Hodgepodge 74/365 - Shifting Baselines

Today while driving I was listening to an interview on On Point with Gary Taubes, author of the new book The Case against Sugar, talking about the obesity and diabetes crises of today. Most people assume these diseases have always been around because they're so prevalent today. But that's not the case. They may be the "new normal," but in that phrase, "new" is the operative term.

This got me thinking about a concept referred to in environmental studies as "shifting baselines," the idea being that we, today, tend to think that things have ALWAYS been as they are now. And so we behave as if all we need to do is make sure we keep things as they are today.

And way too often that's way too little, way too late.

In the case of sugar, we humans have NOT always had chronic obesity and diabetes. People, however, behave as if we have, which, basically, means those diseases are "okay," just something to live with, and manage. Taubes remarked that in fact, it wasn't until the 1840s that such things as candy, pies, cookies, etc., were commonly available, because until then sugar was very expensive, truly a luxury. So our crisis actually began in the 1840s, in a very slow wind-up. It accelerated with the introduction of sugared beverages in the 1880s and '90s. And today? Yes, a full-blown crisis. But it doesn't—or at least didn't—need to be that way. And we could still change, if we, as a society, wanted to. The same goes for so many issues (here, for example, is a blogpost on shifting baselines in copyright regulations)—including ones that, if we think carefully and critically, we might be able to catch now, before they become even close to crises. Anything's possible, right?

Conversely, many situations today really are better than they once were, which should spur us into continuing to make them better still. And some—like race relations, maybe—simply continue to change, without becoming truly better or worse. That's something to look at as well.

I wrote an article on the concept of shifting baselines a while ago (in 2006), which lived online for a while, but it now seems to have disappeared. I wish you could read it. The idea is powerful, and it's applicable way beyond environmental matters.

Instead of my article, I will post a TED talk (given in the Galápagos) by the man who coined the term, Daniel Pauly, a Canadian fisheries scientist who happens also to be an outspoken critic of modern fishing practices. In a 1995 paper in Trends in Ecology and Evolution, Pauly charged that young biologists fail to address the collapse of once abundant fishing stocks because anecdotes of immense past catches have little meaning for them. “Each generation,” wrote Pauly, “accepts as a baseline the stock size and species composition that occurred at the beginning of their careers.” The result is an ever-shrinking sense of possibility, which leads to ineffectiveness and to continued overexploitation—or as Pauly puts it, a continued “fishing down the food web” that eventually will leave people with a diet of “jellyfish and plankton soup.”

We transform the world, without having any idea what we're doing. Over and over again. And we think what we end up with is "normal." When will we ever learn? Will we ever learn? I'm not optimistic.