia and historical amnesia are bound together, I think. Anthropocene culture has forgotten what previous (and current Indigenous) cultures knew was important: the story-telling that helps us live in relation to deep time.
Outstanding piece! Thank you for sharing it with us. I’m one of a small percentage of people who actually was already aware of the examples you chose - even the freshwater mussels, but even so there are I’m sure many examples I am unaware of. Education about the natural world and its diversity is an important part of the answer, but it must be done at the scale needed - and it needs to include expensive and hard-to-provide real world experience. Learning about biodiversity from videos is not enough.
I spent my career helping young people (college students ) learn about the biological world, but sadly I see little evidence that my life’s work made any difference. Things continue to get worse. Current attempts to underfund public education and control what is taught will not help. It is hard to hold on to any optimism. It is true that humans lack the power to completely extinguish life on Earth, but being the cause of the 6th great mass extinction (likely including our own) does not reflect well on our species.
Thanks for your kind words… I suppose I should consider how much worse things might be without my, and many other people’s, efforts…🤷. I do think you’re correct about decreases in the numbers of students interested in biodiversity/conservation. And - who can blame them - not many jobs and they don’t pay well, which very clearly shows what our civilization values. Also many young people today grow up with little chance to actually engage with nature in a meaningful way.
Thanks, Jim. I'm so glad folks like you are out there learning and teaching about the natural world. We need so many more, but I think the numbers of students interested in, say, conservation biology or natural history, are dwindling. This time of year, I always wish people giving graduation speeches were offering that kind of message, that we need young people directing their lives not just upward but outward into the real world.
Of course your work made a difference. But there are much larger forces pushing the other direction, and as you say they've recently become much more forceful.
Deep gratitude for this compelling and heartbreaking call to action. It’s a must read for all. And a bow to Heather for the important work she is doing. Thank you both. 🙏
Thank you very much, Leah. I'll pass your kind thoughts on to Heather.
As for the 4th of the four-part interactive solution, educating the public, I am finding the excellent nature writing on Substack, including yours, very valuable. I'm learning so much. Thanks for covering a topic very dear to my heart, the extinction of nature and the extinction of our experience of it, in such depth.
Thank you, Jessica. That's very kind of you to say. There's so much more to say about these things, as you know. And the need to say it grows by the day.
I am so impressed by your essay “The Extinction of Experience” that I decided to upgrade to paid subscription and support you. We need more people like you.
Thank you very much for your support, Christopher. It means a lot. I'll do my best to live up to the praise.
FYI, I received two notices from Substack about your upgrade to paid. You might want to verify that you didn't upgrade twice. If so, let me know and we'll sort it out.
Again, thank you.
I've personally experienced this. I grew up in the Caribbean (Puerto Rico) and I'm in my 60s now. As a kid, I snorkeled shallow reefs every weekend. I used to see thousands of fish and other marine life every time. We returned to the mainland in the early 70s. My father went back in the late 90s.
Nothing was the same. The beaches were "developed." The reefs were gone. He didn't have the heart to snorkel out to see what little was left. I was in Mexico and Honduras about two years ago. I went snorkeling and was broken hearted to hear that the areas that required technical diving skills and scuba diving were the only places left that weren't a faded shadow of themselves. My children and grandchildren are denied ever seeing what I saw as a child paddling around in the shallows with a mask and snorkel. Every time I think of it, I'm glad I had the experiences I had, but feel a sense of loss and grief for what is gone.
Thank you for this real-world example, Gregg. I imagine that the generations before your father might have grieved what was lost by his time as well. I'm reminded of the terms "solastalgia" and "soliphilia", both coined in the early 2000s by Glenn Albrecht. Solastalgia is "the emotional distress we feel at witnessing the destruction of beloved homelands", and soliphilia (related to E.O. Wilson's biophilia) is "the notion of political commitment to the saving of loved home environments." And then we have to imagine that some equivalent sense of loss is happening in other consciousnesses as well, as their populations and habitats diminish.
