INTRODUCTION: FROG IN HOT WATER
1 Mia Monroe remembers: Personal interviews with Monroe.
2 A 1914 monograph, The Butterfly Trees: See Lucia Shepardson, “The Butterfly Trees,” (The James H. Barry Company; 1914). Available at: https://archive.org/details/butterflytrees00sheprich
3 a figure that’s never been equaled since: For a detailed, year-by-year accounting of
overwintering butterflies in California, see the Western Monarch Count: https://westernmonarchcount.org/data/
3 butterfly numbers in the United States have plummeted by 20 percent: Collin B. Edwards et. al., “Rapid butterfly declines across the United States in the 21st century,” Science, March 2025. Available at: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adp4671
3 less than 1 percent of their historic totals: See the Xerces Society: https://xerces.org/blog/western-monarch-population-closer-to-extinction-as-wait-continues-for-monarchs-protection
4 Statewide, only 1,006 monarchs: This an error that slipped into the text. The correct figure (which will be fixed in subsequent editions) is 1,914. See: https://xerces.org/blog/western-monarch-population-closer-to-extinction-as-wait-continues-for-monarchs-protection
4 Some people call her: Personal interview with Ole Schell.
5 The monarchs came back: https://xerces.org/blog/western-monarch-thanksgiving-count-tallies-nearly-250000-butterflies
5 The following winter of 2022-23: https://xerces.org/press/western-monarch-count-tallies-over-330000-butterflies
5 “California’s Western Monarch Butterflies Are Making a Comeback”: Livia Albeck-Ripka, The New York Times, December 3, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/03/us/monarch-butterflies-comeback.html
5 “The Monarch Butterfly Beats Extinction”: Laurenz Busch, Los Angeles Magazine, February 2, 2023. https://lamag.com/news/the-monarch-butterfly-beats-extinction-in-triumphant-california-comeback/
5 The San Francisco Chronicle Declared: Tara Dugan, San Francisco Chronicle, January 31, 2023. https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/environmentalists-cheer-as-monarch-butterfly-17754441.php
5 the public response to the tentative rebound: When I started tagging along with some of the monarch counters during the tail end of the 2022 Thanksgiving Count, I was struck by how the idea of shifting baseline syndrome was already well known within that community. Emma Pelton at the Xerces Society had brought up shifting baseline syndrome in an interview with Time (see: Oliver Millman, “The Fight to Save the Monarch Butterfly,” March 21, 2022). In a post on their LinkedIn page, the staff at the Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History had introduced the concept to their docents and supporters: “People think of how things used to be in their child-hood as the golden period. As things progressively get worse, new generations can’t imagine a better world, thus making it harder for conservation groups to work towards a healthy ecosystem. The goal is not to equal the number of butterflies we saw in 2021, to be more than 2020, or even to reach 1997. The true goal is the historic tens of millions that used to exist across all of California.”
6 Scientists call it shifting baseline syndrome: See: Daniel Pauly, “Anecdotes and the shifting baseline syndrome of fisheries,” Trends in Ecology and Evolution, October 1995. Available at: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adp4671
7 the steady coarsening of American civic and political culture: In a New Yorker article exploring whether democracy in the United States is sliding toward demise, Andrew Marantz makes a comparison between how the public has slowly accommodated to global climate change and the American political system’s slide toward authoritarianism. “In the real world, though, the cataclysm can come in on little cat feet. The tremors can be so muffled and distant that people con-tinually adapt, explaining away the anomalies. You can live through the big one, it turns out, and still go on acting as if—still go on feeling as if—the big one is not yet here.” See, “Is It Happening Here?” The New Yorker, April 28, 2025. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/05/05/is-the-us-becoming-an-autocracy
8 “It never failed that during the dry years”: John Steinbeck, East of Eden, Penguin Books, 1986 edition, page 7.
8 The ancient wisdom is right: The insight about how you can never step in the same river twice comes from the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus. Brooke Jarvis mentions Heraclitus in her ground-breaking article about the so-called insect apocalypse. “It is impossible to maintain a fixed perspective,” Jarvis wrote. See “The Insect Apocalypse Is Here,” New York Times Magazine, November 27, 2018. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/27/magazine/insect-apocalypse.html
9 “Man is a creature that”: See Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The House of the Dead, Penguin Classics 1986 edition, page 29. The theme of accommodation as a survival technique runs through Dostoyevsky’s novel. At another point in the book, he writes: “Working under escort in the barracks together with two hundred ‘companions’: never alone, never! However, I was obliged to get accustomed to it.”
10 The concept of shifting baseline syndrome was coined: Pauly’s article, “Anecdotes and the Shifting Baseline Syndrome of Fisheries,” has been so influential because of its intrinsic insightfulness and pre-science. But what I find most interesting is how the word “anecdote” slipped into the title. As I’ll explore, anecdote-driven community sci-ence and grassroots oral history and natural history are some of the most important antidotes to environmental amnesia. Speaking of amnesia, Pauly never uses that term in his original paper, but the focus on memory does appear in his subsequent writings as he dis-sects the idea of “collective amnesia.” See Pauly’s 2019 book, Vanishing Fish: Shifting Baselines and the Future of Global Fisheries.
10 the author banged it out in a single afternoon: Personal interview with Daniel Pauly.
10 shifting baseline syndrome has been referenced: According to the National Institutes of Health research database, the paper has been cited some 3,400 times. In their paper, “The Shifting Baseline Syndrome as a Connective Concept for More Informed and Just Responses to Global Environmental Change” (People and Nature, May 2023), Heidi K. Alleway et al. say the paper has been cited 1,560 times. I’m splitting the difference. In any case, as Alleway and collaborators report, “This is an impressive reach for a one-page article.” The authors uncover the historical nugget that an Australian fisheries expert, H. C. Dannevig, coined the term “drifting baselines” way back in 1903.
10 perceptions of bushmeat hunters in Africa: S.K. Papworth et. al., “Evidence for shifting baseline syndrome in conservation,” Conservation Letters, May 2009. Available at: https://conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1755-263X.2009.00049.x
10 cultural preservation in Australia: Dirk H.R. Spennemann, “The Shifting Baseline Syndrome and Generational Amnesia in Heritage Studies,” Heritage, August 2022. Available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/362427263_The_Shifting_Baseline_Syndrome_and_Generational_Amnesia_in_Heritage_Studies
10 loss of ethnobotanical knowledge worldwide: Natalia Hanazaki et al, “Evidence of the shifting baseline syndrome in ethnobotanical research,” Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine, November 2013. Available at: https://ethnobiomed.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1746-4269-9-75
10 Should we be trying to restore: In recent decades, shifting base-line syndrome has become one of the knottier questions in conservation biology. To what baseline are we hoping to restore Wetland X or Grassland Y? It’s an epistemological problem: biologists may not know exactly how things were in the past, especially the dis-tant past. A perfect distillation of the dilemma comes from Scott D. Sampson and Peter D. Roopmarine, “We Need to Think About Conservation on Different Timescales,” Scientific American, October 15, 2023, in which they write: “Time is one of humanity’s greatest blind spots. Humanity’s shortsightedness around time creates major constraints on modern conservation. As the climate and biodiversity crises accelerate, we are urgently working to protect and regenerate ecosystems without understanding how they functioned when they were truly thriving.” Available at: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/we-need-to-think-about-conservation-on-a-different-timescale/
10 If a kid only knows a despoiled environment: Peter Kahn and Batya Friedman, “Environmental views and values of children in an inner city black community,” Child Development, October 1995. Available at: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED360456.pdf
11 writes Peter Kahn, an environmental psychologist: Peter Kahn and Thea Weiss, “The Importance of Children Interacting with Big Nature,” Children, Youth and Environments, 2017. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7721/chilyoutenvi.27.2.0007 . For more on Kahn, see his books The Rediscovery of the Wild and Technological Nature, especially the Introduction and Chapters 11 and 12, which I’ll come back to later.
11 One experiment, conducted in England: Lizzie P. Jones et. al., “Investigating the implications of the shifting baseline syndrome on conservation,” People and Nature, July 2020. Available at: https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/pan3.10140
11 “knowledge extinction”: See S.K. Papworth et. al., “Evidence for shifting baseline syndrome in conservation.”
11 one group of researchers has concluded: ibid.
11 According to Kevin Gaston and Masashi Soga: Masashi Soga and Kevin Gaston, “Shifting baseline syndrome: causes, consequences, and implications,” Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, April 2018. Available at: https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/fee.1794
