Columns:: Worth Repeating

since 12/15/98

Columns::February 18, 2002

Worth repeating

Jeremy B.C. Jackson of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography is an expert on the paleoecology of Caribbean reef communities. He presented a lecture titled “Unnatural Oceans” as part of the 2002 Winter Evolutionary Biology Lecture Series at the university. The theme of this year’s series is “Deep Time.” An excerpt from Jackson’s lecture:
“What this talk is about is the sad state of the oceans, and my theme is that if you don’t have a historical perspective you cannot possibly understand what’s going on. And to help you see that, let me give you an analogy. Imagine a woman with a rare disease is away on travel and she collapses and she’s rushed to the hospital. But the doctors don’t know anything of her past. And so without her medical history there’s a risk of misdiagnosis and death, which is much higher than the risk of death at home. And in the same way, if we don’t know an environment’s history we can really screw up because we don’t know how we got there. This is . . . the ‘shifting baseline syndrome.’
“The shifting baseline syndrome is easy to describe. Everybody thinks that ‘natural’ is the way it was when they were a kid. ‘Unnatural’ is everything that’s happened since, which is why older people are more depressing than younger people. And what this talk is about is the shifting baseline syndrome for fishing, which is just one little part of what we’ve done to the oceans. And the reason the focus is on fishing is because it tends to be the first thing we ever did. So we can start out by asking why history’s important for thinking about fishing in the ocean.”

--Kim Cretors

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