Photo illustration of vintage green velvet chair in front of an abstracted large recycling symbol

The Washington Post

hyo-SustainableFurniture

v-unearthed-climatefriendlyplants

Michael Parkin for The Washington Post

For The Washington Post

ClimateCurious

Hudson Christie

Gel,Caps,In,Hand,For,Washing,Mashine,,Liquid,Coloured,Detergent

ecocoffeepods

10 ways to lower your carbon footprint

Closeup shot of an unrecognisable man exercising with a kettlebell in a gym

Contributor

kettle bell earth

Solar

staff

(Michael Parkin for the Washington Post)

Respond to prefers-color-scheme dark in app web views

Follow section front redirects in Spectrum

Enable NLP source in PCS for load testing

Switch off the News Alerts Survey Widget when we have enough responses

Poll to determine if new LUF updates are available

Allows the winning A/B test variant to be turned on without Spectrum deployment

Show infinite scrolling sections in Assembler MultiView

Show option for NLP article summaries in Action Bar

Show NLP summaries collection recirc on article pages

A general feature flag for Recipe Features that aren't yet released

Feature flag for media team features that aren't yet released

Use new Orca video player for preroll plugin in Spectrum

Show the snow tracker (instead of the heat tracker) on Spectrum

The next global crisis could come from the sun. We should prepare now.

Lily James shows off train at Met Gala

Under Putin, a militarized new Russia rises to challenge U.S. and the West 

Postal worker finds WWII-era letters, drives 5 hours to deliver them

Strangers help Sesame Street puppeteer after heirloom necklace was stolen

Teen grabs wheel when driver passes out and school bus veers into traffic

The right’s enthusiasm for hyperbole is doing Trump no legal favors

Middle East conflict live updates: IDF takes control of Rafah border crossing; Biden denounces Hamas, antisemitism in address

Indiana primary election 2024: Latest updates on governor, House races

France tries to shed its rude reputation ahead of the Olympics

Don’t be a jerk at the airport: A guide for headphones

The new cure-all for vacation excess: the IV drip 

Triumphal Putin is inaugurated for fifth term as Russian president 

Ukraine arrests two colonels in protective service in plot to kill Zelensky

Boeing Starliner space launch delayed at least until Friday

Substack courts TikTokers with new ‘creators’ program

Book excerpt: The admiral who had a mental breakdown over Fat Leonard

A guide to the 2024 Alexandria Democratic primary election 

Baseball can crush rookies. Why hasn’t it crushed Trey Lipscomb?

Eddie Rosario and Co. lead the Nats to an MLB-best 12th comeback win

CJ Abrams keeps getting better. It’s time to think about an extension.

Miss Manners: Greeting a non-parent on Mother’s or Father’s Day 

Ask Amy: I’ve lied about being a Vietnam War veteran for 50 years

Carolyn Hax: Husband admits to one-night stand, wants spouse to ‘let it go’

The crisis Biden and Trump don’t want to deal with

Russia is using toxic chemical weapons, wrecking a ban it helped create

House Republicans hold a press conference in advance of tonightÕs State of the Union, on March 01 in Washington, DC.

Reporting on Earth’s changing climate and the search for solutions

See more coverage in your recommendations

Climate & environment

The Climate Coach newsletter

Climate alerts

Michael J. Coren

OQUOSSOC, Maine — Every morning this week, I’ve woken up to a sea of yellow birch and balsam fir in this northern stretch of the Appalachians. The wind whipping off Mooselookmeguntic Lake stirs millions of leaves with a sound like the ocean. Once darkness falls, the loons arrive, their voices pealing across the water as they dive for chub, golden shiners and small brook trout.

To my eye, this is as Edenic as you get in America today. Yet almost everything I assumed about this “pristine” landscape was wrong.

Maine, while <a href="https://www.maine.gov/dacf/mnap/features/ecosystems.htm#:~:text=Forest%20Ecosystems&text=Maine's%20diversity%20of%20forest%20types,largely%20based%20on%20its%20forests." target=_blank>90 percent forest</a>, is also one of our most logged states. If you’re wondering where a lot of America’s 2-by-4s and toilet paper come from, it’s here. Of Maine’s original species, sea minks, cougars, caribou and gray wolves are either <a href="https://www.maine.gov/ifw/docs/swap/2015MaineSWAP_Element1_DRAFT.pdf" target=_blank>extinct</a> or extirpated from the state.

