#shifting baselines

Every morning this week, I’ve woken up to a sea of yellow birch and balsam fir in this northern stretch of the Appalachians. The wind whipping off Mooselookmeguntic Lake stirs millions of leaves with a sound like the ocean. Once darkness falls, the loons arrive, their voices pealing across the water as they dive for chub, golden shiners and small brook trout.

To my eye, this is as Edenic as you get in America today. Yet almost everything I assumed about this “pristine” landscape was wrong.

Maine, while 90 percent forest, is also one of our most logged states. If you’re wondering where a lot of America’s 2-by-4s and toilet paper come from, it’s here. Of Maine’s original species, sea minks, cougars, caribou and gray wolves are either extinct or expatriated from the state.

Without this knowledge, it was easy to think I stood on the edge of primeval wilderness. Changes here unfolded over centuries. Each generation came to see the woods and rivers around them as normal even as the ecosystem degraded.

There’s a name for this: shifting baselines.

Today, a new normal is being rewritten in our own lifetimes amidclimate-related disasters, from smoke-filled skies to lethal heat waves. Yet accepting these conditions as normal threatens to unravel what made the world capable of withstanding these shocks in the first place. To restore the rich relationships of species, and our place among them, we need to remember our “baselines,” whether that’s in Maine or your own backyard.

One of the best ways to do this, even scientists admit, is by telling stories.

The term was coined by marine biologist Daniel Pauly in 1995. Pauly, now at the University of British Columbia, noticed fishery scientists generally accepted the size of fish populations at the start of their careers as normal, and then managed toward that goal. If stocks declined by the time the next generation entered the field, this became the new normal.

“The result, obviously, is a gradual shift of the baseline,” he wrote in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution, “a gradual accommodation of the creeping disappearance of resource species.”

At one time in Newfoundland, cod were so numerous that you could drop a bucket over the side of a boat and pull it in full. That was John Cabot's story when he "discovered" the island in the 1400s. The fish grew to astonishing sizes because they held the coveted ecological status of apex predator on the Grand Banks, the continental shelf off Newfoundland. Once a fish grew to such a large size, nothing would eat it. It take 2-5 years for a codfish to grow big enough to reproduce and decades to exceed toddler-sized. 

As industrial fishing ramped up in the mid 1900s, the size and number of cod steadily declined. Factory trawlers were developed that could scrape the ocean bed raw, drumming up thousands of cod, and flash-freeze the fillets on board. Countries had fought over fishing rights on the Grand Banks for hundreds of years, and throughout the 20th century, the Canadian Coast Guard struggled to maintain fishing rights within its 200-mile exclusive economic zone. By the 1980s, fish were sparse and the Grand Banks were almost barren. The structure of numerous cod stocks had collapsed, as the most desirable individuals disappeared and fishers tightened the mesh on their nets, targeting smaller and smaller fish. Over 95% of the historical numbers had been harvested from what had once been the largest fishery in the world. 

One of my current professors, Dr. Daniel Pauly, coined the term "shifting baselines." The theory captures how the baseline for a natural resource (like the average number and size of fish) changes over generations. We fail to realize that the resource is being mismanaged, because no individual has observed the full extent of the decline. My grandfather fished for 40-pound cod, my father remembers 25 pounders, but I've never seen one exceed 15 lb. Although the change in average size is substantial, the difference I've observed can seem insignificant. Meanwhile, the balance of abundance has tipped, and the fish population can no longer reproduce enough to replace those being caught. 

When my family first visited Newfoundland in 1999, there was still poverty and despair, five years after the moratorium was imposed on codfish. The small outports, inhabited since the island was settled, were struggling to find any other source of income. Some were still only accessible by boat. Dories, cod flakes, and wharfs sat unused and decomposing. An entire culture and people had lost its anchor. Tourism was in its infancy in the province, and we often relied on verbal directions over signposts to find attractions. By the time I was fourteen and had spent four summers there, I knew about the lake boats (commercial shipping on the Great Lakes) and Fort Mac, places my friends' parents and older siblings went to find work. I'd heard about the special openings for the food fishery, when my friends would go out with their fathers to jig a few cod for the year. My parents tried their hand at jiggs dinner (another salted Newfoundland staple) and didn't soak the pork nearly long enough. Most of all, I knew that being from "away" in a small outport on the Bonavista Peninsula was novel but suspicious. 

The effects of the collapse of the cod fishery and subsequent moratorium on the people of Newfoundland cannot be overstated. It caused an exodus of fishing families from the outports and from the province. It has since led to a successful tourism industry and serious investment in offshore oil extraction.