The Concept of Shifting Baseline Syndrome

I have a very specific memory from the beginning of this year which keeps cropping up in my head.  It's the memory of the strong feeling I had when I had finished working in a beautiful Caledonian pinewood and started work in an area of land that is managed for grouse shooting.  The conspicuous contrast in the amount of life you could see and hear in these two habitats was very evident  and made me think about the other moorlands I drive and walk through a lot in Scotland.  Knowing as I do that Caledonian pinewoods used to cover large areas of Scotland before cutting, burning, and grazing depleted them to just 1% of their original extent, it's made me realise just how 'unnatural' a lot of the Scottish landscape actually is.

And yet many people don't see it as unnatural at all.  They see it as rugged and wild, untamed and one of the last natural places in Britain, completely unaware of just how managed it is.  I know this as I used to be one of these people and it made me wonder about how it is that we can be seeing a landscape so falsely?  How are we not seeing nature as damaged as it actually is?  So I did what I always do when I have questions and started researching, and during my research I came across the concept of Shifting Baseline Syndrome.

The idea of Shifting Baseline first appeared in a landscape architect's, Ian McHarg, publication 'Design with Nature' in 1969 when he was comparing modern landscapes with that in which ancient people used to live.  Shifting Baseline Syndrome was then coined by a marine biologist called Daniel Pauly in 1995 when writing about the fact that fisheries management scientist tended to use the population size of fish populations at the beginning of their careers as the baseline for stock management rather than at its untouched state as the baseline for stock management.  This meant that inaccurate advice was then being provided as the baseline was much lower then it should actually be.  

However, this is not just confined to fisheries management but is actually a common problem when it comes to how people view the natural world around them.  As we believe that what we remember from our childhood is when nature was at its normal, most natural state, we pay little attention to what we perceive as a slight loss unaware that it was already depleted in the first place.  This new level of depleted wildness then becomes the new baseline for the next generation.  A good example of this is the lost of a rare species.  When they go extinct it is taken as a sad but unsurprising loss, the population size was after all already small.  However, they are forgetting that the population size of many of these species actually used to be quite large, but declining with each generation.  This decline was so gradual that we basically sleepwalked into the situation.

This concept is now being increasingly recognised as one of the fundamental obstacles faced by conservation organisations when trying to address the wide range of global environmental issues we face today.  Trying to get individuals to care about an issue when they only see a relatively minor change is difficult and education is greatly needed to help people see just how far the baseline has shifted, even within a few generations.  Then we can have a more realistic eye opening conversation about the problems we're facing and the actions we need to take to solve them.

Don't get me wrong, I still find the stark Scottish scenery beautiful, but this beauty is tempered by the fact that I know I should also being seeing large woodlands in that scenery.  And I have to admit, in my eyes at least, it would be all the more beautiful for it.