What is “normal” or even “natural” in nature? In a world where everything is constantly changing, the human desire to define things as “normal” has broad implications on how we see the world, and how we choose to conserve it (or not conserve it!).
This desire to establish a personal “normal” leads to a quirk of psychology called Shifting Baseline Syndrome.
Learn about the dramatic impacts that it has in this Jumpstart Nature episode.
Join your guide, Griff Griffith, as he explores what shifting baseline syndrome is through some incredible examples. With the help of Dr. Loren McClenachan, Dr. Alison Whipple (San Francisco Estuary Institute), Ben Goldfarb (author and environmental journalist), and Francisco Saavedra Jr (forestry student and member of the Pit River Tribe Madesi band), we look at the many ways that shifting baselines steer us in the wrong direction.
Beyond a podcast, Jumpstart Nature is a movement fueled by volunteers, igniting a fresh approach to reconnecting people with the natural world. In the face of our pressing climate and biodiversity challenges, we’re on a mission to help you discover newfound purpose and motivation.
Join us in this vital journey towards nature’s revival. Explore more and show your support at jumpstartnature.com, and follow us on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
For even deeper nature insights, delve into our companion podcast, Nature’s Archive.
Links to Topics Discussed
Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet, by Ben Goldfarb
Eager: The Surprising Secret Life of Beavers, and Why They Matter, by Ben Goldfarb
Everyone’s Guide to Helping our Planet, Jumpstart Nature’s list of easy things you can do…TODAY.
The Underworld: Journeys to the Depths of the Ocean, by Susan Casey
Links to Additional Resources
Anecdotes and the Shifting Baseline Syndrome of Fisheries (Daniel Pauly)
Documenting Loss of Large Trophy Fish from the Florida Keys with Historical Photographs (McClenachan)
Credits
This podcast episode was written and produced by Michael Hawk. Our host is Griff Griffith. Michelle Balderston is our associate producer.
Some of the music used in this production is through creative commons licensing:
The following music was used for this media project:
Music: Lofi Prairie by Brian Holtz Music
Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/9247-lofi-prairie
License (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
Transcript (Click to View)
Jumpstart Nature owns copyright in and to all content in transcripts.
You are welcome to share the below transcript (up to 500 words but not more) in media articles (e.g., The New York Times, LA Times, The Guardian), on your personal website, in a non-commercial article or blog post (e.g., Medium), and/or on a personal social media account for non-commercial purposes, provided that you include attribution to “Jumpstart Nature Podcast” and link back to the jumpstartnature.com URL.
No warranty of accuracy of the transcript is provided or implied. There may be typos.
[00:00:00] Griff Griffith: If we went back in time to say, 1777, to a place called Grifftown, Pennsylvania, it would probably be normal to hear people complaining about getting passenger pigeon poop in their hair. This bird, once the most numerous in North America, went extinct in the wild by 1900.
[00:00:18] In 1877, it would be normal to hear someone say that the salmon were so thick in California’s rivers that you could walk across their backs to the other side. Today.
[00:00:29] Salmon species are listed as endangered or threatened, in much of their range.
[00:00:36] In 1977, it would be normal for my dad to thoroughly wash the smashed insects off our windshield. Every time we stopped for gas he had to do this or he wouldn’t be able to see. Today I live and drive in the same places, but I rarely need to take a squeegee to my windshield. The insects just aren’t there. These extreme examples of wildlife population declines happened in just a few generations.
[00:01:03] And despite being obvious in hindsight, weren’t always obvious while they were happening. And even today, there are many other examples occurring right in front of us that most people are completely unaware of.
[00:01:14] This misperception can be attributed to a particular quirk of human psychology called shifting baseline syndrome. This quirk has to do with how you and I perceive normal from a particular place and time. For example, what do you consider to be normal weather? How many birds in our parks is normal?
[00:01:33] What species of trees are normal in our forest? The idea of normal depends on who is doing the observing and when they are doing it.. Historical Marine Ecologist Loren McClenachan unearthed an incredible reference that vividly illustrates This phenomenon at work.
[00:01:48] Loren McClenachan: I was focused on the Florida Keys and the Caribbean, trying to see what sorts of sources existed. and it was actually the very last archive that I was visiting in, in Key West, the Monroe County Public Library,
[00:01:58] I was working with the archivist, basically saying I’m interested in anything that can tell us about long term change And then he came out one morning with this big box of, pictures
[00:02:08] And there were these pictures of, people just come back from recreational fishing trips in the 1950s and 1960s, and there was just these immense, immense fish in the, in the photographs and immediately it was like, a giant light bulb went off so I was in Key West and I went and took repeat photos, in the same sort of vein and then compared them.
