Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America

by Jon Mooallem

THE PHENOMENON THAT Powell stumbled onto has a name: shifting baselines syndrome. The term was coined in 1995 by a fisheries scientist named Daniel Pauly. Pauly recognized that global fish populations have been slowly collapsing, and though scientists weren’t blind to that damage, their vision was too narrow and subjective to take in its full extent. Every generation of scientist accepts the oceans as it inherits them, Pauly argued. Overfishing may eat away at fish stocks, or even drive species extinct. But when the next generation of scientists start their careers, they don’t see the oceans as depleted; that depleted condition becomes their baseline, against which they’ll measure any subsequent losses in their lifetimes.