Shifting Baselines

About

What Is Shifting Baselines?

(April 1, 2007) A Personal Message from Randy Olson, Director of the Shifting Baselines Ocean Media Project

Greetings ScienceBlogs readers and welcome to a new blog which will focus on this relatively new term, "shifting baselines," and its importance not just in the oceans (though the oceans will be the primary focus) but in all other aspects of our lives. The term shifting baselines was coined in 1995 in the world of fisheries by Dr. Daniel Pauly, Director of the Fisheries Centre at the University of British Columbia. A baseline is a reference point. When we begin to lose track of our reference points from the past, allowing them to shift, we can begin to lose track of change. This is obviously a very powerful and important concept for conservation biology since how can we conserve nature if we lose track of what was originally there?

In 2002, Dr. Jeremy Jackson of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography told me about this term and conveyed his belief that it is both powerful and has applications beyond just the oceans. After running it past my friends in Hollywood (who have no science background) and finding that they immediately understood it's relevance, I wrote an Op-Ed about it that was published in the LA Times.

That kicked off our Shifting Baselines Ocean Media Project, which was co-founded by Jeremy, myself, Dr. Steven Miller (UNCW) and veteran movie producer Gale Anne Hurd ("Terminator," "Aliens," "The Abyss," "The Hulk").

The following year I created a blog which for three years has been a forum for further exploration of the term which continues to gain wider acceptance as exemplified by an article this year in the Style section of the Washington Post which begins by discussing shifting baselines in the sexual behavior of today's youth before delving into our project. Last year I handed over the Directorship of Shifting Baselines to Ty Carlisle who put together the SB Flix Contest which reached out to high school and college kids, inviting them to make one minute videos about shifting baselines or environmental issues in general. The results of the contest will be announced just before Earth Day, in a few weeks.

We are now moving the Shifting Baselines blog to Scienceblogs and, because I have taken wing with a Flock of Dodos, I am handing it over to Jennifer Jacquet who, quite fittingly, is a graduate student with Dr. Daniel Pauly. In addition to her background in environmental economics, she has written a number of articles about various aspects of the today's ocean fisheries.

Under my management the Shifting Baselines blog was a predictably ramshackle voice of whining, ridicule, encouragement, applause, and complaints. I think that Jennifer will take it to a new place that will be much more substantive, probably a little more responsible, and hopefully eventually a major voice in the world of ocean conservation. I'm sure you will all find this blog to be a lively source of information and discussion, as well as a critical voice in the world of ocean issues. I know I'm certainly looking forward to the new path that it takes. So...

Take it away, Jennifer!

What, Me Worry?

I grew up in middle America in a state without oceans reading MAD Magazine. Robert Boyd recently published an article in the L.A. Times on his impressions of MAD, which I gladly substitute as my own:

"The magazine instilled in me a habit of mind, a way of thinking about a world rife with false fronts, small print, deceptive ads, booby traps, treacherous language, double standards, half truths, subliminal pitches and product placements; it warned me that I was often merely the target of people who claimed to be my friend; it prompted me to mistrust authority, to read between the lines, to take nothing at face value, to see patterns in the often shoddy construction of movies and TV shows; and it got me to think critically in a way that few actual humans charged with my care ever bothered to."

This MAD-inspired critical thinking coupled with concern for our oceans (a paradise I rarely saw in my youth) has led to interest in outlets such as Randy Olson's Shifting Baselines Ocean Media Project and now my participation in ScienceBlogs, a colorful outcrop of science and culture. I humbly recognize my embryonic stage and will thus often rely on expert voices. Randy Olson will be a frequent contributor when he is not off making a headway in Hollywood. Daniel Pauly will join in further elucidations of the shifting baselines concept and Jeremy Jackson will, on occasion, rediagnose the oceans. I hope to be the medium for this wise triumvirate and look forward to bringing many other contributors into the mix. I hope this blog can serve as cocktail therapy for one of the most pressing syndromes of our time: shifting baselines.

My first exposure to shifting baselines was through Mathias Espinosa, a longtime scuba diver in the Galapagos Islands. Mathias explained that during his nearly 25 years in the islands, he heard every diver to come through the islands exclaim that the shark populations were bountiful, despite the evident decline he had witnessed over the decades. Most tourists found it impressive to swim with a couple sharks, let alone hundreds. But divers who had known Galapagos waters since the 1960s and 70s, like Mathias, could recognize the decline in sharks due to their notably earlier baseline.

Anecdotes of shifting baselines are everywhere and are troubling. Unlike the gap-toothed Alfred E. Neuman, I am truly worried, especially for the future for the ocean and its inhabitants. I hope to contribute to the ocean movement by examining popular science, the media, and politics with a MAD spirit and with gracious contributions from shifting baselines supporters.

(Mar. 1, 2008) Update: After 11 months blogging, we have opted to expand the Shifting Baselines team and brought onboard Josh Donlan, a conservation scientist with one wild baseline. Read more below...

A Pleistocene Baseline

Josh Donlan is a Visiting Fellow at Cornell University and Director of Advanced Conservation Strategies, an NGO dedicated to dedicated to reversing biodiversity loss through the development of innovative, self-sustaining, and economically efficient solutions to environmental challenges. Josh works on a variety of issues, including understanding how species interact and the ecosystem consequences of those interactions, reversing the impact of invasive species, incorporating ecological history into conservation strategies, and developing financial and incentive instruments for conservation. He also works with the business, non-profit, and academic sectors to maximize return on investments for biodiversity conservation strategies.

Josh holds a Ph.D. from Cornell University and a M.A from University of California. He is a senior fellow with the Robert & Patricia Switzer Foundation, the Environmental Leadership Program, and the Alcoa Foundation's Conservation and Sustainability Program. Josh has published over 60 scientific and public articles on a variety of conservation topics, some of which have received widespread media attention. He has written for Slate Magazine, Grist, Scientific American, and Orion Magazine. Josh was highlighted in New York Times Magazine's Big Ideas of 2005 issue and named 25 of 2005 Saving the Planet by Outside Magazine. Josh's article Restoring America's Big Wild Animals for Scientific American was included in in Houghton Mifflin's 2008 Best American Science and Nature Writing Anthology.

Josh spends much of his time restoring islands around the world and has worked in Argentina, Australia, Ecuador, Chile, Mexico, New Zealand, and the United States. He served as the Science & Conservation Adviser to the Galapagos National Park for four years, where he helped run the world's largest island restoration project. As a visiting scientist at the Australia's Commonwealth Scientific Research Organization in Tasmania, Josh is currently co-directing an international program to integrate island restoration and fisheries bycatch management for seabirds and sea turtles by incorporating biodiversity offsets under the Convention on Biological Diversity. This research was recently highlighted by Smithsonian Magazine. Over the last six years or so, Josh has spent a good deal time of thinking and writing about ecological history and bygone Pleistocene animals such as ancient ground sloths, heavily-armed armadillos longer than Michael Jordan is tall, and 500 pound beaver. In 2005, he and his colleagues coined the term Pleistocene Rewilding.