Baseline Babies
Evidence of the degradation of our environment is all around us, but the pressure to do something about this is surprisingly weak. Why?
Scientists have an explanation. It's because we are all 'baseline babies'.
Scientists call it 'shifting baseline syndrome'. We all have a tendency to trust our own experiences more than other people's.
And nobody young likes to hear an old-timer waxing on about how much better things used to be.
These seem to be a universal traits, but they cause us to lose sight of changes taking place over several generations.
The world we are born into becomes our baseline. Things get worse over our lifetime, but when the new generation is born, the baseline starts again at where the new kids came in.
The result is that we end up taking for granted things that two generations ago would have caused an outrage.
I have to say it pains me to think that my children might think of scenes like the one in the picture on the left as the norm.
But, until I started thinking about it, I have to admit I had no real sense of how my own concept of normal was different from my parents'.
If you don't believe our baselines are shifting, you need to turn over this page.