Without this knowledge, it was easy to think I stood on the edge of primeval wilderness. Changes here unfolded over centuries. Each generation came to see the woods and rivers around them as normal even as the ecosystem degraded.

There’s a name for this: shifting baselines.

Today, a new normal is being rewritten in our own lifetimes amid <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/12/30/blizzard-hurricane-drought-flood-tornado-2022/" target=_blank>climate-related disasters</a>, from <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/06/08/wildfire-smoke-climate-change-real-natural-disasters/" target=_blank>smoke-filled skies</a> to <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/07/25/heat-wave-us-europe-climate-change/" target=_blank>lethal heat waves</a>. Yet accepting these conditions as normal threatens to unravel what made the world capable of withstanding these shocks in the first place. To restore the rich relationships of species, and our place among them, we need to remember our “baselines,” whether that’s in Maine or your own backyard.

One of the best ways to do this, even scientists admit, is telling stories.

Robert F. Bukaty

The term was <a href="https://www.waterbucket.ca/rm/files/2014/08/AnecdotesShiftingBaselineSyndromeFisheries-_1995.pdf" target=_blank>coined</a> by marine biologist Daniel Pauly in 1995. Pauly, now at the University of British Columbia, noticed fishery scientists generally accepted the size of fish populations at the start of their careers as normal, and then managed toward that goal. If stocks declined by the time the next generation entered the field, this became the new normal.

“The result, obviously, is a gradual shift of the baseline,” <a href="https://www.waterbucket.ca/rm/files/2014/08/AnecdotesShiftingBaselineSyndromeFisheries-_1995.pdf" target=_blank>he wrote in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution</a>, “a gradual accommodation of the creeping disappearance of resource species.”

Shifting baselines is now shorthand for generational amnesia of the natural world. As species decline or die off, our cultural memory of them fades. We might remember the abundance and diversity of our childhood but never imagine the world of our grandparents — or of their ancestors. This phenomenon has already been documented among groups as diverse as <a href="https://conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1111/j.1755-263X.2009.00049.x" target=_blank>bush meat hunters in Africa and birders in Britain</a>.

In Maine, I’ve been thinking about this a lot. How can we remember what once was, even as climate change promises to transform the planet?

The answer, Pauly suggests, is not simply more wildlife counts. We need stories from people who remember to re-create these baselines as best we can. “The big changes happened way back,” he wrote, “but all that we have to recall them are anecdotes.”

To hear those stories, I called on the people who have been in Maine longer than anyone else.

The <a href="https://www.penobscotnation.org/" target=_blank>Penobscot Nation</a> is among <a href="https://wabanakialliance.com/penobscot-nation/" target=_blank>the oldest continuous governments in the world</a>. Some of its members still recall stories of Atlantic salmon filling Maine’s rivers and of alewife, or river herring, swimming upriver by the uncounted millions, says Chuck Loring Jr., the Penobscot Nation’s director of natural resources. Last year, fewer than <a href="https://www.bangordailynews.com/2022/12/01/outdoors/salmon-returns-highest-in-years-joam40zk0w/" target=_blank>1,400 salmon</a> returned to the state.

Loring, who <a href="https://www.penobscotnation.org/departments/department-of-natural-resources/" target=_blank>manages forests, game and fisheries</a> across 121,000 acres, doesn’t think in decades in his work. He looks back centuries. “We have a seven-generation approach,” he says. Unlike most commercial timber harvesters, he’s aiming to create an old-growth forest like those that existed hundreds of years ago across Maine but now cover only <a href="https://downeast.com/land-wildlife/big-reed-preserve/" target=_blank>0.05 percent</a> of the state.

Instead of cutting trees every 30 to 40 years, Loring plans to grow them for a century or more. And he’s not optimizing for wood. “We’re one of the biggest timber tribes,” says Loring, “but the most highly regarded goal is water quality.”

