Shifting Baseline Syndrome


	View in browser

‘Men still live who, in their youth, remember pigeons; trees still live who, in their youth, were shaken by a living wind. But a few decades hence only the oldest oaks will remember, and at long last only the hills will know.’
– Aldo Leopold

Today’s Book Recommendations:

The Unnatural History of the Sea
Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story about Looking at People Looking at Animals in America
(but I’m afraid they are both expensive!)

I went out for a wander today, Wordsworth style. I stopped at the top of a small hill and looked out across a gentle valley. The scene was pleasant: grassy slopes, green fields, and blue skies. I enjoyed it for a while.

But then I got thinking about one of the most important concepts I learned while writing Local last year. It sounds dry and academic, but I believe shifting baseline syndrome is one of the most important things I can highlight and emphasise in this newsletter. I introduced it in an earlier newsletter, but I want to dive deeper today and urge you to get out into your countryside and see it for yourself.

Behold my pleasant, green valley beneath the crisp blue sky. Lovely. Or is it? Out of my pocket, I pulled an Ordnance Survey map from the 1840s and looked again. Where I stood now was once a two-mile stretch of woodland on the edge of a region of orchard farms. I imagined giant oaks and birdsong.

Today, that ancient woodland is gone. In front of me, I could see one tree – or, rather, a scruffy bush. One! Atop it sat a silent magpie. One pigeon flew by. One! The ground was nothing but homogenous grazing grass, like a bright green carpet.

Suddenly, this wasn’t a pleasant valley anymore. It looked deforested, silent, barren – like the clearcut landscapes you see in horror documentaries about the Amazon.

We have traded that rich woodland for what? Not even for crops we can eat, but to grow grass to feed a cow, to feed a human. (And not a good cow – the ones that help biodiversity and are important in a system where food is a byproduct of nature, but a high emissions, river polluting, land guzzling, inefficient-source-of-protein-and-calories cow.) What a sad and depleted world I was walking through.

My earlier, lulled appreciation of the scene is an example of shifting baseline syndrome (SBS). I had thought it looked nice and nature. We look at landscapes and see them as 'normal', when in fact they are vastly diminished compared to previous generations. My grandparents would have seen more than one bush and a bloody pigeon. SBS is so insidious because it lulls us into a false sense of security.

It is why we’ve got used to not seeing bugs spattered on our windscreens.
It’s why we are happy to eat delicious fish and chips (lashings of salt and vinegar) from 'sustainable sources', though it comes from stocks down to a mere 10% or worse of their historical abundance.
It’s why you don’t lament not seeing a passenger pigeon on a road trip across the USA, though they were once so abundant that flocks could darken the skies for days during migration.
And it’s why a fishing trip seems fun until you compare your bragging photos to your grandpa’s snaps.

2007

1980s

1958

Crazy, huh?!

Learning to recognize shifting baselines has been one of my greatest environmental awakenings. I believe that trying to flag it up for you is vital, so that the next time you’re gazing happily over Welsh mountains (and see them now as green deserts) or admiring the fish as you canoe down the River Wye (and grieve now for its destruction).

Waking up to SBS not a happy shift in your view of the world. I’m sorry about that. Aldo Leopold wrote, ‘One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen.’

But it is an important step towards halting the damage (Aldo mourns, ‘I am glad I will not be young in a future without wilderness’) and then turning things around towards a better future of a landscape filled again with nature and young people exploring it (Aldo, again: ‘Perhaps every youth needs an occasional wilderness trip, in order to learn the meaning of this particular freedom’).

Shifting Baseline Syndrome is a complex concept.

As I stood in my empty valley, comparing it to my 1840s map, I reminded myself that 500 years ago, the woodland would have been even bigger.

Go back further and it was once shrouded in ice.

Should I lament the absence of dinosaurs too?

There is no date we can look at and say ‘THAT was perfect, that’s what we’re after.’ The planet is always in flux. The past is a different country. We can’t go back. It’s not just about thinking the past was better. It’s that we need a frame of reference to realise the severity of the current challenge.

And we – with our short lives – are just rubbish at that. SBS is the result, and it means that we admire paltry restoration efforts or think things actually aren’t that bad.

But we can and should use past baselines to judge the present more clearly and critically. Crucially, we can also use the past to inspire solutions and get us excited again. Imagine rewilding this grassy valley into a thriving woodland. It wouldn’t be hard to do. Some tiny tweaks to our diet and a bit of ELM cash from the government for countryside stewardship and you’re flying! (Unlike my glum-looking magpie.)

Building a house depends on good foundations. Fixing the planet depends on understanding our baselines – giving us a clear-eyed perspective on where we stand now and, hopefully, therefore the motivation to turn it around.

So what can we do, today, to get us off our screens and out into the world with our new way of seeing the landscape? First of all, I recommend listening to this entertaining but informative podcast episode about SBS.

Second, use this wonderful website to compare modern Ordnance Survey maps with older versions (it works much better on a computer than a phone). On one side you will see the modern map of where you live, and on the other side is your choice of map going back as far as the 1840s. It is enthralling and I have whiled away many a happy hour time travelling on this website around places I know.

(As you compare the maps, you’ll invariably notice new towns that didn’t exist in the 1840s. Urbanisation is certainly an important factor in the loss of wild places. But only 1% of the planet is urban, so it’s not a colossal problem. The global population will plateau by the end of the century and there’s more than enough space for us all – if we change the way we live. Everyone needs a home, and if I want a comfortable, safe home then who am I to begrudge other people wanting the same. So this isn’t about NIMBYism or planes to Rwanda.)

In this newsletter I want to focus on what I can do. I acknowledge the issue of wild places being lost to building homes, but those streets ain’t gonna be rewilded any time soon. So, when I browse around my local map on this marvellous website, searching for examples of SBS, I choose to focus on the loss of wild places that have been turned to monocultures or degraded into green deserts.

Can I suggest that you spend a few minutes exploring the website to find a lost woodland close to you. And then go to visit today’s fields that lie where forests used to be. Sit quietly out there for a while, think how it feels, and familiarise yourself with shifting baselines. Doing this has certainly created a powerful shift in the way I see our landscape.

And from there, we can next move on to positive and exciting solutions! Solutions which I’ve already touched upon, involving rewilding and the food we eat. I’ll be writing more about both, soon. In the meantime, please do hit ‘reply’ and let me know your own examples of Shifting Baseline Syndrome.