From Parklane Landscapes
Shifting Baseline Syndrome (SBS) is what happens when we forget how vibrant the natural world used to be. Each generation grows up with a more depleted environment and calls it “normal,” simply because it’s all they’ve ever known.
Think about walking through a park and thinking, “This seems healthy.” But maybe 30 years ago that same park had twice as many birds, wildflowers, or insects. If you never saw that version, you don’t feel the loss - and that quiet forgetting becomes the new baseline. Over time, we start accepting degraded ecosystems as normal.
Researchers warn that this shift lowers our expectations, increases our tolerance for decline, and reduces our urgency to protect what’s left.
What helps:
Intergenerational conversations that reconnect us with what nature used to be.
Direct experiences with nature that sharpen our awareness of change.
Remembering (knowing) the past is the first step to restoring the future.
Not a sponsor, I don’t think it’s an AI graphic, and I think it has something important to say. Plus it does have an owl. We can’t save our animals if we don’t save them the spaces they need to thrive.
German environmentalist Robinga Schnögelrögel recently talked about the shifting baseline syndrom, and he gave an example of how bad it is. He read a primary source from 1858 that talked about the biodiversity back then: Butterflys were described as “everywhere”, hundreds on every meadow. A type of mayfly (ephoron virgo) hatched in rivers and congregated above, making it look like a snow flurry. The next day their dead bodies would cover the river banks, which farmers picked up by the wheelbarrow to use as fertilizer and feed to their pigs. Hence ephoron virgo’s German name “Uferaas”, meaning shore carrion.
The amount more insects and such I can recall from being a kid in the 80s compared to now is staggering, so I can only imagine what it was like 100+ years ago, especially pre-Industrial Revolution.
When I was a kid, a short road trip would cover your car in insects. Now? A long road trip is barely an inconvenience.
While insect population decline is a factor, another factor is aerodynamic design. Bugs are much more likely to be be blown over the windshield than before.
Hence why when they want to study this way, they have to look at front-mounted license plates to control for different aerodynamic design.
Of course another potential factor would be headlight design, and how insects react to them differently. I haven’t heard any thoughts on whether newer headlights attract more or fewer insects than older headlights…
All our washer buckets always seem like they dont fill them anymore, so it seems most people don’t need them anymore. When I was a new driver, washing off the bugs was basically a given when I filled up. Now as you say, I couldn’t tell you the last time I had to do it or was even able to.
When was the last time anyone saw a firefly/lighting bug in the summer? I miss them.
They used to fill up the yard here so I could swing my hand gently and grab them without trying. Now I’m happy to see a handful spread over the whole yard. 😢
Suburbs/ exhurbs in Maryland here. We still have them, but we don’t rake our leaves at all, and I’ve gotten fairly into native gardening. Maryland in general has also made a concerted effort to preserve 30% of it’s land from development though.