I don't know if it is my age wearing on me, the changes I have seen in my lifetime, the chaos that has become our political discourse, or what.
I remember as a child, lying on my belly in the grass watching bugs, and running free in the fields with the cows. Chasing butterflies, and inspecting jack in the pulpet flowers. I remember cooking hard boiled eggs and leaving the house before anyone else was up, spending my day outside. I found snakes under logs, robins nests, tadpoles to raise into frogs. I remember Lake Superior before the zebra mussels took over. I remember swimming in the big lake(Lake Superior)
and swallowing when I got a mouthful of the cold crystel water. I remember roaming the woods before the loggers cut it all down.
I remember a time when nature was something other than the Discovery channel. It was what I stepped outside my door in the morning to explore. A child born today where I was born will not know those things. They will be born into a tourist destination where the value of a tree lies in the wood it produces unless it is placed where a tourist will see it from the highway as they fly past in their car. That is what a shifting baseline means.
The human population has doubled in my lifetime. A child born today will not remember a time when there were only 3 billion people on the planet. If they do it will mean they remember a catastrophe that decimated the human population. The human doubling time when I was born was one generation. It will take half that time now to add another 3 billion people.
In the 1950s when I was born, there were 90% more big fish in the ocean than there are now. A child born on the coast today will remember the 10 percent remaining as the most fish they ever saw in the ocean. They will not remember an abundance of seafood. They may not remember a time when there was enough to eat. That is the meaning of a shifting baseline. The way it used to be means the way it was in my earliest memory.
I do not remember the passenger pigeon.
They once numbered in the billions. The last Passenger Pigeon, named Martha, died alone at the Cincinnati Zoo at about 1:00 pm on September 1, 1914. I never got to see one. I am hard pressed to imagining a flock of thousands of birds, any species of bird, blackening the sky as they migrate. It was before my time, before my baseline. My recollection is hundreds of birds in a flock speckeling the sky at one time. That seems to me a lot of birds. Who knew they were once so numerous. The children born now will remember flocks of ten or twenty as lots. They will not remember hundreds, as I do not remember thousands. They will spit water from the big lake out...polluted you know, and will think a stand of 10 acres where a forest of 1800 acres once stood is the norm. Humanity will forget how it used to be. They will forget, not because the memory is so painful a reminder of loss, but because what was lost, was lost before they were born and so they never knew.
If they forget they will be doomed to repeat our excesses. So then, I am sad tonight. I remember what I remember...and I am sad. I thought perhaps if I write it down, some of the little things I remember then later someone may read it and be warned. Share your memories with me! I need to know what others have seen and cherished. If we remember together what was, perhaps the future will shift a little and more will be saved.
cross posted at My Left Wing and ePluribus Media