[00:02:28] Griff Griffith: These photos were taken at the same spot after similar deep sea fishing trips. And what did she find?
[00:02:34] Loren McClenachan: I found a 90% decline in the size of these large trophy fish over that 50 year time period. Essentially we’ve replaced these large trophy fish that we think of as, as being, these massive, catches and these massive fish on the reef with really small, , fish that have, essentially, replaced the fish, both in the ecosystem and then also in the, fishery itself
[00:02:56] Griff Griffith: Yes, these fishers returned with fish that were 90 percent smaller than just a few decades ago, but they had the same big smiles and looks of satisfaction in their photos as a fisherman of the past who had the much larger fish.
[00:03:08] Loren McClenachan: Yeah, exactly. That’s and that’s the shifting baseline syndrome
[00:03:10] Griff Griffith: They seemingly had no idea that just a few decades ago, they could have been catching fish 90 percent larger. Things had changed, just slowly enough that the fishers didn’t think about it at the moment, because they didn’t have the same baseline of normal.
[00:03:25] But shifting baseline syndrome is so much deeper than just our perceptions.
[00:03:29] Francisco Saavedra: we know historically that it only takes one generation to forget. It only takes one generation to be killed off, displaced or denied access to an area for them to forget the culture.
[00:03:42] Griff Griffith: That was Francisco Antonio Saavedra Jr. A member of Pitt River Tribe. Madaisi band with Yurok ancestry. We’re going to hear more from him shortly.
[00:03:53] So let’s take a deeper look at our sense of normal shifting baseline syndrome and what it means to you, me, indigenous people, and how we treat the environment.
[00:04:03] I’m Griff Griffith, and welcome to Jumpstart Nature.
[00:04:11] A moment ago, we got a small taste of shifting baseline syndrome, and we’ll come back to Dr. McClenachan’s findings in a bit, but first, just what is shifting baseline syndrome?
[00:04:25] Loren McClenachan: shifting baseline syndrome is this idea that, the first time that you observe an environment, you, you think of it as natural and, all changes that you observe after that personally, you think of as, not natural. So you can imagine, you know, your childhood environment, the neighborhood that you grew up in.
[00:04:43] Griff Griffith: Right? Who hasn’t had the experience of returning to a place they know well after several years and seeing everything has changed? What you grew up with is your baseline of normal.
[00:04:53] And now the next generation is growing up with a new baseline of normal. If they’re lucky, they’ll hear stories about the way it used to be, but that will never feel normal to them.
[00:05:03] But is the way it used to be the way it should be in the future.
[00:05:08] Dr. Alison Whipple: what really comes out of that is that our ecosystems. Are not static, they were not and should not be thought of as static. That’s often, a challenging thing when we wanna do like conservation work or restoration
[00:05:20] where we’re like, we’re getting credit to do X, y, or z. We, we wanted to stay that way.
[00:05:26] Griff Griffith: That’s Dr. Alison Whipple of the San Francisco Estuary Institute, referring to a study on the Sacramento San Joaquin River Delta in California. In this system, river channels, islands, and sloughs were constantly changing due to floods, droughts, and other environmental processes.
[00:05:42] If we look at any ecosystem, we see frequent change. In fact, there’s an important concept where one ecosystem tends to convert to another ecosystem over time. Ecologists call this succession.
[00:05:54] A great example is a mountain meadow. Picture this meadow. It probably has short grasses and sedges, perhaps even a few hardy wildflowers.
[00:06:01] And it’s often surrounded by forest. This meadow formed because of some dramatic geologic event, , such as a glacier scraping out all the topsoil and plants and leaving behind poor, rocky soil. Grasses and sedges can live in that environment, but not much else.
[00:06:16] Over time, those sedges and grasses grow and die and decompose, adding nutrients to the soil. Fungi and bacteria move in, and new pioneer plants start to encroach around the edges of the meadow. The soil continues to improve, allowing shrubs and small trees to move in, accelerating the soil building. Eventually, the large trees move in, and the meadow is gone.
[00:06:38] Most ecosystems have these types of natural ” pressures” to transition to some different systems similar to what we just described with meadows.
[00:06:47] That is, unless something dramatic happens.
