Photo credit: Sarah Killingsworth.
Ecologists have a term for a subtle but powerful problem in environmental thinking: shifting baseline syndrome. It describes how each generation comes to accept the environmental conditions they grow up with as “normal,” even when those conditions are already significantly degraded compared to the past. Because change often happens gradually, expectations quietly adjust downward. What once would have been recognized as decline becomes the new reference point for management, conservation goals, and public perception.
In this article published in The Wildlife News, TIRN’s Executive Director, Ken Bouley examines how shifting baselines shape the way we understand fisheries collapse, shrinking wildlife populations, altered landscapes and even conservation “success” stories. Drawing on ecology, psychology and history, the article examines how the loss of ecological memory narrows our sense of what is possible to restore — and why recognizing this pattern is essential if environmental protection is to be based on long-term reality rather than recent, diminished norms.
“The term shifting baselines was coined in 1995 by fisheries scientist Daniel Pauly in a short paper called “Anecdotes and the shifting baseline syndrome of fisheries.” Pauly noticed that each generation of fisheries scientists tended to accept the stock sizes they encountered early in their careers as “normal,” even though those stocks were already dramatically reduced from historical levels. Management targets crept downward not because anyone felt good about it, but because expectations quietly shrank. The baseline moved, and hardly anyone noticed.
Psychology and sociology circle this phenomenon from multiple directions. Creeping normality describes how dramatic change becomes acceptable when it arrives in small increments. The tyranny of small decisions shows how many individually insignificant choices can add up to a disastrous outcome. Normalization of deviance captures how departures from proper standards become culturally acceptable over time. Proximity bias reminds us that we privilege what is close—including temporally—over what is distant.”
