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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.
Researchers warn that this shift lowers our expectations, increases our tolerance for decline, and reduces our urgency to protect what’s left.
When you can still imagine something that’s lost that’s something you might be able to get back.
When folks can no longer imagine something that loss is much more profound.
For a few days after 9/11 there was so much less particulate in the atmosphere younger folks could see things in the distance they had never seen before and there were still old folks who could remember and describe it.
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@stepheneb
> When you can still imagine something that’s lost that’s something you might be able to get back
Absolutely. Which is this why accelerating this generational forgetting, and undermining any attempt to sustain collective memory, is a key project of corporatist propaganda. Sometimes known as 'capitalist realism'.
The late David Graeber pointed out that there's a reason it's easier to imagine the end of the world that a post-capitalist one. Mark Fisher described it.
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This doesn't just apply to environmental loss either. I grew up with a frayed social safety net compared to what my parents' generation grew up with. My daughter's generation has grown up with a partially dismantled one. If we don't turn things around now, my granddaughter will grow up without one, and will never know what it was like to have one.
This is not acceptable.
@Jeroen89 Is that a flying fish in 2020? 😅
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