[00:06:50] . Many ecosystems have natural reset buttons, such as wildfire. These reset buttons prevent succession or perhaps even roll back the system to an earlier stage.
[00:07:04] In fact, we’re going to go deep into wildfire in a future episode, but for now know that our obsession with wildfire suppression has allowed succession to continue without reset in many places where it wouldn’t have been possible in the past. Ben Goldfarb, author of Crossings and Eager, has also been thinking about shifting baseline syndrome.
[00:07:30] Ben Goldfarb: it’s a concept developed in fisheries where, , maybe your, grandfather, you know, would catch these giant groupers, and then he fished at those groupers and then, you know, then, and then your father would catch.
[00:07:39] Smaller groupers, but we think it’s still fine, , and today you’re, catching sardines, but you know, you don’t really know any better because you weren’t alive when your grandfather was catching giant groupers and, you know, and someday your children , we’ll be, eating jelly fish, but, you know, that’s okay.
[00:07:51] because , they have no memory of, what the oceans were like during their kind of apex abundance.
[00:07:56] Griff Griffith: Ben’s example of eating jellyfish might seem a bit extreme, but it powerfully drives home the point.
[00:08:02] Often, these shifting baselines cause our expectations of nature’s abundance and productivity to decline. And this can create a destructive feedback loop.
[00:08:12] Let’s consider a hypothetical new development project Perhaps a new strip mall is being proposed for some area of land.
[00:08:19] The developers and politicians, and probably most people, assess the impact of the project based on current conditions. What does this land do for us today? Perhaps that land is abandoned agricultural land. It’s not providing much ecological value. . So officials decide to approve the strip mall.
[00:08:37] But our baseline of the land is totally wrong. Perhaps that spot back in 1900 was a wetland that helped buffer floods and supported fish, frogs, bats, and a generally abundant ecosystem. And could easily be restored. But our baseline tells us otherwise.
[00:08:53] So the decision to build on the land didn’t fully consider the ecological potential of the area. Our acceptance of these new baselines is extremely damaging. But shifting baselines run deeper still.
[00:09:05] Loren McClenachan: one example that I alluded to, earlier was the goliath grouper in the Florida Keys. And so this is a fish that has existed, in great abundances for centuries.
[00:09:14] it was fished intensively over the last century and it was protected in the 1990s because of, a realization that it was, it was really, depleted. And since then it started to come back, which is great. But, people who, have recently moved to the Keys, for example, will say things like there’s more now than I’ve ever seen in my lifetime.
[00:09:34] which is true, but it’s also just part of the story. And so in the absence of a longer term perspective, those voices really dominate the narrative
[00:09:42] in the case of the goliath grouper, there’s been pressure to reopen the fishery essentially every year since it was closed in, in the 1990s. And it just was successful in this last year, which I think is unfortunate. I think partially that’s a result of, sort of sense that, you know, things are, things are better than they were in terms of the populations and these fish that people were used to seeing rarely in these ecosystems are coming back
[00:10:05] Griff Griffith: This rebound effect is also common. Without a proper baseline, we tend to mistakenly perceive a partial recovery as a much more significant improvement.
[00:10:14] And at this point, I feel like I just need to give the ocean a shout out. You probably know that nearly 70 percent of our planet is covered in oceans. You might also know that oceans play the most prominent role in our climate, where ocean temperatures and currents influence major weather patterns and trends.
[00:10:30] It’s easy for us to see what’s happening on land, which plants and animals are growing, how much land is used for people and agriculture, but only a tiny fraction of us spend any real time on our oceans.
[00:10:41] We don’t have the same intuitions about how they work and what they support. To help wrap our minds around this, people often cite that 70 percent statistic, but it goes so much deeper. Literally. Susan Casey, author of The Underworld, Journeys to the Depths of the Ocean, says if we think of the parts of the Earth that support life, 98 percent is ocean.
[00:11:03] That’s because life in the ocean generally occurs all throughout its depths. Above sea, life is restricted to a thin slice close to the Earth’s surface.. Despite the importance of oceans, we seem to have a lot of problems with shifting baselines in marine systems.
[00:11:17] Loren McClenachan: humans are terrestrial animals. I think we just have a much shorter set of observations under the ocean than we do in terrestrial systems. And so, in marine systems, we developed SCUBA and the ability to essentially be aquatic animals for short periods of time in the 1960s and 1970s.
