Shifting baselines syndrome, then, is only the scientific manifestation of a broader problem affecting all people: what the psychologist Peter H. Kahn Jr. has named “environmental generational amnesia.” All of us adopt the natural world we encounter in childhood as our psychological baseline—an expectation of how things should be—and gauge the changes we see against that norm. This explains why the children Kahn has interviewed in terribly polluted neighborhoods in Houston don’t believe their neighborhoods are polluted, and why Kahn’s daughter thinks the woods around their family cabin in
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