shifting baseline syndrome

noun

Etymology

Coined by scientist Daniel Pauly, in reference to generations of scientists treating the successively reduced fish populations of their own time, rather than the earliest recorded fish population levels, as the "baseline", so the "baseline" kept shifting.

Definitions

  1. The tendency of each generation to consider the state the environment (or by extension…

    The tendency of each generation to consider the state the environment (or by extension any other thing) was in when they grew up or first examined it to be its natural state (baseline), normalizing changes made by prior generations.

The neighborhood

Vish — recursive loop

No curated loop yet for shifting baseline syndrome. Loops are being traced one word at a time while the ingestion pipeline matures.

sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA