CONCLUSION: MEMORIES OF THE FUTURE

147      bald eagles lived nearly everywhere: The eagles made me do it—made me write this book, that is. Some years ago, my family and I were driving home to Bellingham after a vacation in the San Juan Islands when, crossing over what’s called Colony Creek, a bald eagle flashed above the car. It was wintertime, the season when eagles congregate here in great numbers, and it wasn’t an unusual sight. But it felt like the visitation of a muse: What would my descendants think of bald eagles, I wondered, some decades from now? Will they still be common, or perhaps threatened once again? How will the baselines shift over time? Those questions have preoccupied me ever since.

147      There were likely a half million: See the Fish and Wildlife Service’s Bald Eagle Fact Sheet, available at: https://www.fws.gov/sites/default/files/documents/bald-eagle-fact-sheet.pdf 

147      The First Nations perceived: My capsule history of the bald eagle story relies heavily on Jack Davis’s encyclopedic wildlife biography, The Bald Eagle (Liveright; 2022), which I highly recommend. I feel bad for not giving the author an explicit callout in the main text, but I worried it would distract from the legend vibe. I hope you understand, Jack!

148      plucked from a living bird: Davis, pages 181 and 182.

148      esteemed the eagle as chief: ibid, page 177.

148      the most common animal clan name: ibid, page 193. 

148      “In the eagle there is all the wisdom”: ibid, page 178.

148      they also apprehended its strength: ibid, page 15.

148      their nests can weigh a ton or more: ibid, page 113. 

148      the unofficial national bird: It wasn’t until December 2024 that the bald eagle was officially designated as the United States’ national bird. See, Sara Ruberg, “The Bald Eagles Is (finally) the National Bird of the United States,” The New York Times, December 26, 2024, available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/26/us/bald-eagle-national-bird.html.

148      But it was a conflicted relationship: As Davis details, by the turn of the last century, the emblem had eclipsed the eagle itself. One could find no shortage of places named for eagles, sports teams with eagle mascots, or newspapers with Eagle on the masthead—but the bald eagle itself was gone from the sky.

148      “He is a Bird of bad”: Davis, pages 20 and 21. 

149      Against all common sense: ibid, pages 150 and 151. 

149      Americans murdered eagles mercilessly: Though it’s hard to imagine today, the bald eagle was almost universally reviled. Even the Audubon Society considered the bird a pest that deserved to be shot. For a gripping recounting of the campaign by champions like Rachel Carson and Rosalie Edge to reform the Audubon Society’s position on eagles, see Michelle Nijhuis’s Beloved Beasts (Norton; 2021), Chapter 6, “The Eagle and the Whooping Crane.”

149      “We kill all the eagles we can”: Davis, page 163

149      In Alaska alone: ibid, page 273.

149      “Twenty years ago”: ibid, page 215.

149      In Silent Spring, Rachel Carson wrote: See Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Mariner Books; 2002), pages 118 and 122. 

150      By 1963, there were just: See USFWS Bald Eagle Fact Sheet.

150      “little more than sewers to the sea”: The evocative line came from Senator Edmund Muskie, as quoted by Davis. This point about the importance of the Clean Water Act to the successful revival of the bald eagle can’t be overstated. When it comes to species recovery, habitat is everything. If a wildlife species has no healthy home to return to, captive breeding and daydreams of de-extinction won’t be enough to truly restore it.

150      Using a technique called “hacking”: Covered in depth by Davis, pages 307 to 329. See also by Darryl McGrath, Flight Paths, (State University of New York Press; 2016). 

151      one of those jewel boxes of city nature: For a lovely celebration of the urban wildness of Warner Park see Trish O’Kane, Birding to Save the World (Ecco; 2024), pages 247 to 254. 

152      “It was this brilliant beacon:” Personal interviews with Beth Sluys.

152      A neighborhood teenager: Personal interviews with Elsie and Eric Olmanson. 

152      A minor controversy broke out: See Eric Murphy, “Fireworks at Mallards ballpark could wait until bald eaglet can fly,” Isthmus, April 4, 2024, available at: https://isthmus.com/news/news/fireworks-at-mallards-could-wait-until-bald-eaglet-flies/.

153      Patrick Hasburgh, a passionate outdoorsman: Personal interviews with Patrick Hasburgh. 

153:     Fifty years ago: See “Eagles in Wisconsin,” Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, available at: https://dnr.wisconsin.gov/topic/WildlifeHabitat/baldeagle.