For the Penobscot, the goal is restoring a landscape and its inhabitants’ place in it — from fish to moose to future members of the Penobscot Nation. “That’s one of our goals getting into the school, and talking about everything we do,” says Loring. “The tribe has made ensuring a viable forest in the future the priority, even if we’re not generating income from the forest.”

Maine, and the rest of the world, can never fully recapture the past. Our new landscape must straddle a healthier past and a warming future because of climate change.

Jessica Leahy, a natural resources professor at the University of Maine who manages 600 acres of her own forests, is already living there. “The ground isn’t freezing in the winter, the mud season is extending, and our roads are washing out,” she says. “Everything I do now is not called a climate change project, but it is driven by it.”

She’s creating a new baseline for Maine. Leahy now orders her new tree saplings from nurseries in warmer climates such as New Hampshire. She’s diversifying the species, planting white pine and northern red oak, as new insect pests and other challenges emerge. She mentions others pursuing “assisted migration,” moving trees beyond their historic range in anticipation of warmer temperatures to come.

The deep past can be a foreign concept in a nation of immigrants. For most of us, our memories of the natural world date back decades, or perhaps a few generations. And our firsthand experience is declining: In the 1800s, roughly <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1988/07/20/us/farm-population-lowest-since-1850-s.html" target=_blank>three-quarters of Americans</a> made their living on the land. Today, that figure has fallen to less than <a href="https://www.fb.org/newsroom/fast-facts#:~:text=Farm%20and%20ranch%20families%20comprise,2%25%20of%20the%20U.S.%20population." target=_blank>2 percent</a>.

But you don’t need to identify every flower, plant and tree around you, or manage forests as Loring and Leahy do, to know what once lived in your neck of the woods — and could again.

That’s what did it for me. I spent my earliest years rooting around mangrove forests and oak hammocks in Florida. I played video games like everyone else, but my mother and great-grandmother slowly introduced me to the plants and animals around us. I grew up awed by land crab migrations and <a href="https://wusfnews.wusf.usf.edu/environment/2023-05-06/lovebugs-bug-love-hate" target=_blank>lovebug swarms</a>, sparking a natural curiosity I never lost.

But this affinity is not necessarily innate. <a href="https://news.uchicago.edu/story/children-dont-nature-much-adults-preferences-change-age" target=_blank>It’s learned</a>, suggest <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0272494419300519?via%3Dihub" target=_blank>researchers at the University of Chicago</a>. If you live in a place that once <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/interactive/2023/firefly-summer-extinction/" target=_blank>glowed with fireflies</a> each summer night, tell your children what you remember, and ask your parents to tell their stories.

Why fireflies are going extinct, and what to do about it

I’ll be telling my son stories about the wild lives that existed in the places we go before anyone thought to call them “Maine” or “California.” If he won’t inherit an ecosystem with all its parts, he’ll have a shot at reassembly.

Baselines, after all, don’t always decline.

Many of the days I’ve been in Maine, I’ve watched bald eagles fly over Lake Mooselookmeguntic on their way to fishing grounds. In the 1960s, virtually no one in my parents’ generation could have done this. Just 800 or so bald eagles remained in the Lower 48. Today, more than<a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/american-bald-eagle-populations-quadrupled-since-2009/" target=_blank> 317,000</a> live in the contiguous United States, and the population is growing.

When my son is my age, he’ll know those flights as the new normal.

Henry Luce Scholar

Udall Scholar 

MIT Knight Science Journalism Fellow

Oxford Climate Journalism Fellow

Solutions Journalism Network fellow

Emory University, BA in environmental studies and journalism

Yale University, MESc in environmental science

Michael is a journalist writing the "Climate Coach" advice column for The Washington Post. Before joining the Post in 2022, he spent nearly two decades as a reporter and editor covering climate, technology, and economics for outlets such as Quartz and CNN.com. He was also the managing editor of Cambodia’s Phnom Penh Post. 

Shifting baselines: How to push back against climate’s new normal

the-washington-post

Environment

Weather

Climate Solutions

Climate Lab

Green Living

Business of Climate

Climate

washpost

prism://prism.query/site,/climate-environment/green-living&limit=20

prism://prism.query/site-articles-only,/climate-environment&limit=20

Sign up for the Climate Coach newsletter and get advice for life on our changing planet, in your inbox every Tuesday.