What is shifting baseline syndrome?

Shifting baseline syndrome has been referred to as ‘environmental generational amnesia’ and 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’. It is a psychological and sociological phenomenon where this generational or personal forgetting results in people’s perceptions of biodiversity loss or environmental degradation being out of kilter with actual loss.

It is reflected by a tendency of people to think about the state of the environment based on their experience of it as children, rather than the longer term time scales environmental change has been occurring. This means subsequent generations are likely to accept an ever more diminished environment as the new normal, with people’s accepted thresholds for environmental conditions being lowered over time without them realizing it. In this way, shifting baseline syndrome builds on itself, with its outcomes exacerbating it still further.

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Animation by Sasha Frost Art.

Shifting baseline syndrome gained more widespread recognition following the work of fisheries scientist Daniel Pauly. He observed that successive generations of fisheries scientists had different reference points for fish populations, sometimes failing to correctly identify “baseline” population sizes of fish species. Such reference baselines will already be depleted as a result of human exploitation of the fish stocks in question, when compared to a baseline population prior to human fishing pressure.

Isabella Tree is a conservationist and writer, who has overseen a pioneering rewilding project on her Knepp estate in Sussex, documented in her book Wilding. In her words:

“We look at a landscape and see what is there, not what is missing. What you see as a child growing up often influences what you want to continue to see. Nostalgia binds us to the familiar, and we erroneously believe that this landscape has been like this for centuries.”

Within our own individual lifetimes, we may have noticed biodiversity loss and environmental changes in the wider landscape. For instance, research has shown that the number of insects ‘splatted’ on people’s vehicles has declined markedly since 2004. Other people may recall there being a greater abundance of some species of birds than there are today. In my experience, I recall a great deal more pollinating insects visiting garden flowers during the summer months, and many more moths visible in car headlights at night. However such environmental changes far eclipse the time scale of our own individual lifespans, and we need to look far beyond this if we hope to obtain a clearer picture on what has changed and what we have lost. This is important as it will inform actions on how to push back against such loss.

What causes shifting baseline syndrome?

Shifting baseline syndrome is driven by a number of compounding factors. An ‘extinction of experience’ (a lack of day-to-day interactions with elements of nature), and the loss of familiarity of nature that stems from this appears to be important, distorting people’s ability to assess the environment and notice change. A lack of scientific data on past conditions can also limit perspectives, meaning it can be hard to obtain a viable reference point with which to aim restoration, conservation or management actions. These factors act to distort people’s perceptions when assessing environmental changes.

Illustration by Cameron Shepherd.

The threat that it poses

Shifting baseline syndrome is insidious due to its invisibility. By making people more habituated and tolerant of environmental degradation, it doesn’t just contribute to the loss of wildlife, but makes it a fundamental obstacle to addressing a wide range of global environmental issues. It fuels the degradation of entire ecosystems, while skewing perceptions of climate change, natural resource depletion and pollution.

The skewing of perspective that it creates can result in a corrosive self-reinforcing feedback loop, where a progressive erosion of environmental expectations influences decisions about the conservation or restoration of nature. This in turn could result in such objectives falling short of their full potential, resulting in ‘conservation complacency’. While initial research suggests that professional ecologists and conservationists may be more resilient to the effects of shifting baseline syndrome due to digging a little deeper, they are not immune and can still fall prey to it on occasion. Shifting baseline syndrome may also influence policy and management decisions, given that these are informed by perceived natural environmental norms, and in so doing potentially have far reaching effects at the societal level.

In the context of the UK, this means that ecologically depleted areas are being actively conserved, with a lack of reference to the wilderness ecology of our island’s past. An example of this is our National Parks, with much of their land area given over to agriculture. Broadly speaking they are falling short when it comes to protecting or enhancing biodiversity, with only a low percentage in good ecological condition.

Vast swathes of land are kept in an ecologically stunted state so a tiny elite can hunt grouse, and much of the English countryside is but a much diminished shadow of what it once was. In spite of this, some may be fetishizing and have a sense of nostalgia for this life-depleted landscape, simply because of its familiarity. An inability to wake up to this means we have little hope of pushing back against this persistent loss of life from our land.

