We’re All Frogs in the Boiling Water*
Photo: Dominik Jirovský
Some psychologists have tried to explain our ecologic myopia as being the consequence of two powerful and related cognitive illusions, “shifting baseline syndrome” and “nature deficit disorder.” The first was described in two separate papers published in 1995. In a seminal essay on the subject, the marine biologist Daniel Pauly explained why no one noticed that fish stocks in the world’s oceans had been declining through the generations. Each new generation of marine scientists and fishers perceived the size and diversity of fish stocks at the beginning of their careers as the norm—the assumed baseline—by which they would judge changes in fish stocks during the rest of their careers.[i] Natural variation and relatively short human lifespans hid the changes. Peter Kahn and Batya Friedman came to a similar conclusion in a very different environment. They studied the perceptions of pollution among impoverished children in inner-city Houston, concluding that, “With each generation, the amount of environmental degradation increases, but each generation takes that amount as the norm—as the nonpolluted condition.”[ii] They called this “generational amnesia,” an apt term for the fishers and scientists, as well.
The children who grew up in the inner city were probably also suffering from what Richard Louv calls “nature deficit disorder” and others refer to as “the extinction of experience.”[iii] More than half the world’s human population now lives in towns and cities, and as the economist Partha Dasgupta notes, “Urban living creates a distance between us and the natural world.”[iv] Like billions of other urban dwellers as well as the denizens of electronic screens, the children’s experiences and knowledge about non-human mediated nature are close to nil. Many of the academics in the world’s universities also belong to this group. They would never notice a change of nature if it happened directly outside their office window, for the sun is shining as bright as ever, and there are still the muffled sounds of one lone songbird perched on a wire above the manicured lawns of their institution.
Before our hyper-populated, industrial civilization took control, the very thickness of life across much of the planet was far beyond that experienced by most anyone living today. Just a couple of short centuries ago, the wetlands around Manhattan were rich with gigantic oysters, and the waters off the Atlantic coast were, according to early European accounts, loaded with enormous schools of menhaden “forty miles long and two miles wide, from the surface to the seabed.”[v] In 1608 the famous English explorer John Smith wrote about encountering such a school: “There were an abundance of fish, lying so thick with their heads above the water that for want of nets (our barge driving around them) we attempted to catch them with our frying pan…”[vi]
Upon arriving at North America’s shores in the17th and 18th centuries, the European sailors beheld a limitless expanse unbelievably filled with wildlife and seemingly near empty of human inhabitants. In describing the “white’s” amazement, the American historian Frederick Turner in Beyond Geography waxes rhapsodic in passages like the following:
“To those who followed Columbus and Cortés the New World truly seemed incredible, not only because of what civilization had made of the Old World but because of the natural endowments of the one they now began to enter. The land often announced itself with a heavy scent miles out into the ocean… with the odor of forest and verges in bloom… while ships running farther up the coast occasionally swam through large beds of floating flowers.
“Wherever they came inland they found that these announcements had been in no way false: the land, wilderness though it was, was a rich riot of color and sound, of game and luxuriant vegetation… Waterfowl took flight under their advances with thunderous wings, and deer in unconcerned droves browsed lush meadowlands… When the whites penetrated the western watercourses they found life there as abundant as it had been along the eastern seaboard where sturgeon, giant lobsters, and shad were so plentiful that settlers grew nauseated on them. Out west, Pierre Radisson in the middle of the seventeenth century found otters so numerous in the streams that they hindered the progress of the little expedition’s canoes.”[vii]
And so on, about “gigantic catfish,” and flocks of passenger pigeons darkening the skies for hours, and buffalo as far east as Pennsylvania and upper New York.
It is difficult enough getting a bead on past changes. Viewing a future world which is not like the one we are now inhabiting is perhaps even more challenging. David Wallace-Wells, the author of The Uninhabitable World: Life After Warming, described his own difficulties. “I know the science is true, I know the threat is all-encompassing, and I know its effects, should emissions continue unabated, will be terrifying. And yet, when I imagine my life three decades from now, or the life of my daughter five decades from now, I have to admit that I am not imagining a world on fire but one similar to the one we have now. That is how hard it is to shake complacency. We are all living in delusion, unable to really process the news from science that climate change amounts to an all-encompassing threat. Indeed, a threat the size of life itself.”[viii]
To get a sense of how different our future might be (that is, how different we are making it), in the following three blogs/essays I review three natural catastrophes in-the-making. Each provides a different lens into the larger biospheric catastrophe. And each is caused by our need to feed the human population explosion and, poignantly, promises to be less accommodating to those numbers. The razing of the Amazon rainforest exemplifies how fast we are destroying ecosystems that have been resilient at geological time scales and how surprisingly extensive the reverberations of that destruction can be. The hundreds of dead zones in the world’s coastal waters due to fertilizer runoff from farmlands confirms that many of nature’s seemingly unrelated threads on land and sea are tightly interwoven. And the bizarre and sudden disappearance of insects around the planet is a testament to how the very glue to our biological existence may become visible to us only when its gone.
Endnotes
*The frog in the heating water is an allegory describing how people are often unable to recognize slow-motion existential threats. However accurate the reality, the allegory, itself, is baseless. That is, frogs will not sit senselessly in a heating pot. Humans, however, apparently will.
[i] Pauly, D. (1995) Anecdotes and Shifting Baseline Syndrome of Fisheries. Trends in Ecology and Evolution; 10: 430.
[ii] Kahn, P.H., and Friedman, B. (1995) Environmental Views and Values of Children in an Inner-City Black Community. Child Development; 66: 1403-1417.
[iii] See, for instance, Louv (2005) and Soga and Gaston (2018).
Louv, R. (2005) Last Child in the Woods. Algonquin Books, Chapel Hill, NC.
Soga, M. and Gaston, K. (2016) Extinction of Experience: The Loss of Human-Nature Interactions. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment; 14: 94-101.
[iv] Dasgupta, P. (2021) The Economics of Biodiversity: The Dasgupta Review. Abridged Version. HM Treasury, London.
[v] An oft-quoted line without attribution, as far as I know.
[vi] Oysters—Nigro, C. (2011) History on the Half-Shell: The Story of New York City and its Oysters. NY Public Library..
John Smith from White, A. (2017, June 14) Remember the Menhaden! Pacific Standard.
[vii] Turner, F. (1983:256-7) Beyond Geography: The Western Spirit Against the Wilderness. Viking Press, New York.
[viii] Wallace-Wells, D. (2019a, Feb 16) Time to Panic. New York Times.
