Jun 5, 2020
Remembering Now
Global Shutdowns and Shifting Baselines
This past May has been balmy and hot in London — an unusual, but welcome break from our typical slow-to-start summers. Like so many other people throughout the world, I was living a life under lockdown. I had spent so much time indoors that it was beginning to wear away at my edges. The new normal was a routine disrupted and tossed abruptly into a strange form of existence. With so much of the world social distancing and spending more time apart, this is undoubtedly a feeling many can relate to. And although I am undoubtedly lucky, in that I can do my job from the safety of my kitchen table, the claustrophobia and feeling of being trapped indoors became relentless. I had to get out.
With a long weekend with continued warm weather ahead, my partner and I made a plan to get up early and go for a ride on our bikes into Central London — a place we hadn’t ventured to for weeks, despite it being but a reasonable walk away. We mounted our bikes and set forth.
The roads we travelled on are ones that I have cycled on for years. They are not quaint backstreets. They are not the meandering paths that roll through Victorian terraced houses, passing corner pubs absorbed by flowering wisteria. They are not casual Sunday ride roads. They are utilitarian. My memory is overrun with countless days in the cold drizzle of winter, cycling alongside hundreds of other commuters to our offices. They are clogged arteries that pump users into the heart of the city at as rapid of a pace as possible. There are blockages and stops along the way — traffic jams, double-decker busses caught between lanes, honking cars, broken traffic lights. But that was then, and this is now.
The streets were far beyond calm — they were abandoned. From the saddles of our bicycles, we could see far into the distance. Not a car, bus or taxi was in sight. Just other cyclists and pedestrians filled the quiet and calm city. As we continued forward and neared the Thames river, passing it via the Westminster Bridge, the solitude heightened. Over twenty minutes of cycling, we had seen fewer cars than I could count on my hand. It was madness, it was unnerving, it was apocalyptic — and yet — it was incredibly pleasant.
Lately, I’ve been contemplating this feeling and like so many others, wondering just what the future will bring. Will the easing out of lockdown be quick and smooth, contact tracing a shocking success, and a vaccine rapidly deployed, thrusting us back to our original routines? Or will life be a rollercoaster with no clear resolution for the foreseeable future? These are questions without answers.
And despite the lack of solutions, the constant uncertainty, the anxiety, I wonder how we might learn from this experience. There are lessons to be remembered everywhere, in every sector of work, and in every way in which we handle crisis, but we as a society have experienced something which will forever change us. But, we don’t entirely know in what ways this may manifest.
In a year, when I am cycling again into my office, on that same busy London street, full of overfilled trucks, speeding black cabs, and idling diesel engines, will I remember the feeling of cycling on that calm spring day while the world braced itself during a catastrophic pandemic? Will I remember the uncomfortable feeling of serenity spiked with the anxiety that a loved one would come down with the illness? Will I remember the air being so clean or the streets being so quiet? Or will it all just be a fever dream as life resumes?
In the mid-1990s, a biologist was exploring a novel idea he had regarding declining US fish populations. He theorised that a subtle, but significant bias was occurring amongst the scientific community that was going unnoticed. He believed that fisheries scientists early in their careers would establish a baseline understanding for fish stock populations and species composition. The scientists would go on to use this baseline to evaluate changes in the marine ecosystems they observed. However, as generations passed and new scientists entered the field, their baselines would be ever-so-slightly different from that of their predecessors. And regrettably, that meant in most cases that the counts would be lower, the populations more homogenous. The biologist, Dr Daniel Pauly, gave this theory a name apropos of this phenomena — shifting baseline syndrome.
