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.

The Republican governor of Louisiana is jumping on the Supreme Court’s evisceration of voting rights to cancel the state’s upcoming primary elections to help avert a humiliating defeat for Donald Trump at the midterms.

The high court ruled 6-3 along partisan lines on Wednesday to strike down Louisiana’s voting map, with the conservative majority finding that lawmakers had unlawfully factored in race when creating a new majority-Black district in the state.

The decision prompted a quick response from Gov. Jeff Landry, who is determined to redraw the voting maps to grab his party another seat in Congress.

It said Landry, a MAGA favorite who also serves as Trump’s envoy to Greenland, told House Republican candidates he is planning to suspend next month’s primary elections in order to give state lawmakers enough time to pass a new congressional map, according to two people with knowledge of the calls.

The primaries are currently scheduled for May 16. People familiar with the plans said that Landry’s announcement could come as early as Friday, one day before early voting was set to begin.

French astrophysicist Jean-Pierre Luminet created the first-ever simulation of a black hole, published in Astronomy and Astrophysics. Using an IBM 7040 computer and hand-plotting techniques with India ink, he calculated how light from an accretion disk would be distorted by gravity, producing a "distorted eye" image remarkably similar to modern direct imaging

A fossilized mosquito preserved for 46,000,000 years was discovered with blood still inside its abdomen a rare snapshot of ancient life frozen in time

Article: https://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2013/1015/46-million-year-old-mosquito-filled-with-blood-is-a-scientific-first

https://friendica.myportal.social/display/e65e1095-1569-f423-e2f2-637090146501

bonus:

“HB 211 is a debt trap. It creates a population of people who are, by definition, unable to pay. And then converts that inability into a labor obligation,” Michael Ryan, a finance expert and founder of MichaelRyanMoney.com, told Newsweek. “The ‘streets to success’ framing is deliberate misdirection. No legitimate treatment program requires the patient to work off their bill under threat of incarceration."

I'm morbidly fascinated by how carefully this article avoids using the obvious term. But slavery. It's slavery. It is a bill that would literally, legally, enslave a population (of predominantly Black men, fucking surprise) for the "crime" of being poor.