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.
I think one of the easiest ways to “reset” your baseline is to visit old growth/native forests. Those are some of the few untouched areas left and shows you what the land used to be like before we depleted everything.
That’s getting harder and harder to do for a lot of people. 🥺
It’s one of the reason I try to represent a lot of more rare and exotic owls here. A lot of stuff we will never have the opportunity to see, especially in person, so I want to at least make people see what needs protecting. I think that’s why well-run zoos and animal education centers are so important. It’s near impossible to get people to care about things that they don’t know even exist.