On Baselines That Need Shifting

A flurry of articles in recent years shows that loss of knowledge about the past may have contributed to an acceptance of other losses, such as declines in biodiversity. I first identified this form of collective amnesia in a 1995 article describing how fisheries biologists assess changes in biomass abundance. Every generation begins their conscious life by assessing the state of the world and society around them and using what they see as a baseline to evaluate changes that occur subsequently1…