153      there’s more forest in New England today: I first came across this stat in Jim Sterba’s Nature Wars. For more, see: Jack Savage, “Keeping Forests as Forest,” Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests, September 15, 2017, available at: https://www.forestsociety.org/forest-journal-column/keeping-forests-forests.

154      loggerhead turtles, whose populations increased: See, “Most Sea Turtles Rebounding Worldwide as Conservation Efforts Protect Nests and Habitat, Analysis Finds,” NOAA Fisheries, available at: https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/feature-story/most-sea-turtles-rebounding-worldwide-conservation-efforts-protect-nests-and-habitat.

154      the gray whale return: Mia said this to me in January 2025, and at that time it was very much still true. From the end of commercial whaling to the 2020s, the population of Eastern Pacific Gray Whales—the ones that migrate up and down the Pacific Coast of North America and which Mia knows best—enjoyed a steady increase. But in recent years the population has cratered. Marine biologists believe the decline is due to a diminishment of their food sources as ocean temperatures rise. In June 2025, NOAA Fisheries announced that the gray whale population was at its lowest level in fifty years. Even a wildlife comeback can suffer from downward shifting baselines. For more, see NOAA’s tracking of gray whale condition and calf production: https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/west-coast/science-data/gray-whale-condition-and-calf-production.

154      The British writer Robert Macfarlane: See Robert Macfarlane, Is a River Alive? (Norton; 2025), pages 23 and 24. 

155      Rebecca Solnit made a similar point in an essay: See Rebecca Solnit, “Want to see political change? Look to the margins.” The Guardian, September 14, 2022, available at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/sep/14/we-need-to-celebrate-incremental-change.

155      The indivisible present can cloak the march of progress: I think this phenomenon of taking progress for granted is especially acute when it comes to social relations. Think about how quickly popular attitudes on gay marriage have shifted. In 1996, roughly 70 percent of Americans were opposed to gay marriage and only about 30 percent supported same-sex union; by 2025, the numbers had completely reversed, with some 68 percent of Americans expressing support for gay marriage. Think about American apartheid. My father grew up in the Jim Crow South, when many people considered segregation normal. For my daughter, segregation is nothing short of madness. Prejudice and racism are still alive and well, of course—but the progress we’ve experienced can be difficult to see.

155      triumphs of harm avoided: This is a common insight among environmentalists, who know all too well that every victory is provisional: the loggers only have to get into the forest once, but the trees have to be defended again and again. Solnit makes this point in Hope in the Dark (Nation Books; 2004), when she writes (page 74), “most environmental victories look like nothing happened.  They are triumphs invisible except through storytelling.” Hope in the Dark also inspired some of my thinking of the role of history in progress. Solnit writes (page 34), “Often the road to the future leads through the past.”

156      the family of Patrick Hasburgh: Personal interviews with Fletcher, Ranger, and Ashley Hasburgh. 

161      “It’s a poor sort of memory”: This Lewis Carroll line is another gem picked up from Memory: An Anthology, page 302. 

161      a pioneering English psychologist: See Ranganath, page 73. Much of Chapter 4 of Why We Remember is dedicated to the question of imagination and memory.

162      a discovery so profound that Science magazine: ibid, page 72.

162      By studying people with damaged hippocampus: See Ingrid Wickelgren, “Where Imagination Lives in Your Brain,” Scientific American, June 8, 2023, available at: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/where-imagination-lives-in-your-brain/. This writeup mentions the curious case of “HM,” a subject who had his hippocampus all but removed in a surgery. HM appears again and again throughout the neuroscience literature. 

162      Then neuroscientists using brain scans: See Donna Rose Addis, et. al., “Remembering the past and imagining the future: common and distinct neural substrates during event construction and elaboration,” Neuropsychologia, April 2007, available at: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17126370/ .

162      The scans of healthy brains revealed: See Addis and Schachter, “The hippocampus and the future: where do we stand?” from Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, January 2012, available at https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3251274/pdf/fnhum-05-00173.pdf

162      “A key function of memory”: See Schacter and Addis et. al., “The Future of Memory: Remembering, Imagining, and the Brain,” Neuron, November 2012. Available at: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3815616/. 

162      Even fantasy is made: I’ll grant that every once in a while some genius alights on a truly original idea. But much of even the most outlandish fiction comes from fact. Star Wars? Famously, a space opera set to ancient mythic archetypes, the fearsome AT-ATs inspired by the cranes at the Port of Oakland. The Wizard of EarthSea? A bildungsroman set at a boarding school. Even on an ever-changing planet, there is little that is new under the sun.

