Notes from an Environmentalist. Baseline Creep skating by.
Baseline Creep;
Skating by
Last week I had skate wings at a wonderful Mexican restaurant in Washington DC. As I enjoyed my meal I realized it was another example of what ecologists call baseline creep.
Environmentalists use ecological baselines as a way to determine how much an area has changed from what they consider to be normal.
The problem is that they tend to consider what they remember from the beginning of their careers as normal when in fact what they consider to be normal is very changed from before, and will be even more changed in our Anthropocene future.
When my father used to go to the docks in Boston Harbor, fishermen would be bringing in 6 foot long halibut and nailing them to the ceiling of their cabins so inspectors wouldn’t see their catch. People were realizing the species were being overfished.
But when I started studying fisheries; cod, haddock, hake, flounder were being overfished, managers were pushing aquaculture and dogfish and skate were considered to be bottom feeding cartilaginous trash fish.
Today most of the groundfish are commercially extinct, aquaculture is in disrepute and dogfish and skate are considered to be gourmet delicacies. And climate change has joined overfishing and pulse fishing as the latest scourges in our depleted oceans.
Our baseline has changed but the rapid destruction of our planet continues unabated. Sic transit gloria mundi!