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.
There were a lot of places in the world that went in reverse from this scene. Managed/coppiced woodlands date to the Middle Ages, and resemble the first picture much more than the third.
I would also point out that there are plenty of completely natural areas that have resembled the first picture since time immemorial. Savannahs, scrublands, steppes, and prairies are naturally sparse in terms of large vegetation, due to the grazing of large herds of ungulates. These voracious herbivores rapidly destroy young trees, leaving wide gaps between the larger trees that have beat the odds to reach the critical size needed to survive.
In North America, the disappearance of bison (due to European settlers’ destruction of their populations) has led to woody forest encroachment on areas that were previously prairie grasslands with no trees. So in that case the whole progression shown in these pictures is running in reverse.
https://www.scotsman.com/news/opinion/columnists/fifty-years-ago-david-attenborough-changed-the-way-we-see-the-world-now-we-must-heed-his-warning-8294239
In my lifetime – and even more so in Sir David’s – the natural world has suffered an extraordinary and devastating decline. Since the spread of industrial agriculture, the planet has lost more than two-thirds of its wildlife populations. Today, 96 per cent of all mammal biomass on Earth is made up of humans and farmed animals. Just four per cent is wild.
At COP26, he ended his address with words that deserve to be remembered: “If working apart we are a force powerful enough to destabilise our planet, surely working together we are powerful enough to save it… In my lifetime I’ve witnessed a terrible decline. In yours, you could – and should – witness a wonderful recovery.”