[00:11:35] And so scientists began to use those and study those systems, a few decades ago. And so we have observations coming out of that history of marine science, but the average person doesn’t spend a lot of time underwater. And so I think there’s just a lot less, sort of knowledge about the changes that have happened.
[00:11:53] Griff Griffith: It’s frightening to think how much has changed in our oceans in such a short period, and our general lack of knowledge going back further in time. But historical
[00:12:00] But historical ecologists, like Dr. McClenachan, find creative ways to uncover the past.
[00:12:05] Loren McClenachan: So I worked with, some early pirate journals, and descriptions of, travels through the Caribbean, which was really fun. there was this one pirate named William Dampier, who was just an amazing natural historian. He recorded the different species of mangroves, and he was really interested in turtles, which is how I came across him.
[00:12:23] But his, narrative of his voyages and his trip around the world really includes a whole lot of ecology, actually, which is, sort of surprising,
[00:12:31] Griff Griffith: And this makes sense. Making a living at sea, regardless of the ethics of that living, requires a deep understanding of the ocean and its animals. A pirate in the 1600s would be totally dependent on the oceans for food, travel, and just general survival. If you weren’t a skilled observer taking detailed notes, you probably wouldn’t survive long.
[00:12:51] Back to the land for a few minutes. Dr. Alison Whipple and her colleagues at the San Francisco Estuary Institute have spent significant time establishing an early to mid 1800s baseline of two parts of California. Let’s first look at the San Joaquin Sacramento River Delta. This is just downstream from the famous 49er gold discoveries .
[00:13:13] Dr. Alison Whipple: This is a very unique system, we don’t have a lot of inland deltas in the world. So this was a, historically a freshwater but tidal system. So we had the, the two rivers in the Central Valley, the Sacramento and the North, and the San Joaquin and the South coming through the Central Valley draining the Sierra Nevada and other, the Western coastal systems.
[00:13:39] And coalescing into Pretty crazy mess of tidal channels in the delta.
[00:13:45] we mapped over 360,000 acres of tidal freshwater wetland in the delta
[00:13:52] Griff Griffith: There’s a ton of interesting geology here, but I’ll keep it to the basics. As Dr. Whipple said, the Sierra Nevada mountains act like a blockade on storms and force a lot of rain and snow out
[00:14:02] All this water flows downhill, seeking the ocean, but it runs into another mountain range. Thankfully for the water, there is a narrow opening in the mountains near San Francisco.
[00:14:13] Both rivers converge at this point, forming the massive delta. Okay, that’s a lot of words. We’ll put a map in the show notes, but just recognize that we have a lot of water trying to go through a narrow area.
[00:14:25] So it creates this huge delta into California’s Central Valley. In the 1800s, this delta was enormous, biodiverse, and very productive.
[00:14:33] Dr. Alison Whipple: contrast that to today where we’ve really done a lot in terms of hemming in those tidal channels basically levying off the small dendritic channels that used to weave within. The tidal wetlands and quote unquote reclaiming that land for agriculture. Those peat soils are very rich for crops.
[00:14:53] And so they’ve been great for many decades now. And so we’re really yeah, that’s that big contrast shifting to an agricultural landscape. So we’ve seen what we documented in, in our mapping was about a 97% loss of the tidal freshwater wetlands. So we really have only very small patches today.
[00:15:14] Griff Griffith: Today’s Central Valley is perhaps the most productive agricultural land in the United States. Full of almonds, walnuts, citrus, tomatoes, grapes, garlic, and dozens of other crops.
[00:15:23] So what’s the downside of channeling the Delta and creating more farmland? Well, with intensive agriculture, the fertility of these existing soils are declining, and we’re no longer generating as much new fertile soil. Of course, there is also the loss of many ecosystems, and biodiversity, and negative impacts to fisheries.
[00:15:41] Without insights to the early 1800s baseline, we’d be inclined to continue to reign in the river delta and expose more productive soils.
[00:15:50] But understanding how the system worked in the past and what created this fertile land in the first place gives us the knowledge to make better decisions.
[00:16:00] Francisco Saavedra: we don’t necessarily suffer from shifting baseline syndrome in the same way. We know that we were stewards of the land. We know that the land’s been altered. We, we know that history, it has been passed down orally mostly,
[00:16:23] my name is Francisco Antonio Saavedra Jr. My Yurok name is Chpgi, C H P G I. It means Osprey in Yurok.
