Sacred Headwaters #21: Shifting Baselines

Every year seems to have a new record-breaking storm, wildfire season, heatwave, or more. How can we avoid normalizing the rapidly changing climate in our discourse -- and in our minds?

Sacred Headwaters is a bi-weekly newsletter that aims to guide a co-learning process about the existential issues and planetary limitations facing humanity and about how we can reorient civilization in a way that will enable us to thrive for centuries to come. If you’re just joining us, consider checking out the first issue for some context and head over to our new table of contents to browse the whole library. The newsletters are not strictly sequential, but this exploration is meant to build on knowledge and understanding over time. Subscribe below if you haven’t already, and please share with friends, family, and colleagues who may be interested:

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Sacred Headwaters has a rudimentary table of contents intended to allow readers to “catch up” more effectively, facilitate using Sacred Headwaters as a reference, and give a better picture of what the newsletter is about for those who are just joining us.

Issue #21: Shifting Baselines

Well — another two weeks, another postponement of my issue on extreme heat. It felt like now was not the time for another issue cataloguing the current and future human impacts of climate change. While I would still like to write that issue and believe there’s a lot to be learned about the direct impacts of increasing temperature on where and how we live, this week, we’re focusing on the concept of shifting baseline syndrome, the process by which we become accustomed to changing conditions in our environment, treating each successive state as “normal.”

In North America, the last year has seen deadly storms and the worst wildfires in modern history, compounded in many cases by record-breaking heat waves, the deadly effects of which are, in turn, compounded by the power outages caused by the fires and storms. Globally, we’ve seen massive, deadly flooding across southeast Asia, in Brazil, and elsewhere; devastating wildfires in Australia, Russia and the Amazon; and even swarms of locusts destroying crops in Africa.

All of this is happening over a backdrop of a global pandemic, the worst economic crisis in 90 years, and in the US and a number of other countries, major social upheaval.

It’s sort of delusionally reassuring to write things off as “2020 being 2020.” The slightly more realistic people like to say, “This is our new normal.” But that’s wrong too. There is no new normal; there is only an increasingly rapid pace of change. This is, in some ways, just the beginning, but even that implies a process with a beginning, middle, and end that fails to really capture what we’re living through.

There is no doubt that 2020 has been a shock: it’s much worse than most people thought it would be, and it’s happened much faster. But many of these changes have been happening for decades. The problem is that we get used to them over time and forget that things used to be different.

XKCD

When your grandparent tells you, “Back in my day, we used to trudge five miles through deep snow uphill both ways to get to school” — there’s a good chance that part of that statement is actually true. Our weather, at a local level, has changed dramatically, even within my relatively short lifespan. By the same token, the wildlife we see has changed; the political climate has changed; income inequality and wealth distribution have changed.

So how do we avoid just “getting used to” the fact that 1200 Americans are dying every day (~5000 globally) from a pandemic? How do we remind ourselves that storms were less frequent and less destructive a few decades ago? How do we prevent it from becoming “normal” to evacuate coastal areas on an annual basis?

The climate emergency requires outrage, but as the changing climatic and socioeconomic systems become normalized in our minds, we lose that outrage. In this issue, we’ll read about this process of shifting baseline syndrome (SBS), its context and importance within the climate dialogue, and about how we can combat it.

To be honest, this is what scares me most. What I’ve seen this year, more than anything else, is an incremental acquiescence to an ever-worsening world. It doesn’t have to be that way.

The scariest thing about global warming (and Covid-19) (20 minutes)

This is a sweeping article that introduces the concept of shifting baseline syndrome, gives an overview of its history (it was first formulated in the context of fisheries ecology), and contextualizes it within our current moment. Roberts — a climate writer at Vox who we’ve read in past issues — makes important connections to both actual climatic changes and political economic changes. As he says,

Shifting baselines are evident in the steady erosion of unions, the militarization of police, and the infusion of US politics with dark money. They are even evident…in our experience with Covid-19.

The article gives a quick introduction to some of the studies that have been done on shifting baselines, referencing an interesting one that found — at least among US Twitter users, where its data are from — that people normalize previously extreme weather within 2-8 years. With global warming, this line of inquiry leads to a kind of terrifying conclusion that the Washington Post sums up tritely: “Frogs don’t boil. But we might.” Taken together, Roberts paints a picture of a grim possible future: each year, each event, we normalize extreme weather, heat, sea level rise. We normalize pandemic death, police violence, openly white supremacist rhetoric, refugee crises, and more. Bit by bit, the world becomes a hellscape, without ever actually crossing a discrete barrier that we could identify as “collapse,” and we hardly even notice.

