Shifting base lines – The Green Tau

Baselines

25th August 2025

Last week I was in eastern Switzerland. The alpine meadows were full of a rich diversity of flowers, butterflies of all colours & sizes, bees, beetles, and grass hoppers. It was wonderful! But then I pondered, was this a normal amount of insect life that simply highlighted the lack back at home? Checking out via the internet, it seems that Switzerland like the UK, is witnessing a sharp decline in biodiversity including insects, due to issues such as urban expansion, intensified farming and climate change. (1)

We tend to assume that we see is normal because why wouldn’t it be? Our perception of normal is generally based on our own experience, culture and what we read in the press.

When I was a child, buddleia bushes were nick-named butterfly bushes because their flowers attracted so many butterflies. In comparison when I look at our garden now, I’m saddened by the lack of butterflies – you can count them on one hand. However for my children that number of butterflies is normal: they have not known it otherwise.

Similarly as a child, I remember having to clean the car windscreen of a thick grease of dead insects – especially after a long journey – simply because there were so many flying insects around. My children have not had that experience, and for them, the current – small – number of insects is normal.

This experience of what is normal is termed the ‘shifting baseline syndrome’. It doesn’t just affect our assessment of normal levels of butterflies, but also our assessment of ‘normal’ temperatures – summers were on average cooler in the past, but we have become acclimatised to hotter summers and now 26C is not perceived as that hot, and 30C isn’t seen as a cause for concern.

The shifting baseline syndrome also affects our understanding of roads and cars. (2) We perceive having a car – or two – as normal, and that being able to drive anywhere and everywhere is not just normal but a right. We don’t remember the past when not everyone had cars, when most people relied on public transport, and when you could even use the railway to move your household contents! (3)

Another well known syndrome is that of the ‘boiling frog’. Because the water only warms slowly, the frog being a cold blooded creature doesn’t react to the grow in heat until it is too late. Until that point each degree of warming doesn’t signal a warning to the frog. Humans seem to react to climate change in the same way: we accept each degree of warming as either a pleasure or a mere inconvenience without any sense of the danger signals we should be responding to. Climate change is dangerous. It leads to life-threatening floods and heatwaves, life-threatening storms, poor harvests, food shortages, droughts, conflicts and mass migration.

If we don’t see the scale of the changes around us, and don’t perceive the risks we face, we are not going to take appropriate action to either protect ourselves or to prevent the worst from happening.

Tag: Shifting base lines

Green Tau: issue 113