A modern version of this process has occurred in the overexploitation of fisheries, where stocks decline as a result of being overfished from one generation to the next, but people forget how things used to be and consider the situation to be normal, until the next decline. The term “shifting baseline syndrome” has been coined to describe how people get used to each new level. This, perhaps, offers an answer to Jared Diamond's question of what that Easter Islander was thinking when he cut down the last tree. Most likely, he didn't think anything of it at all because, by then, the only trees
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