Global Apathy Toward the Fires in Australia Is a Scary Portent for the Future (10 minutes)

You may have already forgotten that we saw images like the footage of San Francisco set to Blade Runner 2049 music out of Sydney, Australia less than a year ago, with thousands of white residents of a first world country trapped on beaches as flames engulfed their homes. It’s easy to forget, given everything that’s happened since then. But what’s more surprising is how little coverage it got at the time. In this piece from December 2019, David Wallace-Wells (who you may remember from issue #1) reminds us how bad the fires in Australia were and explores the failure of both media coverage and our collective consciousness to understand the scale of the disaster. He posits that, because the fires lasted months, we experienced what was essentially a rapid version of shifting baseline syndrome; this is something to keep in mind as the as the fires in Oregon and California inevitably drag on into the fall. He makes another interesting point about why the coverage of this event was striking: western media tends to ignore large-scale disasters in the global south but report widely on relatively small disturbances in western, English-speaking countries. The fires in Australia broke that rule and demonstrated a new ability to ignore even the plight of the global north. Are we seeing this now within the bounds of North America, within the US? If we aren’t already, will we in a few weeks or months?

Shifting baselines of disaster mitigation (15 minutes)

This paper expands the concept of shifting baselines to the realm of climate adaptation and disaster mitigation by looking at two case studies in Southeast Asia, the Mekong Delta and Bangladesh, coastal regions that are subject to regular flooding and particularly vulnerable to ongoing sea level rise. Thomas argues that international aid and development agencies like the World Bank are implementing mitigation strategies that perpetuate the current conditions as the “natural baseline” when in fact, those conditions were created by failed mitigation structures earlier in the 20th century. This doubles as both a scientific baseline about the ecological condition of the coastal deltas and a socioeconomic one, classifying the harm caused to local communities by prior attempts at mitigation as the new baseline that must be preserved in the context of climate change. This is a really important point and it’s one we’ve seen play out in ecological restoration across the world; I wrote an essay recently that touched on how river restoration in the US has been largely driven by a false understanding of the so-called “natural” state of rivers, a state actually created by tens of thousands mill dams that were built in the 17th- to 19th-centuries. It also begins to hint at something I haven’t written about much, but certainly will: do international development and aid organizations like the World Bank actually benefit the global south? There are many different reasons to answer “no,” but in this particular context: are they essentially molding communities to a harmful baseline that they created instead of respecting and empowering local knowledge and using a broader historical perspective to identify better strategies for climate adaptation?

Indigenous knowledge as a remedy for shifting baseline syndrome (10 minutes)

Wallace-Wells and Roberts both talk about shifting baseline syndrome outside the contexts of academia where it was originally identified. This short paper by Timothy Jardine moves back into that realm, echoing arguments from Daniel Pauly’s original 1995 essay that identified the problem and pointing towards Indigenous knowledge (sometimes referred to as “traditional ecological knowledge”— TEK) as a potential solution. Jardine points towards another recent paper on SBS that includes a section titled, “Preventing SBS,” and argues that Indigenous knowledge meets all the strategic recommendations from that paper. I’d encourage you to read that section as well. While some of what both papers discuss is specific to challenging SBS within the bounds of academic ecology, they also reach further, with Soga and Gaston calling for strategies to “reduce the extinction of experience” and “educate the public.” Jardine states succinctly one way that Indigenous knowledge can help in those realms:

Wrapped up in national apologies, constitutional amendments, and landmark land‐transfer agreements is a movement to seek reconciliation between Indigenous and non‐Indigenous peoples and to “decolonize” education and research. Our collective relationship with the environment is very much a part of this foundation.

Jardine argues that, at least in places where the project of colonial genocide did not completely succeed, Indigenous communities have accumulated ecological knowledge across much longer timespans and with much more holistic perspectives than academic science and that this knowledge can help us reestablish more meaningful, older baselines that indicate what “sustainable” ecosystems may look like. He is careful to emphasize that this can (and should) only effectively happen through reciprocal and respectful partnerships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers.

Book Recommendation: The Good Ancestor: How to Think Long Term in a Short-Term World, Roman Krznaric

Note for North American subscribers, myself included: unfortunately this book has not been released yet and you can’t just buy the UK version (at least not without using a VPN)! It will be released on October 27th. Perhaps unimportant side note: Krznaric is married to Kate Raworth, author of Doughnut Economics, an economic framework we’ve read about in a number of prior issues.

This book is not really about shifting baselines, but it’s about a paradigm shift in our relationship with other generations of humans; that shift is a way of fighting SBS and of developing (or re-developing) long, multi-generational memories and intentions. Krznaric argues that we need to redesign society to place value on the lives of future generations, something we only give lip-service to today through heavily discounted economic calculations. His focus is primarily on how we can connect to the future, but I’m hoping that the lessons are similar for something I believe is equally important: how do we connect to the past? The problem, in my mind, is recognizing that we are part of larger collective organisms, both the self-organizing system of humanity that has existed for 200,000 years and more broadly, the system of Earth. Krznaric’s goal with this book is to offer a hopeful guide for the actors of the present to embrace their role as part of a system that will exist over a longer time span than we, as individuals, can meaningfully imagine.

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