In 2002, when Randy Olson wrote an Op-Ed for the L.A. Times one of the ways he described the shifting baselines phenomenon was in terms of weight: If your ideal weight used to be 150 pounds and now it's 160, your baseline -- as well as your waistline -- has shifted. And indeed it has.
Shifting Baselines
The Cure for Planetary Amnesia
The Shifting Baselines Blog
Jennifer Jacquet is a Ph.D. candidate with the Sea Around Us Project at the UBC Fisheries Centre. She works closely with Dr. Daniel Pauly, who coined the term Shifting Baselines, the syndrome on which this blog focuses.
Josh Donlan is a conservation scientist and a Visting Fellow at Cornell University. He often hides out in the backcountry of the Teton Mountains, pondering bygone giant beavers and ground sloths. He also is also the founder and Director of Advanced Conservation Strategies and has a habit of restoring remote islands.
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New Projects & Publications
November 27, 2008: Jennifer Jacquet gives the talk "Why Consumers Alone Can't Save Our Fish" at 1pm at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, B.C.
August 2008: Josh Donlan is co-author on a new paper titled Integrating invasive mammal eradications and biodiversity offsets for fisheries bycatch: conservation opportunities and challenges for seabirds and sea turtles published in Biological Invasions.
August 2008: Jennifer Jacquet is co-author on a new paper titled Funding Priorities: Big Barriers to Small-Scale Fisheries published in Conservation Biology.
August 2008: Josh Donlan is an author on a new paper in Journal of Applied Ecology titled Diversity, invasive species, and extinctions in insular ecosystems.
July 26, 2008: Randy Olson's film Sizzle premieres on the East Coast at the Woods Hole Film Festival in MA.
July 24, 2008: Josh Donlan gives a talk on biodiversity offsets to The Alcoa Foundation and the Alcao Intalco Aluminum Plant in Bellingham, Washington.
July 22, 2008: Jennifer Jacquet gives the talk "A Way Forward in a Sea of Market Based Initiatives to Save Wild Fish" at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, CA.
July 19, 2008: Randy Olson's film Sizzle premieres on the West Coast at Outfest in Hollywood, CA.
July 17, 2008: Jennifer Jacquet gives the talk "In Hot Soup: Shark's Captured in Ecuador's Waters" at the Society for Conservation Biology Annual Meeting in Chattanooga, TN.
July 9, 2008: Jennifer Jacquet gives the talk "Flawed Data, Reef Fisheries, And Food Security: A Close Inspection Of Marine Fisheries Catches in Mozambique, Tanzania, Fiji, And The Solomon Islands" at the 11th International Coral Reef Symposium in Ft. Lauderdale, FL.
June/July 2008: Josh Donlan attends training for his Kinship Conservation Fellowship in Bellingham, WA.
May 2008: Josh Donlan is an author on a new paper in Ambio titled High impact Conservation: Invasive Mammal Eradications from the Islands of Western Mexico.
May 15, 2008: Jennifer Jacquet reviews Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood at the Tyee.
April 2008: Trade Secrets: Renaming and Mislabeling of Seafood by Jennifer Jacquet and Daniel Pauly is published in Marine Policy.
April 2008: Randy Olson and the Puget Sound Partnership release the flash video Shifting Baselines in the Sound:.
Mar. 2008: Dr. Josh Donlan joins the Shifting Baselines blog.
Jan. 2008 Jennifer Jacquet launches the Eat Like a Pig Seafood Wallet Card
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Shifting Waistlines: Fat Is the New Normal
Category: Losing Track
Posted on: August 9, 2007 3:07 PM, by Jennifer L. Jacquet
Comments
This posting reminded me of another new normal-- Check out http://www.daveramsey.com/shop/images/products/decaldebtnormal_lg.gif
The point is that normal isn't necessarily a good thing.
(I heard about this slogan from a friend of mine. Admittedly, the website is overly commercial, but I've heard pretty good things about his radio show. Unlike Howard Stern or Rush Limbaugh, he's not just agitating people for the sake of publicity and ratings-- He's trying to get them to change their lives for the better.)
Posted by: knwd | August 10, 2007 6:15 AM