We transform the world, but we don’t remember it. We adjust our baseline to the new level,and we don’t recall what was there. If you generalize this, something like this happens. You have on the y axis some good thing: biodiversity, numbers of orca, the greenness of your country, the water supply. And over time it changes — it changes because people do things, or naturally. Every generation will use the images that they got at the beginning of their conscious lives as a standard and will extrapolate forward. And the difference then, they perceive as a loss. But they don’t perceive what happened before as a loss. You can have a succession of changes. At the end you want to sustain miserable leftovers. And that, to a large extent, is what we want to do now. We want to sustain things that are gone or things that are not the way they were. Read more: science.time/2013/08/01/shifting-baselines-why-the-environment-is-even-worse-off-than-you-think/#ixzz2d7TrTi5F
Posted on: Mon, 26 Aug 2013 23:10:50 +0000
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