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'm confused as to how that tree on the left kept getting younger over time?
Just replied this to a similar comment:
We can see the young tree replacing the conifer on the right is too young to support any life.
The left tree used to be large enough to support the owl. After that was cleared, a new tree was planted, but never grew old enough to again support a large cavity nesting bird. The replacement tree was left to grow long enough to support a few different species, but then was again replaced with a younger tree that is now just barely useful to animals.
Old trees have had time to get to the size and state of weathering where they can support many different types of life, from mosses, to insects, to birds that eat those insects, to the large birds of prey that roost in cavities or snags where the top of the tree breaks off and provides nesting for the largest of birds. When we remove “dead” trees, we remove a crucial piece of a wooded ecosystem. While the tree is dead, it can be supporting hundreds of other types of life.
If you look at it, all versions of the tree have roughly the same branches (of course the older ones have more than the youngest). Therefore this must be the same tree, it's too much of a coincidence having three trees grow THIS similar at the exact same spot.
Or it could just be AI generated, as I think an actual artist would realize they're drawing the same tree three times