[00:16:35] Griff Griffith: We briefly heard from Francisco earlier. He studies tribal forestry at the College of the Redwoods in Eureka, California.
[00:16:41] He’s also a forestry apprentice in one of the largest restoration projects in the United States. It’s called Redwood Rising, and it’s happening on the Yurok people’s homeland.
[00:16:50] The Yurok people reside in far northern California. While the Yurok tribal lands today overlap with their ancestral lands, they have been reduced from roughly 1 million acres down to about 56, 000 acres.
[00:17:02] Francisco Saavedra: we’ve been stewards for the land of, for over 10,000 years, and sometimes that’s some of the disconnect that I see with the loss of like species, like the salmon. you know, we’ve experienced dramatic environmental changes and decline of species, of staple foods.
[00:17:19] Griff Griffith: One of the staples of the Yurok is the lamprey eel or Pacific lamprey as some call it.
[00:17:25] Francisco Saavedra: The amount of eels that my grandfather used to catch in the fifties, in the sixties was in the hundreds. It was a lot. Uh, guys could go out there and catch hundreds of eels to the point where they’re taking turns, catching eels, and It was sustainable because at that time, lamprey eels made up 90% of the river’s biomass.
[00:17:48] That’s something that when I tell people that, when I say, Hey, did you know that lamprey eels made up 90% of the river’s biomass as far down as the Sacramento River? Think of all those indigenous nations who’ve maybe never even seen a lamprey eel because of hydroelectric damming, because of redirection of water, because of loss of streams and habitat through commercial logging.
[00:18:10] Griff Griffith: It’s estimated that the lamprey eel have decreased by 90 percent since the 1960s. A couple of things stand out here. One, remember that number, 90%. And two, this demonstrates how complicated shifting baselines are. Francisco clearly knows the history.
[00:18:26] He knows the baseline. But many others, even some conservationists, may not know this. And part of that reason is not only because of shifting baselines,
[00:18:35] Colonists.
[00:18:36] Francisco Saavedra: created hydroelectric dams and classified the lamprey as a parasitic fish. He didn’t make no fish ladder for them. He only made it for the salmon. The lamprey died off in massive, massive numbers.
[00:18:48] Griff Griffith: Yes, Western cultures love to label everything.
[00:18:51] In this case, the lamprey eel was labeled a parasite. That label alone is filled with negative connotations, reducing the chances that anyone would try to save this fish. But who are we to judge the strategies that life has evolved to embrace? And we actually need creatures like lamprey eels to maintain balance in our ecosystems.
[00:19:09] But the view of shifting baselines from an indigenous perspective runs much deeper.
[00:19:14] Francisco Saavedra: we know historically that it only takes one generation to forget. It only takes one generation to be killed off, displaced or denied access to an area for them to forget the culture.
[00:19:28] Griff Griffith: California indigenous people are reclaiming their culture and lands.
[00:19:32] And the real story of what happened to them is starting to become more clear. I know when I was in school, we weren’t taught about the systemic genocide of Native Americans in California and other parts of the USA. Yes, I know the term genocide has taken on different legal and common meanings, But it’s hard to ignore the intent of policies and the reality of actions that were taken, very often violent actions.
[00:19:53] Thousands of Native Americans were killed directly through massacres or forced starvation. Many thousands more were separated from their families, enslaved, Or put in very oppressive boarding schools. In fact, there were land grants and related policies that encourage colonists to clear the land, removing numerous oak trees from the landscape These were oak trees that the indigenous people depended on for food and other things.
[00:20:21] As we learned in episode one, oak trees are also the champion species of biodiversity. Stick with me here. Have you ever heard of Silicon Valley?
[00:20:29] It’s the part of California where silicon based microchips, computer processors, were developed and mass produced. It’s now known for its tech culture. Depending on how you define its boundaries, it’s home to 4 to 6 million people.
[00:20:41] You look around today and you see business centers, office parks, and suburban sprawl…. But this area used to support exceptional varieties and quantities of plants and animals.
[00:20:50] Dr. Alison Whipple: The Santa Clara Valley, certainly as you head north and head towards the bay you start entering into more of a seasonal wetland complexes, alkali seasonal wetland. And then moving into, once you hit tidal influence the tidal marshes of the bay historically.
[00:21:06] Griff Griffith: Santa Clara Valley is the proper geographic region that is known as Silicon Valley. Wetlands and tidal marshes are some of the most productive ecosystems, most of which have been filled, channelized, or entirely cut off.