12 Kahn, the psychologist, cautions: Peter Kahn, The Rediscovery of the Wild, MIT Press, 2013, Introduction.
12 “one of the central psychological problems of our lifetime”: As quoted by Jon Mooallem, “Our Climate Future Is Actually Our Climate Present,” New York Times Magazine, April 19, 2017. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/19/magazine/our-climate-future-is-actually-our-climate-present.html
12 One of the most poignant illustrations: Loren McClenachan, “Documenting Loss of Large Trophy Fish from Florida Keys with Historical Photographs,” Conservation Biology, June 2009. Available at: https://conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/j.1523-1739.2008.01152.x. You can view the photos yourself here, via NPR: https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2014/02/05/257046530/big-fish-stories-getting-littler
13 the concept has trickled into the public dialogue: For several years I’ve been receiving Google Alerts for “shifting baseline,” and I receive, on average, about two alerts a week. Shifting baseline syndrome has become sort of like the Forrest Gump of environmental discourse, constantly popping up here and there, sometimes in the foreground, sometimes in the background. In the preface to the latest edition of her powerful book, On Extinction, Melanie Challenger writes, “Little wonder, then, that the idea of shifting baselines has become such a hot topic in research. This generation is then less able to judge how destructively altered are the places they inhabit, and so it goes on.”
13 New York Times essayist David Wallace-Wells has warned: David Wallace Wells, “Can You Even Call Deadly Heat ‘Extreme’ Anymore?” The New York Times, May 17, 2022. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/17/opinion/india-heat-wave-pakistan-climate-change.html
13 Climate journalist David Roberts is blunter: David Roberts, “The scariest thing about global warming (and Covid-19)” Vox, December 4, 2020. Available at: https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2020/7/7/21311027/covid-19-climate-change-global-warming-shifting-baselines
14 “Pearl Harbor moment”: This was a pretty common idea among environmentalists for some time. By way of evidence, see: Kelsey Brugger, “How activists put the ‘climate emergency’ on the map,” E&E News, October 12, 2022. Available at: https://www.eenews.net/articles/how-activists-put-the-climate-emergency-on-the-map/
14 The world won’t end with the bang of calamity: The critic Amanda Hess investigated this phenomenon some years ago when she wrote, “I can’t say precisely when the end began, just that in the past several years, ‘the end of the world’ stopped referring to a future cataclysmic event and started to describe our present situation. Ours is a banal sort of apocalypse. Even as it is described as frightfully close, it is held at a cynical distance.” See “Apocalypse When? Global Warming’s Endless Scroll,” New York Times, February 3, 2022. Available At: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/03/arts/climate-change-doomsday-culture.html
15 You might’ve seen the memes: In case you missed them, Buzzfeed has you covered: https://www.buzzfeed.com/ishmaeldaro/wildfire-golfing-photos
15 In May 2021: See the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, “The new U.S. Climate Normals are here. What do they tell us about climate change?” May 4, 2021. https://www.noaa.gov/news/new-us-climate-normals-are-here-what-do-they-tell-us-about-climate-change
15 temperatures nationwide have warmed: Bob Henson and Jason Samenow, “NOAA unveils new U.S. climate ‘normals’ that are warmer than ever,” The Washington Post, May 4, 2021. https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/05/04/noaa-new-climate-normals/
15 This rejiggering of weather recordkeeping: NOAA’s 2021 release of the updated thirty-year averages sparked a burst of news articles about “the new normal” and shifting baseline syndrome. Veteran environmental journalist Bryan Walsh anticipated the handwringing in his dispatch, “Shifting Baselines Are Changing What Normal Means,” Axios, January 6, 2021, when he wrote, “Some climate scientists have urged weather agencies to fight shifting baselines by sticking with a static 30-year time period when calculating weather averages, rather than updating the reference period every decade.”
16 North Carolina’s state climatologist: Seth Borenstein, “America’s new normal: A degree hotter than two decades ago,” Associated Press, May 4, 2021. Available at: https://apnews.com/article/climate-change-science-environment-and-nature-414a77846631e50d3c528204b8beb3d9
16 Michael Mann, an eminent climatologist: Long after the new figures had been released, Mann’s righteous annoyance was undimmed. I emailed him in spring 2022 and asked for his comment, and he replied: “When we redefine ‘normal’ as ‘today,’ it literally ‘normalizes’ global warming. It’s a continually shifting baseline toward more extreme and damaging impacts. I know how dramatically things have changed from my own lived experience. But the students I teach at Penn State don’t have that experience. A warmer world with more damaging weather extremes, coastal inundation, etc. is what they’ve grown up with. So they don’t have the same profound, intuitive sense of how dramatically things have changed.”
16 “Are we supposed to just get used to more smoke in the sky?”: Paul Bogard, “We’re Watching the Sky as We Know It Disappear,” The New York Times, June 20, 2023. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/20/opinion/wildfire-smoke-minneapolis-canada-fires.html
17 unusual temperature variations cease to spark interest: See: Frances C. Moore et al., “Rapidly Declining Remarkability of Temperature Anomalies May Obscure Public Perception of Climate Change,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, February 2019. Available at: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1816541116. The authors write, “Human evaluation of weather as normal or abnormal will also be influenced by a range of factors including expectations, memory limitations, and cognitive biases.” This is probably one of the most frightening shifting baseline syndrome studies out there.
