Nature Disconnection and Shifting Baseline Syndrome 🤓


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"The world is changed. I feel it in the water. I feel it in the earth. I smell it in the air."
— The Lord of the Rings

Shifting Baseline Syndrome // Nature Disconnection

Today I want to explain two phrases which sound a bit geeky but are fundamental to my hopes of combining adventure + purpose.

Once I learned the phrase 'shifting baseline syndrome', the way I saw the world changed instantly, and forever.

Shifting baseline syndrome can be defined as ‘a gradual change in the accepted norms for the condition of the natural environment due to a lack of experience, memory and/or knowledge of its past condition’.

In other words, what you consider as the nice normal levels of birdsong from your childhood are actually far lower than what your grandparents experienced.

You're quite happy with the footpaths and patches of woodland where you can go running, unaware that there used to be much more access and wildness before you moved in to the area.

Your child considers the street you live on to be normal, not grieving for the rows of trees the council chopped down before she was born.

Every generation we accept less wildlife, more pollution, less access to land, higher emissions, smaller roaming distances for our children, more screen time etc. etc. These are all shifting baselines, and once you've started to see them you'll notice them everywhere.

Nature Disconnection is a measure of how we have broken our relationship with nature.

Miles Richardson is a professor in nature connectedness and the author of Reconnection. He gave evidence for this surprisingly-readable Parliamentary committee evidence on the subject. He asks, 'How did our relationship with nature become broken, why does it matter and how can we fix it?' Fine questions for me to be exploring in my mission to combine adventure + purpose...

Addressing the causes of nature dislocation, its impact, and how we can correct it is key to so many of our problems. I'll be discussing them in future emails, but I wanted to keep today's as brief as possible as it's a bit nerdy!

Challenge: think right now of the way you consider your local landscape and nature, or even something like how many runs you do each week or how many cakes you eat. Have you gradually accepted a decline in standards over time, without even noticing?
Challenge 2: think right now of the way that you, or people you know in your community, have lost touch with the natural world?
Challenge 3: what negative feedback loops can you think of where a disconnection from nature has magnified shifting baselines, which then lead to further disconnection from nature?