162      To picture a Pegasus: Albert Read makes this point in The Imagination Muscle (Union Square & Co; 2023) pages 25 to 26. 

163      John Lewis Gaddis writes: See John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History (Oxford University Press; 2022), pages 3 and 9. If you’re looking for a short, accessible book on histography, you can’t do much better than Gaddis’s book, which calls to mind the ideas about memory palaces. “What if we were to think of history as a kind of mapping? . . . The past is a landscape.”

163      “The short-term view breeds defeatism”: See again Solnit’s September 2022 essay in The Guardian. 

164      Historical plaques at national parks: See Frank Langfitt and A. Martinez, “National parks removing historical items Trump administration found ‘disparaged’ the U.S.,” NPR, September 17, 2025, available at: https://www.npr.org/2025/09/17/nx-s1-5543315/national-parks-removing-historical-items-trump-administration-found-disparaged-u-s.

165      The Smithsonian Institution: See, “Trump amplifies attacks on 'out of control' Smithsonian museums for including negative parts of American history,” Associated Press, April 19, 2025, available at: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-amplifies-attacks-on-out-of-control-smithsonian-museums-for-including-negative-parts-of-american-history.

165      The federal government is removing: See Karen Yourish et. al, “These Words Are Disappearing in the New Trump Administration,” The New York Times, March 7, 2025, available at: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/07/us/trump-federal-agencies-websites-words-dei.html.  

165      companies like ExxonMobil now deny that such denial: See Geoffrey Supran and Naomi Oreskes, “The forgotten oil ads that told us climate change was nothing,” The Guardian, November 18, 2021, available at: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/nov/18/the-forgotten-oil-ads-that-told-us-climate-change-was-nothing

165      Big Oil spends hundreds of millions of dollars: See “New White Paper Calculates First Proven Path for Marketing Agencies to Ditch Fossil Fuels,” Clean Creatives, available at: https://cleancreatives.org/news/new-whitepaper-calculates-first-proven-path-for-marketing-agencies-to-ditch-fossil-fuels.

165      “Oil pumps life”: See Supran and Oreskes, cited above. 

165:     “Energy in Progress”: You’ve likely seen the TV commercials. See also: https://www.chevron.com/who-we-are/energy-in-progress.

165      According to academics who have decoded: Some of the best work on this comes from Benjamin Franta and colleagues at Oxford. See: https://www.smithschool.ox.ac.uk/news/researchers-can-explore-1700-fossil-fuel-ads-through-oxford-carbon-and-climate-advertising. Scholars can search a database of Big Oil’s climate-related ads at: https://airtable.com/app1AQcnqzJEXtcAL/shrr0ztv9DNtUhKB3/tblwS9mRuRWQGb2Ew.

166      “normalize fossil fuel lock-in”: See Supran’s and Oreskes’ complete study, “Rhetoric and frame analysis of ExxonMobil’s climate change communications,” One Earth, May 2021, available at: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2590332221002335. See also Clemens Kaupa, “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes: Misleading Fossil Fuel Advertising in the Climate Crisis,” Journal of European Consumer and Market Law, 2021. Available at: https://research.vu.nl/ws/portalfiles/portal/231610211/EuCML2021009_Smoke_Gets_in_Your_Eyes.pdf.

166      Remembering is a form of resistance: When Daniel Pauly and I met on the UBC campus in the spring of 2025, the conversation turned to the questions of the state of the planet and hope and despair. Pauly insisted to me one’s emotional state or intellectual outlook is irrelevant. If you are optimistic about the future of the planet, then act to make it better still; if you are pessimistic about the future of the planet, then act to avoid the worst. Hope and despair are beside the point—no matter what, act.

167      What’s at stake in this work: Many scholars of shifting baseline syndrome have made similar points, but perhaps none so insistently, and eloquently, as the psychologist Peter Kahn, who warns that shifting baseline syndrome could cause harm that lasts many human generations due to “unfulfilled flourishing.” He asks us to “imagine a gray wolf held captive in a zoo, pacing from one end of its cage to the other repetitively for hours. It is hard to escape the interpretation that the wolf in a zoo is living an impoverished life.” If we can’t break free of environmental amnesia, we will be imprisoned and impoverished.