Shifting baseline syndrome is a niche eco-psycho-sociological term used to describe a continuous change in the natural environment. It is a change that occurs slowly and often over multiple generations, if not even centuries. This results in the change itself going unnoticed. Shifting baseline syndrome has meaningful repercussions. Take, for instance, the marine ecologies and fish populations that Daniel Pauly brought attention to. In the US, many fish stock populations are determined from counts from only forty years ago. This baseline is problematic, as the 1980s were a time in which marine ecosystems were already being overfished. If the baseline for what is acceptable comes from a time in which populations were already in free-fall, then working to revert and reach this baseline only shifts us slightly back into the ‘safe zone’ — far from where populations once existed. It is a strategy that leaves ecosystems such as these marine ecosystems, constantly faltering apex between comfort and calamity.
The consequences of shifting baseline syndrome go beyond marine ecologies and fish counts. Shifting baseline syndrome can affect people in various other ways which are actively studied today. Consequences of the phenomena include an increased acceptance for environmental degradation and changes to our expectations about what we consider an acceptable state for the natural environment. For those working in the management of natural systems, shifting baseline syndrome may inadvertently result in the setting of inappropriate baselines for conservation, restoration and management.
But what if there was a chance to see beyond our baseline and experience something different? What if instead of aiming for a flawed-state, we as a population could experience an alternative baseline? What if this happened as a result of experiences so different from what we’ve ever known before? Would we embrace the good and do everything we can to preserve this new experience? Or would everything just go back to normal?
When the world went on pause, much of the world has experienced what was once deemed impossible. In March of 2020, observational data showed a 10 to 30% drop in nitrogen dioxide levels for mainland China. In Northern Italy, data showed reductions of nearly 40% below the typical output. Nitrogen dioxide is an airborne pollutant that is created primarily through a combination of vehicles, industrial facilities, and power plants reliant on fossil fuels and prolonged exposure to it can lead to respiratory diseases in humans.
At the same time, additional global observations saw decreases in other harmful pollutants. Widely shared satellite data displayed maps from the past compared with that of the present. The past was an angry cloud of red and dark orange hues looming above the geographic outlines. Whereas the maps from the recent weeks showed a softened image, the colours turned down to shades of only soft yellow and amber.
Photos also shared the experience many were facing. Coming from India, photos were shared of an empty Taj Mahal, the white outlines of the building contrasting with crisp and vibrant blue skies behind it as the smog lifted. Similarly, an image of Mount Everest, located nearly 200 kilometres to the east of Kathmandu, was seen for the first time in living memory. Photos like these made their way across social media, news networks, and between people.
From my home in London, I experienced my own alternative vision. One in which the streets were suddenly quiet and comfortable to cycle on. One in which the air felt cleaner. My fellow cyclists were no longer mainly Lyrca-clad commuters, pressing onto their office at rapid speeds, they were families with young children. They were young couples renting docked bicycles. They all rode on streets once avoided for fear of distracted and speeding drivers. Amongst the chaos, and the uncertainty, and the unease, there is quiet calm.
As the world slowly begins to restart, the future is uncertain from the perspective of the environment, but it is not looking good. Data from China and Italy shows nitrogen dioxide levels beginning to rise back to levels recorded before the lockdown. Vehicular traffic continues to increase in London, and the streets no longer feel empty like they once did. Of course, life does need to return — but will we lose the few good things we had during this terrible time?
I wonder to what degree our upcoming amnesia will affect us. Amongst the chaos, how much of what we’ve experienced will we forget? For a brief and fleeting moment in time, we have experienced a way out — a potential shift to our baselines. We saw that environmental change was possible.
Things will not stay like the way they are now forever. The world cannot eternally stay paused, and the systems that we have built will once again take over, speeding us forwards to a state of uncertainty. But I wonder what we need to remember to make things better in the future? What are we willing to sacrifice to make our planet, our cities, our lives better? What if instead of merely social distancing becoming the new normal, we made safer roads the new normal? Or we considered reduced nitrogen dioxide levels the new normal? Or speaking to and helping out neighbours in need became the new normal?
This is a moment in which for once we don’t need to imagine what a world with reduced air pollution, clearer and quieter skies, and safer streets might look like, but instead, we only need to remember.
References
Anecdotes and the shifting baseline syndrome of fisheries (PDF)
