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 1800's was the age of coal and some of the most polluted cities in histor.
In case you weren't aware, the picture doesn't depict the ecosystem of a city
We thankfully don't have rivers catching fire anymore, and air won't kill us in most places, but we've added a ton of mechanization and tech since then so the scope and speed of our ability to destroy has accelerated, even if the amounts and intensities of the damage average lower in some cases.
Mainly I just feel we still have lots of room for improvement. About 90% of animal rehabs are due to people, our junk, and our pets.