August 6, 2018 –We face a paradoxical bind, needing simultaneously to look backward and move forward. It’s dangerous, warn the editors of “Shifting Baselines: The Past and the Future of Ocean Fisheries,” to “ignore historical change and accept the present as natural.”
First coined in 1995 by marine ecologist Daniel Pauly, the term “shifting baselines” describes a widespread tendency to assess change using too recent a reference point – typically how conditions appeared early in a researcher’s life or career. When that pattern extends across generations, it can lead to a persistent ratcheting down of expectations – coming to accept as “normal” simplified food webs with less diversity and resilience.
Shifting baselines can, for example, prompt us to celebrate a population rebound that looks impressive in the context of a 30-year time span but pales in comparison to the population and range of that species 300 – or 3,000 – years ago.
Lisa Kerr, a fisheries ecologist at Gulf of Maine Research Institute (GMRI) in Portland, acknowledges how hard it can be for marine researchers to find appropriate reference points against which to measure change in fish stocks. Fisheries managers, she says, typically rely on data from 1980 onward. A longer historical context would be valuable, but is not always possible due to limited data.