January 14, 2005
1/14 - Divers Discuss "shifting baselines": Check out the discussion on scubaboard.com
When we first started this website we received a number of great personal accounts of shifting baselines examples, some of which we posted under SB STORIES. I've received lots more but never gotten around to adding them to that feature. But here's a great one today that was posted on a forum at the diver's website, Scubaboard, where they are having a very in-depth discussion of shifting baselines as it applies to the world of diving.
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It is very easy to be tricked into believing that the current state of an environment is how it is supposed to be. I have been aware of the "Shifting Baselines" problem since my college days but I haven't had a name for it till now. Back then we used to go backpacking in the Southern Appalachians of the US five or six times per year and we alway tried to go to the areas designated as official Wilderness in order to see the best forests.
One year my buddy suggested we go to a place called Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest in North Carolina. He said it had never been logged and therefore was better. The difference could not have been more obvious. Joyce Kilmer is a small pocket of Eastern old growth forest and the trees are gigantic. Oaks have trunks up to 10 feet in diamter that punch right up through the canopy so that we could not even see their branches. At that point we knew we had been duped. Hiking all those years in "Wilderness" that was nothing more than sterile third growth tree farms.
Last year we went to Belize to dive the reefs and hike the rain forest preserves. We dove for several days before my wife pointed out that virtually all the coral were dead. I was so excited to be diving that I did not even notice that the large spherical rocks used to be brain coral and the weird vertical rocks used to be columnar coral. Of course the dive operators are not going to say anything about dead coral and the divers don't want to be rude by mentioning it.
After a week of diving we went into the mainland to visit Cockscomb Basin Wildlife Sanctuary. It is an extremely well run preserve sheltering jaguars and howler monkeys but it was all clearcut by the British before creation of the sanctuary. We were left wondering what a real climax tropical rainforest would be. My understanding is that this is true of the entire country of Belize. The British cut and exported all the tropical hardwoods and then said "you can have your country back now - here's your independence".
Anyway, keep up the good work. We are learning, even if a little too late.
Pete Dudley
Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA
Veteran underwater cinematographer Howard Hall always referred to
"shifting baselines" as "ten year syndrome" (your favorite dive spot
looks different when you come back ten years later)