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.
Having spent so much time looking at owls now, probably 90% of owl drawings I see have the feet drawn in really silly ways. They’re not always impossible ways for them to have their toes, but how they actually need to use them to hunt or to distribute their body weight is just not often depicted correctly. I think it’s because most depictions fail to capture the correct ratio of foot:body and it doesn’t look right (because it isn’t), so they stick the outer toes in places they don’t belong to fill that space.
The butterfly is probably the same way. We’ve seen that incorrect image displayed so much that the falsehood has replaced the truth for many of us. Even after we’re shown it’s incorrect, we often can have trouble reconciling it with years of having it ingrained the other way.
I agree, another example that comes to mind was this initiative by Matt Parker to change the sign for a football (or soccer ball for my US homies) to an actually accurate football. The representation now was geometrically impossible but the UK basically said “it’s a depiction that gets the point across and people are used to it, we won’t change it”
As soon as I saw the sign in question, I started counting the sides to see if that’s what it was. I don’t know squat about soccer, but even I knew the ball didn’t look right and should be pentagons and hexagons. You would think someone in the production chain would have caught it…