![Orion Magazine | Kal Visuals/Unsplash](https://ifp.nyu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/1-154-1024x575.jpg)
Orion Magazine | Kal Visuals/Unsplash
SHIFTING BASELINES is the idea that each successive generation will accept as “normal” an increasingly degraded and disorganized ecology, until at some point in the future, no one will remember what a healthy ecology looks and feels like. Absent any personal or societal accounting of migrating butterflies, winter snowfall, or spawning salmon, future generations will have tolerated so many small losses in population, abundance, and habitat that eventually they won’t know what they’re missing. Worse, they may not even care.