Shifting Baselines syndrome makes it hard to “stand in the way of progress”

All too often the timber industry will argue they are sustainable
because they harvest less wood volume than grows every year. And it
makes sense if you only calculate the baseline of wood volume that has
grown after a forest is cleared of all it’s original timber. But what
if you figured in the baseline of the wood volume that was originally
harvested?

Or more to the point imagine what if we could solve the current economic crisis by ignoring the debt and only calculating money coming in / going out as of today? Think of the bonuses all the CEOs and bankers could get out of that line of reasoning? Oh yeah, that’s in part how the current economic crisis was created.   –Editor, Forest Policy Research

It’s called shifting baseline syndrome which is defined by Wikipedia
as: “Shifting baseline (also known as sliding baseline) is a term used
to describe the way significant changes to a system are measured
against previous baselines, which themselves may represent significant
changes from the original state of the system.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shifting_baseline_syndrome

The new study provides the first evidence of so-called ‘shifting
baseline syndrome’ – a conservation theory which says that people’s
perception of the environment is determined by what they see now, with
their own eyes, and does not take into account what things were like
in the past.

Get full text; support writer, producer of the words:
http://www.bio-medicine.org/biology-news-1/Village-bird-study-highlights-loss-of-wildlife-knowledge-from-one-7069-1

To test the theory scientists carried out a survey in the village of
Cherry Burton, Yorkshire, to examine whether people were aware of
changes in local bird populations over the last two decades. The
researchers asked 50 village residents what they thought the three
most common birds in the village were 20 years ago, and more recently,
in 2006. Their answers were rated according to how close they came to
getting the three most common birds correct for both dates, which were
the wood pigeon, feral pigeon and starling in the earlier period, and
in 2006 were the wood pigeon, blackbird and starling.

In addition, villagers were asked to say whether they thought populations of four easily recognisable birds – sparrows, starlings, bluetits and wood pigeons – had increased or declined in the village in the last 20 years. In reality, numbers of sparrows and starlings have declined in the area over this period, whilst wood pigeons and blue tits have increased.

Get full text; support writer, producer of the words:
http://www.bio-medicine.org/biology-news-1/Village-bird-study-highlights-loss-of-wildlife-knowledge-from-one-7069-1/