Shifting baseline syndrome ( #SBS ) is what happens when we forget how vibrant the natural world used to be.
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@Kurt Ah yes, the ever-present myth of humans making nature more natural by (carefully?) editing it. Because nature alone is "too dumb" to do it properly. Remind you of other colonial thinking patterns? Yikes.
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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.
@Jeroen89 This phenomenon merits a more emotive name!
As for the graphic - in all too many rural places, there's barely an insect to be seen.
Happily, I came across a veritable insect hotspot this week - a small farm in Sussex that has been chemical free for a decade or more... Insects everywhere - more than I can remember seeing for a long time!
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I was taught that Mesopotamia was "The Fertile Crescent", and that it is in what today is Iraq and Turkey.
I remember watching the news in 1991 the first time we bombed the shit out of Iraq. It didn't look very fertile to me. It looked like a desert.
Same thing?
@Uair @Jeroen89
The area was named the fertile crescent specifically for river valleys, and what they were like over 3000 years ago. The area was already becoming dryer at that time, and about 60,000 years ago the whole Arabian peninsula was a jungle.
Also the war wasn't fought in the prime farming areas. -
@Jeroen89 this is why we need large regions with untouched diversity - rainforests and wetlands, deserts & northern forests - so nature can trive. Where we must not destroy everything.
@Jeroen89 In addition the same for oceans. There's so much damage already due to climate heating but also deep sea mining and fossil fuel pollution!
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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.
@Jeroen89 I remember that butterfly I saw in 2020.
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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.
@Jeroen89@mastodon-belgium.be the irony of talking about climate change with ai slop graphics
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@Jeroen89 I miss the fireflies from my childhood.
@AdmiralMemo @Jeroen89 In the late 1960s, I could see fireflies in large numbers every summer in a vacant lot in my New York City neighborhood. #bronx #nyc
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@Jeroen89 ok, but it's pretty ironic that you're illustrating this with AI style graphics
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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.
@Jeroen89 there was a great story about #ShiftingBaselineSyndrome about a decade ago. A biologist reviewed photos from fishing expeditions in Key West over half a century. Charter boats that regularly brought in fish bigger than the tourists who caught them were, after some decades, only bringing in fish about 30cm long.
https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2014/02/05/257046530/big-fish-stories-getting-littler
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@Jeroen89 The same is valid for our night sky. With all the light pollution we forget how a starry sky could look like
https://nationalgeographic.de/umwelt/2025/09/verschwinden-die-sterne-vom-nachthimmel/
by @skyglowberlin@nachtigal
Also applies to some basic human courtesies
@Jeroen89 @skyglowberlin -
@Jeroen89 If you want a jungle, you need to let it be a jungle. There's no "carefully extracting some resources" or any such thing, it will destroy the jungle. (I use jungle in a generic way to mean "nature, undisturbed" if I may.) And that's why with capitalism, you cannot have jungles. All jungles will be "extracted for profit" because growing the jungle is an externalized (to the past) cost, not having the jungle is an externalized (to the future) cost, but profit is being made NOW. Want change? Gotta go chop down some rich people instead of trees, no way around it.
(Figuratively, of course. But chop you must.) -
@PepperTheVixen Then in Germany I might get sued for encouraging people to commit a crime because Germany is kind of a shit country when it comes to non-politicians saying things. Politicians are of course free to say whatever the fuck they want.
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There is no doubt that it is AI-generated. If you look closely, there's a depiction of a flying fish (Exocoetidae), which is native to the tropic and subtropic oceans, and not – you know – temperate forests.
Also, the tandem dragonfly (Anax tandemicus) went extinct in the 1740's.
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@phf @Jeroen89 Actually, chopping down billionaires literally could be ethically justified... As long as you are environmentally aware, and make sure you dispose of the bodies in an environmentally friendly way. The effect of one billionaire on the world is more than a great number of the world's countries.
@UkeleleEric I’m in favor of eating them. What; it’s not like they’re people.
@phf @Jeroen89 -
@UkeleleEric I’m in favor of eating them. What; it’s not like they’re people.
@phf @Jeroen89 -
P pelle@veganism.social shared this topic
