Shifting baseline syndrome

As circumstances change, what we think of as normal and healthy -- the baseline -- shifts to keep up with experienced reality.

The term "shifting baseline syndrome" was first coined by a fisheries scientist, Daniel Pauly, to describe an effect afflicting researchers who studied fish.  He observed that despite an objectively recorded long-term decline in certain fish populations, each generation of scientists seemed to be accepting the lower abundance and diversity they studied as their "baseline". They did this despite stories that prior generations had experienced and observed ocean life quite differently. Scientists were failing to account fully for the slow creep of disappearing species, and each generation accepted the depleted ocean biodiversity they inherited as normal. He dubbed the effect "shifting baseline syndrome".  Since then, the shifting baseline effect has been observed far more widely than the fisheries community – it takes place in any realm of society where a baseline creeps imperceptibly over generations.

The new normal tends to surface after two main sorts of occasions: traumatic national events — like the World Wars and 9/11 — and catastrophic economic events: the Great Depression, the oil embargoes of the 1970s and the market crash of 2008. The phrase began to be associated with global warming around the early 2000s and its use has ramped up in reference to extreme weather events driven by climate change; also after disastrous wildfires, hurricanes, heatwaves and drought. All of these circumstances have something in common: they are times of transition and times of uncertainty; they describe situations that are radically different than what came before them.