How Species Cease To Matter

Atlantic salmon anyone?

John Waldman explains why as species disappear, the shifting baseline becomes the new norm. Yet another reason we need to restore, protect and preserve wild fish.

Every generation takes the natural environment it encounters during childhood as the norm against which it measures environmental decline later in life. With each ensuing generation, environmental degradation generally increases, but each generation takes that degraded condition as the new normal. Scientists call this phenomenon “shifting baselines” or “inter-generational amnesia,” and it is part of a larger and more nebulous reality — the insidious ebbing of the ecological and social relevancy of declining and disappearing species.

LINK (Via: Yale Environment 360)