| Every morning this week, I've woken up to a sea of yellow birch and balsam fir in this northern stretch of the Appalachians. The wind whipping off Lake Mooselookmeguntic stirs millions of leaves with a sound like the ocean. Once darkness falls, the loons arrive, their voices pealing across the water as they dive for chub, golden shiners and small brook trout. To my eye, this is as Edenic as you get in America today. Yet almost everything I assumed about this "pristine" landscape was wrong. Maine, while 90 percent forest, is also one of our most logged states. It's a primary source of America's 2-by-4s and toilet paper. Without this knowledge, it was easy to think I stood on the edge of primeval wilderness. Changes here unfolded over centuries, each generation coming to see the woods and rivers around them as abundant even as the ecosystem degraded. There's a name for this: shifting baselines. What are shifting baselines? Daniel Pauly, a marine biologist who coined the term, noticed scientists generally accepted the size of fish populations at the start of their careers as normal. If stocks declined by the time the next generation entered the field, this became the new normal. "The result, obviously, is a gradual shift of the baseline," wrote Pauly. Today, shifting baselines is now shorthand for generational amnesia about the natural world — something documented among various groups, from bush meat hunters in Africa to birders in the United Kingdom. Why does this matter? As species decline or die off, our cultural memory of them fades. We might remember the abundance and diversity of our childhood, but never imagine the world of our grandparents — or of those before them. Can we avoid this trap? I called the people in Maine who have been there for longer than anyone else: The Penobscot Nation. It manages about 121,000 acres of land across the state, says Chuck Loring Jr., who is the tribe's director of natural resources. But Loring, unlike most natural resources managers, doesn't think in decades. He looks back over centuries to plan for the future — a time when Atlantic salmon filled Maine's rivers. Last year, fewer than 1,400 salmon returned to the state. "We have a seven-generation approach," he says. He's aiming to regrow an old-growth forest like those that covered Maine hundreds of years ago. For the Penobscot, the goal is harvesting timber while restoring a landscape and its inhabitants' place on it — from fish to moose to the Penobscot themselves. What can you do? Today, the new normal is being rewritten in our own lifetimes: smoke-filled skies over North America, lethal European heat waves and a rising number of climate-related disasters. But you don't need to identify every flower, plant and tree around you to know what once lived in your neck of the woods — and could again. Start telling stories and playing outside. That's what did it for me. I spent my earliest years rooting around the mangrove forests and oak hammocks near my house, and learning about their animals from my mother. If you live in a place that once glowed with fireflies, tell your children what you remember. Ask your parents to tell their stories. Baselines, after all, don't always decline. To read the full column from The Washington Post, click here. | 
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