17 I put my body against the proverbial gears: I spent much of my twenties working for a scrappy human rights group called Global Exchange, where, among other endeavors, I helped launch a national campaign targeting the American automakers and urging them to break the US addiction to oil. This was at the height of public opposition to the US invasion of Iraq, and our theory of change (as advocates say) was to take the “No Blood for Oil” slogan of peace activists and move it upstream to the auto companies. I was twice arrested during that campaign: once for hanging a banner off a Ford dealer-ship in San Francisco, and then for being involved in another banner hang during the LA Auto Show.
17 More than half of all human-caused greenhouse gas emissions: For a detailed and reader-friendly primer on the history of carbon pollution, see: Leandro Vigna et. al., “The History of Carbon Dioxide Emissions,” World Resources Institute, June 2024. Available at: https://www.wri.org/insights/history-carbon-dioxide-emissions
17 The hottest year on record: See NASA: https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/temperatures-rising-nasa-confirms-2024-warmest-year-on-record/
17 Half—half—of all plastics: See the European Environment Agency: https://www.eea.europa.eu/en/topics/in-depth/plastics#.
17 some three million birds have disappeared: See the Cornell Lab of Ornithology: https://www.birds.cornell.edu/home/bring-birds-back/
18 the population numbers of wild species have collapsed: See World Wildlife Fund’s “Living Planet Report,” which is updated regularly. Available at: https://www.worldwildlife.org/press-releases/catastrophic-73-decline-in-the-average-size-of-global-wildlife-populations-in-just-50-years-reveals-a-system-in-peril
18 at least 160 species were wiped off the planet: See Ryan F. Mandelbaum, “All the Species Declared Extinct this Decade,” Gizmodo, December 16, 2019. Available at: https://gizmodo.com/all-the-species-declared-extinct-this-decade-1840325660
18 many people believed that global civilization’s laggard response: If you read any environmental journalism in the 2000s and twenty-teens, you might recall frequently hearing this argument, which is still coasting on vapors today. For example, see a 2018 video, “Why Humans Are So Bad at Thinking about Climate Change,” produced by Vox and the University of California, which includes environmen-tal thought leaders like M. Sanjayan of Conservation International and Anthony Leiserowitz of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkZ7BJQupVA
19 “Our memories have been as wiped clean as the land”: See George Monbiot, Feral (London: Allen Lane, 2013), Page 69.
19 you want to ‘sustain’ miserable leftovers: See Daniel Pauly’s TED talk on shifting baseline syndrome, available at: https://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_pauly_the_ocean_s_shifting_baseline?language=en
20 Even if you’re just hearing: In his TED talk about shifting baseline syndrome, Pauly quips, “The idea can be explained in one minute.”
20 if you put a frog into a pot of hot water: The metaphor was made famous, in part, by Al Gore’s Academy Award–winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. A good indicator of the persistence of this trope is the fact that when two of the authors of the PNAS study about social media and extreme weather wrote up their findings for a popular audience, they felt compelled to mention it. See: Nick Obradovich and Frances C. Moore, “The Data Is In. Frogs Don’t Boil. But We Might,” Washington Post, February 25, 2019. Available at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2019/02/25/data-are-frogs-dont-boil-we-might/
20 urban myths that just won’t quit: Famously, a lie speeds around the world before the truth has its pants on. The trope has been repeatedly debunked, yet it persists. Victor H. Hutchison, a herpetologist and professor emeritus of zoology at the University of Oklahoma, appears to have actually run the experiment back in 2002. The “bullshit” line comes via a delightful takedown by James Fallows, “The Boiled-Frog Myth. Stop the Lying Now!” The Atlantic, September 16, 2006. Available at: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2006/09/the-boiled-frog-myth-stop-the-lying-now/7446/
20 In one particularly sick burn: See Karl S. Kruszelnicki, “Myth leaves frog in hot water,” ABC Science, November 30, 2010. Available at: https://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2010/11/30/3080641.htm
21 focus on the antidotes to landscape amnesia: The term “landscape amnesia” appears to have been first used by geographer Jared Diamond in his book, Collapse (pages 425–26). Diamond coins the term in the context of the apocalyptic ecological history of Easter Island—a forested paradise that was clear-cut and denuded so severely that the Polynesians there eventually resorted to cannibalism. We were warned.
22 “We actually don’t remember”: See: Lisa Genova, Remember (Harmony; 2021), page 3.