Very much so. I think it was more common starting in my grandparent's day, because that's around the time when our technological civilization really accelerated. My grandparents literally went from horse and buggies to the moon landings. My Dad went from a time of basic manufacturing to CAD/CAM, PCs, and nuclear energy. I went from Sputnik to today's marvels, but also climate change, pollution, and AI.
Each one of us also lost so much to the passage of time, though. The thought that "you can never go home," so to speak, can be melancholy at times. Entire landscapes, social mores, and animals are simply... gone. Childhood homes and neighborhoods disappear in the blink of the eye.
I strongly suspect that semi sentient/sentient, long lived animals like whales, elephants, and the higher apes may dimly sense it as well.
Funny you should phase it that way. I always think of my grandmother traveling through time from the horse-and-buggy to the space shuttle. And now I look at population through my own life, from peak growth in 1967 to half the growth but twice the number now.
The blink of an eye, indeed. I think of this too as the "new normal problem," which I wrote about some time back. We've normalized the rapid and constant arrival of new normals even though 99.9% of human history was characterized by stability (punctuated by chaos).
We'll always struggle to understand other minds, even as we improve in translating other species' languages. My sense is that grief and loss (however articulated) are as common as joy and pain. Species with millions of years of experience of upheaval at a population level have probably evolved a conscious response to it.
Another wonderful essay. This is something I've never really considered before, though I often find myself trying to imagine what the natural world was like and what the air felt like to breathe, in distant times. I couldn't agree more about this kind of education being necessary for everyone. I spent a long year trying to get an outdoor education program started at my kids' school, and in the end had to give it up, after feeling like I was banging my head against the wall over and over again. I don't think most of our institutions are capable of caring (what would it mean for an institution to care??!) and even individuals who could have made different decisions seemed uninterested in the problem we were trying to address. Another vicious circle - because we don't have that education, we don't care, and because we don't care, we don't get that education. I guess we just have to be determined about it. Maybe I need to try again...
Thank you, Jo. It is enormously frustrating how little outdoor/nature ed is happening, and how foreign the idea seems to be to staff and parents. Most of the kids, esp. the younger ones, still seem to have an intuitive understanding that it's important. I'm impressed that you've done the work to make it happen, am sorry that it didn't, and I hope you're successful if you try again. The formula around here that Heather is part of is a partnership between conservation groups and the schools. The nonprofits have active nature ed programs that incorporate schoolkids either on school property or at land trust properties. It's tenuous economics to keep it all juggled, but great work is being done.
You do such important work, Jason, so much heavy lifting. I'm grateful and have some idea of what it costs you, energetically to carry this burden and transform it into, sometimes, ...poetry.
Thank you for understanding the warp and woof of information, and then weaving it into these thoughtful, informative essays. I am in your debt.
Thank you, David. As for the work/burden, it's certainly self-inflicted. I was always the guy with the overstuffed backpack on trails and travels, so it seems to be a habit. Still working on the art of traveling light, which you do so elegantly in your photoessays.
🙏
Thank you, thank you, thank you! Shifting baseline syndrome is a fundamentally important concept. I once presented testimony to a legislative committee here in Vermont that used historical photographs of sites juxtaposed against photos of their current state. I was able to use materials made available by the University of Vermont’s Landscape Change Program website: https://landscape.uvm.edu/landscape_new/. I hope folks can use this link because it uses paired photos - old vs. new — that powerfully illustrate your point. I even recommended that the committee invite testimony from the UVM folks who put this resource together. Alas, the committee never did, and that, though, is the problem: Even when presented with visual evidence of monumental damage to the land over time, the gazes of too many people, including legislators and others in a state like Vermont, go blank. They have other agendas, and they want to move on.
