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Bob Zink: Examining the shifting baseline syndrome in hunting and fishing

North American market hunting played a role in the extinction of the Labrador duck, a species that wintered off the coasts of New Jersey and New England in the eastern United States. (Wikipedia image)

A concept known as the shifting baseline syndrome (SBS) is pivotal to our understanding game and fish species and how they are managed.
SBS refers to the phenomenon in which each generation accepts the condition of the natural world they grow up in as “normal,” even if ecosystems have significantly declined over time. In 1995 a fisheries scientist named Daniel Pauly coined the SBS term to illustrate how people underestimate long-term environmental loss because they compare present conditions to their own memory rather than to historical abundance.

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