INTRODUCTION

Humans consider the surroundings of their youth as natural and, as they age, recognize the changes to their environment as unnatural. Children repeat the errors of their parents. Thus, as each new generation collectively adopts this perverse perspective, we lose track of the inexorable degradation of native ecosystems. Pauly (1995) coined the term “shifting baselines syndrome” to describe this phenomenon in relation to the problem of fisheries, for which baselines for so-called “pristine” populations are established by managers that ignore the impacts of earlier fishing that had already greatly reduced fish abundance and size. Consequently, expectations change as we shift to eating smaller and smaller fish and invertebrates at progressively lower trophic levels – the phenomenon now commonly referred to as “fishing down the food web” (Pauly et al., 1998). The gradual accommodation of loss applies to a host of other ecological and cultural resources. Pollan (2008) writes on “the tangible material formerly known as food” and notes that many modern food systems would be unrecognizable to people only a few decades ago. Similarly, we are in the process of destroying many indigenous cultures through a combination of genocide and assimilation. We lose one of the 7000 languages remaining on Earth every two weeks (Wilford, 2007). The “future of the past” (Stille, 2002) is grim indeed.

It is not sycophantic to say that the idea of shifting baselines was revolutionary for the field of ecology, for which our limited understanding of patterns of distribution and abundance, food webs, and community structure are based on the assumption that what we can observe today is all that matters (Jackson, 1997, 2006).