““The phenomenon that Powell stumbled onto has a name: shifting baselines syndrome... Every generation of scientist accepts the oceans as it inherits them... when the next generation of scientists start their careers, they don't see the oceans as depleted; that depleted condition becomes their baseline, against which they'll measure any subsequent losses in their lifetimes... All of us adopt the natural world we encounter in childhood as our psychological baseline -- an expectation of how things should be --and gauge the changes we see against that norm... It also can leave us , the public, unsure how to feel about conservation's supposedly feel-good success stories.””
