British journalist and environmentalist George Monbiot in his new book Feral (p. 69) writes about the way people of every generation perceive the state of the ecosystems they encountered in their childhood as normal. He cites the example of the treeless hills of England and Wales being promoted as wilderness, and the memory of the forests that covered that land and the animals that lived there as long forgotten. Monbiot says that there is a name for this forgetting; ‘shifting baseline syndrome’, which was coined by the fisheries scientist Daniel Pauly. 

Drawing on decades of international experience, Pauly has written extensively about the collapse of global fisheries and the failure of management methods such the ‘maximum sustainable yield’ and ‘annual total allowable catch’. Pauly says that there is limited accounting for shifting baselines, with each generation of fisheries scientists accepting as a baseline ‘the stock size and species composition that occurred at the beginning of their careers’, resulting in the gradual accommodation of the loss of resource species.

Pauly says that fisheries science doesn’t have a framework for accommodating early accounts of ‘large catches’, which are seen as anecdotal. He also argues that such a framework would help, at least in part, in overcoming shifting baselines. Curious to investigate this idea in the Australian context, I checked the marine environment section of the Australian 2011 State of the Environment (SoE) report. I learned that, where possible, comparisons are made with the time of European settlement and oral histories referenced, for example records of the abundance of reef cod populations around Ningaloo Reef in WA, which no longer exist.

So how could the idea of shifting baselines be useful to local government? There are natural resources that are part of large-scale commons (such as fisheries), and the management of these requires a multi-level governance response. However, councils have a direct responsibility for long-term strategic plans for local places, which include small-scale commons, and for measuring progress against these plans. The consultation for these plans provide an opportunity to revisit the underlying assumptions and the data that informs the vision. As in the SoE report, the use of historic records and the knowledge of long-term residents of the area could be valuable in reviving our collective memories and challenging what we have accepted as normal.

In this current political climate, where ‘cutting green tape’ is an oft-repeated mantra, councils play an important role in preventing the creeping degradation of resources and the shifting of baselines, whether through preventing the clearing of habitats of endangered species or protecting aquatic breeding grounds from polluting development. While acknowledging the value of regulation, Monbiot argues for a positive environmentalism - explaining not just what we are against but what we are for. A more ambitious vision for nature will also benefit people, now and in the future.

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