I have recently became very passionate with historical ecology . If history is something I always shied away from (thank you high school) I have always liked stories. And well , history can also be told through stories . And for someone who loves nature and also likes a good story there is nothing better than going digging through old manuscripts, books and even some newspaper articles (yes , even newspapers were of better quality 100 years ago ) And so I read of seabded teeming with oysters and other wildlife, so full that you just dropped down your net and within a minute it would be full.
And imagination runs wild, imagining just what it must have been like to put a mask and snorkel on back then compared to now.. THAT biodiversity and life was normal then, not extraordinary. So - how do we decide what is normal? This issue is nothing 'new' but maybe something forgotten about, or anyway, something i rarely hear, Copying a piece here from earth.org (go read the full article): 'Coined by Daniel Pauly in 1995, while speaking of increasing tolerance to fish stock declines over generations, SBS also has roots in psychology, where it is referred to as ‘environmental generational amnesia’. Simply put, Shifting Baseline Syndrome is ‘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 this sense, what we consider to be a healthy environment now, past generations would consider to be degraded, and what we judge to be degraded now, the next generation will consider to be healthy or ‘normal’. As Soga and Gaston (2018) argue, without memory, knowledge, or experience of past environmental conditions, current generations cannot perceive how much their environment has changed because they are comparing it to their own ‘normal’ baseline and not to historical baselines.' Now, this leads to many issues. For example, we are becoming 'accustomed' to the heatwaves, and say things like ' i remember it being warm at the end of June already 10 years ago'. Let's put a few things straight with this statement: warm it may have been warm, but just one or two degrees can be a big difference for many species, and the duration of this (one-two days versus one week or even a whole month) can make a difference. Secondly, 10-20 years is NOTHING if we put it in the grand scheme of things... So, let's not make our minds downplay the climate issue. Let's look at the long term datasets and realise it is an issue. Actually it is a big issue. And worse, scientists are really worried that not even something like COVID-19 managed to halt the trajectories. So much for the 'green restart'... And so many things have been happening in recent years that are keeping on happening and we are at risk of 'habituation', from huge wildfilres from Australia to California. to extreme floodings, storms... What once took pages and pages of a newspaper, now it is at risk of being arginated to the corner as 'just another regular....' So. Let's not forget what normalcy should be like... And sometimes, go read some historical tales of wonderful environments (and then worry about it as they already knew what the problems were but nobody listened to the scientist, not even back then... but that's for another time )
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