The Shifting Baseline Syndrome

I wanted to show my daughter endangered species in the wild before they disappeared. Scientists call it shifting baseline syndrome - we watch forests get logged or animals disappear but when the next generation comes along they accept that depleted version of nature as normal. I can't even imagine what an ocean filled with a billion sea turtles must feel like. It wasn't so long ago though that America was a kind of beep. When people could be dwarfed and engulfed by wild animals in a way that feels almost impossible now. In the late 1800s trains would sometimes have to stop for four or five hours as streams of buffalo moved across the tracks. Doctors learned to have a very decided respect for the idiosyncrasies