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.
To kids born today and people who have never seen a forested area, this is accurate. It’s not because they’re dumb. It’s their starting point, aka, their baseline for what the natural world looks like.
On a similar note, I have seen people post about how brave it is to talk to strangers in the street.
They don’t realize that before smartphones became the standard, everyone spent pretty much every day talking to strangers.
eh
And before there were hotels when people traveled, the stopped at stranger’s houses to sleep and eat with them and sleep in a bed with strangers. We’d think that was insane now! 🤪
Yeah, I feel this is the point of the graphic. My parents and grandparents used to say “oh this used to be a field/forest/etc” and as a kid, of course I didn’t care much. But now that summers are way hotter, winters way colder, I see far few butterflies and lightning bugs, see more developments and warehouses built, traffic build up, etc now I see why they were telling me this stuff. I didn’t think anything of it, because to me that’s just how it was. I couldn’t feel the natural world getting smaller or worsening because I didn’t see the before. But now I do, but only because that stuff is already gone and will be a lot harder to bring back.