Concept · Ch 16
The shifting baseline
Each generation grows up inside whatever is left and mistakes it for the natural, ordinary state of things — so a country can empty out for two hundred years without anyone alive feeling the loss.
Stand in an Adelaide backyard today and watch a rainbow lorikeet work over a grevillea, and it is easy to call that nature — full, busy, doing exactly what it should. It is also, by any measure that reaches back further than a single lifetime, a threadbare remnant of what was here, and the reason almost nobody notices the gap is a piece of everyday psychology with a name: the shifting baseline.
The fisheries scientist Daniel Pauly named it in 1995, watching colleague after colleague set their idea of a “healthy” fish stock against whatever was left when they started counting, each generation’s depleted inheritance quietly becoming the next generation’s normal (Pauly 1995). It works exactly the same way on land. A person born in Adelaide in the 1990s and a person born there in the 1890s would both tell you the birds and animals around them were what nature looked like — and neither is lying, because neither has any other yardstick to measure against. The baseline does not stay still long enough to be felt sliding.
Which is why the sharpest evidence for it in this book is a single overlooked sentence. The naturalist Frederic Wood Jones, writing in the 1920s, recorded that rabbit-trappers working the immediate edge of Adelaide — not the outback, the edge of the city — had, within living memory, pulled more bilbies from their traps than rabbits (Wood Jones 1923–1925). Read that now and it sounds like a report from a different continent. The greater bilby is extinct across the whole settled south of Australia, one of close to thirty native mammals the state has lost, itself a fragment of a national tally in which more than one in ten of the continent’s endemic land mammals has gone in two centuries (Woinarski et al. 2015). It is a scale of loss no comparable country has matched. Nobody rang an alarm when the Adelaide bilbies thinned out and stopped, because by the time it would have mattered, there was no one left who remembered they had ever been common.
That is the discipline this book keeps returning to under “reading absence”: you cannot feel a baseline shift, so you have to go looking for the sentence, the museum drawer, the old survey that still remembers what was normal before you were born.
Go deeper — the mechanism & the evidence
Daniel Pauly coined the term for fisheries science, watching successive generations of researchers each set their "healthy stock" benchmark against the depleted fishery they personally first surveyed, one generation's overfished remnant becoming the next generation's pristine reference point (Pauly 1995). The mechanism is not dishonesty — it is that a baseline has to be remembered to be missed, and living memory is short. Adelaide supplies an unusually clean documentary case: Frederic Wood Jones's field note that rabbit-trappers on the city's edge, within living memory of his own 1920s writing, took more bilbies than rabbits (Wood Jones 1923–1925). That sentence is the baseline for a species now gone from the whole settled south of the continent — recoverable only because one naturalist happened to write it down before the last people who remembered it died. Multiply that single sentence by every species, every wetland, every woodland the continent has quietly lost, and the scale of what shifting baselines hide becomes plain: the true benchmark for "how much has this land lost" is never memory, only the record (Woinarski et al. 2015).
Sources & further reading
Every claim here is traceable. Each citation links to its entry in the bibliography.
- Pauly, D. (1995). Anecdotes and the shifting baseline syndrome of fisheries. Trends in Ecology & Evolution 10(10):430. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0169-5347(00)89171-5 — Origin of the term 'shifting baseline syndrome'.
- Wood Jones, F. (1923-1925). The Mammals of South Australia. Government Printer, Adelaide. https://archive.org/details/mammalssouthaus00jone (epigraph + Ch 16 bilby source) — The bilby-trapping anecdote as a documented, recoverable baseline for Adelaide.
- Woinarski, J.C.Z., Burbidge, A.A. & Harrison, P.L. (2015). Ongoing unravelling of a continental fauna: decline and extinction of Australian mammals since European settlement. PNAS 112(15):4531-4540. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1417301112 — Scale of Australian mammal loss the shifted baseline conceals.
- Tilman, D., May, R.M., Lehman, C.L. & Nowak, M.A. (1994). Habitat destruction and the extinction debt. Nature 371:65-66. https://doi.org/10.1038/371065a0 — Extinction debt — why some losses from a shifted baseline are still arriving, not yet finished.
See it in the country
Adelaide rosellaCommon brushtail possumGreater bilby (the lost suburbanite)Spear-grass & wallaby-grassReading absenceShort-beaked echidnaThe vanished grassy plainsWestern grey kangaroo
Grounded in A Coast Running Out of Water. Every figure is stated once in the book's canonical facts register and cited to a published source.