The Shifting Baseline
In 1995, Daniel Pauly, a fisheries scientist and head of the
Sea Around Us Project at the University of British Columbia, wrote a one-page essay describing just how little we
really know about the severity of fishery depletions. He
coined the term “shifting baseline” to capture the idea that
each generation of fishers and marine scientists assumes that
the number of fish in the sea during their lifetimes is the norm,
or the baseline. This short-term thinking leads to a form of
collective delusion in which analysts tend to ignore historic
fish populations that could have been many times as great.
“What they learn is what is current in their generation,”
Pauly concludes. “They don’t learn how things compare to
the past.”...