And, we don’t have to rely on photos alone to see evidence of shifting baselines. For several years, my wife and I would stay for a week or two in Chatham, Cape Cod. Without fail, we regularly visited the National Fish and Wildlife Service station on Morris Island. We’d park in the small parking lot, walk along a boardwalk on top of the tree-lined bluffs and take the long wooden stairway down to the beach to hike along the shore. Once the pandemic hit, we stayed away from Chatham for a few years. In that interim, we read stories and saw photos of the erosion of the sandy bluffs and the effects on the structures above. It was disturbing but we remained somewhat consciously remote from the full effect of what was happening. Then, three years ago, we returned to Chatham. Again, we drove to Morris Island. Normally, as we would turn into the FWS site, our view of the offshore barrier island and waters of the Atlantic would be blocked by trees. This time, however, almost everything was gone: trees, buildings, boardwalk, and stairs. The barrier island had been breached, and the unsheltered bluffs were eaten away, proving once more that time and tide wait for no man.
Thank you, Bruce. That VT landscape change site looks fascinating. Its layout could use some updating for today's users, but I'd love to see the idea replicated all over.
I've seen that glazed look in the eyes of public officials shown perfectly good evidence of the larger problem, and it's not a good feeling. "There is always the path to forgetfulness," as Wade Davis noted. Thanks for putting in the effort, though.
I once knew the outer Cape well, and those Atlantic-facing dunes are definitely a good place for watching accelerated erosion. That acceleration will only accelerate over the next several decades. Of course, the Cape isn't the most solid of landscapes to begin with.
Great essay! I wonder also about our democratic process and ability to affect change as a contributor to baseline syndrome. It can be exceedingly hard to care about something you don’t see changing, or feel too distracted by day to day survival to come together to change. I wonder also how we can become empowered enough to imagine, and remember.
Thank you, Lyca. Shifting the political baseline in a progressive direction always seems much harder than tearing the whole thing down to give our darker forces more power - as the present moment too clearly illustrates - and yes, empowering others to imagine and remember the Earth's true abundance is the key. It has to feel directly relevant to our lives, which are increasingly abstract. It's uphill work, but must be done.
One of the most easily digestible explanations I have read about shifting baseline syndrome in a long time. You highlight the essentialness of being outside and observing. Understanding the backstory to the correct observation as a cultural acceptance.
Thank you, Stacy. I really appreciate the praise from someone who knows the story.
Jason, imagine a world where you stood on a vast grassy plain , but there were no birds in the air nor insects or other life in the soil. There was no wind And no clouds overhead, just you and the grass.
You close your eyes.
When you reopen them again, the plain is dotted with copses of trees, birds fly in the air, clouds sail aloft and in the distance herds of grazing animals are visible. You close your eyes.
Now when you reopen them the grass is gone, you stand on plowed ground, a combine harvester is in the distance, jet contrails are in the milky sky above and a fence line separates you from a dirt road. Trash is in the ditch.
You close your eyes and reopen them. This time nothing has changed the road, the fence, the field and combine and contrails all remain as before. You have traveled through time but at the present you can go no further.
An inspiration strikes you. Time is change. Nothing more. If there is no change, time ceases to be. It is meaningless. Another thought arises. If time is change and if the past is the record of change, then all time is in the past and the future does not exist, and cannot exist and you are constantly moving not into the future but a past you are creating moment by moment. It is not behind you but in front of you. You aren't a comet trailing a long tail. Instead you are a searchlight projecting the past into the dark.
Time is the central mystery. You, I, the Anthropocene are all moving steadily into the past and with us all the vanished species. Why mourn? We have always been in good company. We dream each other in mutuality.
I think this is my swan song here. I turn my back to my past and face....what?
This is a lovely exercise, Michael. Thank you. I'm reminded first of learning about a culture that imagines the past is ahead of us - because we can see it - while the unseen future is always behind us.
I'll have to sit with this for a bit, but "time is change, nothing more" resonates. The way a child's (or our own childlike) wonder slows time, for example.
The mourning isn't about change, or even loss, per se. An asteroid bearing down wouldn't bother me the way our path does. What bothers me is the collateral damage of all these other living beings who are much more highly evolved than we are because of our own mistakes and intentional cruelty. We have been in good company, but we are no longer good company.
Keep your candle burning and your searchlight on, Michael. They're always welcome here.
Jason, I just invented that as a variant of the dominant "Growing Block" theory of time. An extreme variant to be sure 😉