On July 1, my neighbor gave birth to a baby girl. I met her a few days later, sleeping outside on her aunt’s lap on a hot, hazy evening in Northwest Denver. I ignored another air quality alert on my phone and complimented her full head of hair. I am nearing 30 years old; I remember summers free of wildfire smoke and ozone-alerts.
Will she?
“Shifting baseline syndrome” refers to the gradual change in accepted norms across generations. In 1995, a marine biologist coined the term to describe the acceptance of deteriorating fishery health caused by the absence of an established ecological baseline. But shifting baseline syndrome can be applied much more generally: The version of the natural world that younger generations consider normal and acceptable may be worse compared to that of their parents, and significantly worse than that of their grandparents, compounding over generations…