In the words of Professor Eleanor Jane Milner-Gulland, an expert on conservation science and biodiversity touching on the importance of shifting baseline syndrome to biodiversity conservation:

“If we don’t realize what we are losing we stand the risk of sleepwalking through the destruction of the natural world without taking action to remedy the situation.”

Recognising the problem

The first step to addressing shifting baseline syndrome is to recognise it in the first place. We can look back to what we think the ecology of the British Isles was like before it was sculpted by the heavy human hand. It likely primarily consisted of a mosaic of open woodlands and wetland habitats, far richer in life, including ecosystem engineers like aurochs, boar and beaver, and apex predators like lynx and wolves. While we cannot return to this pre-human ecological baseline, it can still help inform rewilding efforts today.

Example of nature in a relatively pristine state, in the Rockies, Colorado.

While we cannot turn back the clock, we can instead visit places harbouring similar temperate ecosystems that are in a much more pristine and less degraded state. When considering a UK context, many parts of mainland Europe, such as Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Slovakia and Estonia harbour areas of relatively pristine temperate forest and wetland ecosystems. To visit somewhere teaming with life can help reframe our perspectives.

My own perspective shift came through a trip to the Carpathian foothills in Transylvania, Romania. A land of forest, glades and rivers. The motley canvas of colour woven by the wildflowers in the woodland glades far exceeded anything I had ever encountered in the UK. These glades were teeming with a staggering array of insect life, which would jump or fly in great abundance with every footstep. The forests thronged with a riotous chorus of birdsong. While there were a lot of familiar species, there was a much greater abundance and richness of life to be encountered. While not directly comparable to the British context (it being easier for life to bounce back on the mainland after the retreat of the ice caps), I came away with a clearer perspective on how ecologically impoverished the UK had become.

In a woodland glade in the Carpathian foothills, Transylvania, Romania.

Technology could potentially be leveraged to provide an alternative means of facilitating a shift in perspective. Augmented Reality (AR) technology could have a role in helping reframe perspectives. AR differs from Virtual Reality (VR) in that it overlays virtual 3D images onto the physical world. By superimposing the sight and sounds of lost species onto a landscape, it could help highlight what has been lost.

Lifting baselines

Given that degradation of the natural environment is a fundamental driver of shifting baseline syndrome, nature restoration - including landscape level actions such as rewilding - have a key role to play if we hope to reverse shifting baseline syndrome. Nature restoration efforts are increasingly being applied to urban areas where most day-to-day interactions with nature will take place. Such efforts can play a part in reducing the ‘extinction of experience’, helping promote more contact with nature.

In the past, I’ve made the case for beaver reintroduction to Britain based on psychological grounds, due to beaver’s unrivalled ability to sculpt a wilder and richer environment. Through their capacity to enhance biodiversity at landscape scale and create wetland habitat more life rich than anything humans can replicate, beavers could have a role to play in pushing back against shifting baseline syndrome, helping usher in a wilder, richer landscape if we can learn to live alongside them.

Education also has a part to play, through its capacity to help bolster people’s familiarity with their surrounding environment, while also generating awareness about both its current and past condition, shedding light on what has already been lost. Scientific data can also help reconstruct a picture of past environmental conditions to inform restoration efforts, and public participation in citizen science can contribute to the collection of large-scale and long-term environmental data, while reducing the extinction of experience and enhancing people’s familiarity with nature. Further research on the phenomenon could also shed light on ways in which the issue of shifting baseline syndrome could be more clearly perceived, and so inform the design of more effective interventions.

Shifting beyond our impoverished baseline

The UK is considered one of the most nature-depleted parts of the world, with recent research also reporting that it ranked 59th for average nature connectedness out of 65 national groups surveyed. This marked nature depletion and disconnection likely feed off each other, with shifting baseline syndrome fanning the flames of this. If we cannot recognise and address shifting baseline syndrome, we cannot hope to stem the loss of life from our lands. Not only does this mean we are destined to inhabit a more ecologically uncertain and unstable future, but we will erode our own spiritual bedrock, and diminish our capacity to marvel at the world, and to be nourished by experiences of enchantment, wonder and awe - and the hope of a more life rich future. This is a loss to both ourselves, and the wider web of life of which we are all a part.