A Shift in Baseline

Previously printed as commentary in the Post Register, Idaho Falls, Idaho, July 22, 2018

My Dad, born in 1919, worried in his later years that we were losing monarch butterflies.  He’s gone now, but he was right. According to science the monarch population has plunged. When I was a kid we always had a few jars of milkweed leaves to feed our captive caterpillars for the fun of watching them turn into butterflies. It’s just darn hard to find them anymore, even though our ranch is rich with milkweed, their sole food.

But here’s the thing, kids these days don’t regret not having the experience of watching a caterpillar hang upside down, morph into a cocoon and emerge as the delicate and wondrous monarch, because it just isn’t part of their normal. Their normal has more to do with organized sports and screen time. There’s a name for this phenomenon, it’s called the shifting baseline syndrome.

The term was coined in 1995 by fisheries biologist, Daniel Pauly, who used it to describe how each generation is blind to the loss of species diversity and abundance because they never experienced it differently. His focus was the ocean and the breathtaking mass of species present when we first started to study the sea, and how subsequent marine biologists missed it because they only saw changes related to what they themselves encountered in their own career.  

This hits close to home when you work the land as we do. My uncles, during the homesteading era, lived year around in the mountains where we now graze cattle in the summer. They trapped the creeks every winter and the number of pelts they collected sound like fiction. And by then there were only remnant beaver populations from the staggering numbers present prior to European discovery of the West. Shifting baseline.

My ranching father fought the troublesome weed, burdock, in his day. It is especially annoying to livestock owners because it produces burrs that cling to the coats of cattle and sheep. Burdock is still here and we still fight it, but Dad would be horrified at the new adversaries that have made their way to the ranch in 2018. This is the current generation’s new normal.

Shifting baselines are all around us. One I’ve watched over my lifetime is the growth of homes in the country owned by folks that commute to municipalities for work. It used to be that if you lived out of town you had a farm. Not so anymore. The newcomers are friendly people and mostly good neighbors, but if the trend continues, as it surely will, our ranch won’t fit here in the future. Shifting baselines sneak up on us and lull us into complacency.  

As I watch young people behave, even ranch kids, I’ve developed the sobering suspicion that they don’t have the same land ethic as their forefathers. Some jump on this or that environmental cause, but they lack a basic understanding of how the whole ecosystem works. Some just don’t seem to care. But perhaps it’s not that at all, perhaps they just don’t know what they’re missing. 

taken in 2013, I haven't seen any this year.