Why the Environment Is Worse Than You Think

It's interesting to note that things have been getting worse over time as far as the environment is concerned, but people just don't realize it. For example, fifty years ago in Central Texas, it was very unusual to see summertime temperatures in the upper nineties, much less over a hundred. These days, those kinds of highs are commonplace—even well into Autumn. Yet, most folks either haven't been around long enough to realize the change, or they're too young to have experienced the normal climate. But, there's another explanation for why the average person doesn't realize how much the climate has changed. Shifting Baselines: Why the Environment Is Even Worse Off Than You Think by Bryan Walsh explains: The fisheries scientist Daniel Pauly coined it in 1995 to describe how overfishing has changed the ocean so rapidly over the past several decades that what we think of as normal and healthy—the baseline—has had to shift to keep up with reality. Our picture of the environment becomes skewed, as we forget what used to be and adjust unconsciously to a diminished present. Here's some of what Pauly said: We transform the world, but we don’t remember it. We adjust our baseline to the new level,and we don’t recall what was there. If you generalize this, something like this happens. You have on the y axis some good thing: biodiversity, numbers of orca, the greenness of your country, the water supply. And over time it changes — it changes because people do things, or naturally. Every generation will use the images that they got at the beginning of their conscious lives as a standard and will extrapolate forward. And the difference then, they perceive as a loss. But they don’t perceive what happened before as a loss. You can have a succession of changes. At the end you want to sustain miserable leftovers. And that, to a large extent, is what we want to do now. We want to sustain things that are gone or things that are not the way they were. Walsh concludes: I can’t help wondering if there’s a psychological value to shifting baselines. We live in an era of unprecedented and rapid environmental change—change that’s happening faster than our brains, which evolved over a period when stasis was the norm, might be able handle. By moving the baselines, by resetting our memories, we can cope with that change—with that decay, really. We can convince ourselves that the sea is clear, the coral is vibrant and it’s all not slipping away.

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