[00:21:18] But this area was also home to many, many oak trees, especially further south.
[00:21:22] Dr. Alison Whipple: Again, really a really profound and dramatic loss of oaks in that period of, mid 18 hundreds to that early 1930s period based on reconstructing you using methods to take the trees that were documented in those GLO notes, those general land office notes, and then extrapolate out what that would’ve meant in terms of numbers of trees based on the densities that we’d estimated. And so we found that there was probably around 50 trees per hectare, or that’s 20 trees per acre which can be roughly approximated to about 20 trees in a football field, if that’s something folks can imagine.
[00:22:00] Griff Griffith:
[00:22:00] This research was in a narrow area of the south part of Santa Clara Valley.
[00:22:04] Dr. Alison Whipple: sources that we are able to use for the work is, mostly generated by those who occupied California in the early 18 hundreds. So the Spanish explorers, the missionaries, the 49 ERs, et cetera
[00:22:15] Griff Griffith: It revealed the loss of basically 50, 000 of the most important trees we have for biodiversity. I think it’s safe to say that most of the businesses and homeowners in that area have no idea what was lost.
[00:22:27] And this is why we’re such advocates for planting native plants at home, at school, at your place of worship, or place of business. And if you’re listening, say, in Ohio, Florida, Texas, New York, or pretty much anywhere else, the story is the same. Just change the name of the species.
[00:22:41] 50,000 oak trees down to 300 is roughly a 99 percent reduction. Can you recall earlier when I said, remember the 90 percent reduction? Here’s Dr. McClenachan again.
[00:22:53] Loren McClenachan: that work found a 90% decline in the size of the largest fish that were caught in the Florida Keys. There was work from, from Maine, from this part of the world that showed a 90% or more decline in the abundance of cod, on the Scotian Shelf since the Civil War. , one of the early papers in this field showed a 90% loss of, pelagic fish like billfish and tuna caught on Japanese long pit, longline fisheries since the 1950s. So, I think it’s, it’s really sort of stunning that across these different geographies and time scales and species and ways of measuring, it’s a really consistent finding, which is this 90% or order of magnitude loss. there’s a Canadian journalist, who I think put it really nicely and saying that, we live in a 10% world. So the world that we’re living in now has, various ways that you look at it, 10% of the abundance and the biomass and the productivity that it had, you know when you look farther in the past
[00:23:47]
[00:23:47] Griff Griffith: , in many ways, we now live in a 10 percent world. Can you imagine the beauty, awe, and wonder of a 100 percent world?
[00:23:55] So what can you do to help? Our earlier episode, The Yard of the Future, gave you one of the most powerful things that you can do, and that’s plant native plants wherever you can, . And jumpstartnature. com has a special downloadable PDF called Everyone’s Guide to Helping Our Planet, which has over 100 simple steps that you can take.
[00:24:14] You don’t have to be overwhelmed, but you should get started.
[00:24:17] Today we’ve heard how shifting baseline syndrome skews our perception of the world causing us to miss dramatic changes altogether misinterpret typical processes such as succession, diminish and gloss over injustices and overestimate small rebounds in populations.
[00:24:32] What are some examples of shifting baseline syndrome that you’ve seen?
[00:24:35] We’d love to hear from you. And we’re curious, you can email us at podcast at jumpstart nature. com, or leave a comment on one of our social media pages. You can find us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at jumpstart nature.
[00:24:48] A big thanks to.
[00:24:49] Loren McClenachan, Francisco Saavedra Jr., Ben Goldfarb, and Alison Whipple. Alison Whipple also wants us to acknowledge the historical ecology team at San Francisco Estuary Institute that’s currently led by Sean Baumgarten . And was founded by Robin Grossinger.
[00:25:05] if you want more shifting baselines, Nature’s Archive has a full length interview with Loren McClenachan. It’s episode number 78.
[00:25:12] And jumpstart nature. com slash podcast has a transcript and full show notes for today’s episode, including links to topics we mentioned and additional resources to help you learn more about shifting baseline syndrome.
[00:25:24] Michael Hawk: Jumpstart Nature was created and produced by me, Michael Hawk. Michelle Balderston is our associate producer and our host is Griff Griffith. The song Lofi Prairie by Brian Holtz Music was used in this production with permission via creative commons license. The song is available from filmmusic.io and the full license information is in the show notes at jumpstartnature.com/podcast. As always. Thanks for listening.
