It wasn't dawn, but it wasn't that long after, either. I remember the light, the edgespace, the quiet vastness in the turning, where the nocturnals were just now going to sleep, and the day walkers like us were beginning their first steps of the morning.

I can still feel those first few footsteps, descending slightly down the wild-grass slope, large kopje on our left as we stepped into the trail-less savannah of the wild Serengeti. Each step was mindful, a curious mixture of looking down and into the waist-high grasses to make sure what we stepped on was not a snake–-especially at the beginning when the quickened pulse had yet to settle–-and also a sprinkle of looking out, into the grassland and slightly forested spaces.

In the beginning, my sensual experiences were so stilted–-from travel, from life indoors in winter in Colorado, from the urbanity of modernity which brings me to a computer daily. By the mid-morning, I was learning to feel again–-to see, smell, taste, touch, and hear the landscape and her wildlings. Never in my life had I been so ensconced in such a thriving, vibrant, wild, and untamed ecosystem. This was in January, and when I arrived home to the vibrant and wild landscapes of mountainous Colorado, I thought to myself, "Where is everybody?" I meant, of course, the more-than-humans.

I keep remembering this moment from when I was a teenager, this powerful experience with my mom. Much is lost in the haze of time, but I remember the sunlight and riparian landscape, our two beautiful Malamutes, and my mom. She had stopped walking, and I felt her breathe: "Can you imagine it?" Cliffs and forest terrain bright across the river, the grassland space before us, rocks by the shore, tall deciduous trees all around, spring's veriditas emerging. "What mom?"

"Can you just imagine what this place would have been like hundreds of years ago? All the animals, the wildlife, the wild plants?" I couldn't. Now, thirty years later, I am still profoundly moved by the salience of her inquiry.

I did not know ecopsychology, ecology, and environmental science at that time, topics which have been the focus of my graduate work for over a decade now, but in her shared awareness, something stirred deeply inside.

Our amnesia is rather drastic and alarming to consider: we cannot really know what the wild lifeworld was like prior to Homo sapiens' major modifications and adjustments primarily because we, as a species, did not stop and consider taking baseline measurements.

This is often referred to in the science literature as shifting baseline syndrome (Maloof, 2016), or more generally in everyday parlance as ecological amnesia. As Maloof (2016) explained, "We don't even know what forests should look like anymore" (p. 80). Pyle (1993) called this phenomenon an extinction of experience.

Two prominent scholars in ecopsychology stated it thusly: "Part of the answer is that you can’t miss what you don’t know and you can’t know what you have never experienced. In turn, huge downward shifts in experience occur across generations due to shifting environmental baselines" (Kahn & Hasbach, 2012, p. 318).

This is a very difficult pattern for us to see and understand–-particularly if we have the opportunity to visit a wilderness or unmodified environment, and even more so if we come from an urban complex–-because to us, it may appear lush, vibrant, and teeming with wildness. In many ways, while that may be true, who is there, which more-than-humans are currently vibrant, may be very different from the ecosystem prior to human impact.

Coming to terms with our ecological amnesia is one of two interlocking issues that Parker (2017) suggested we must contend with. The second ecological issue is our blindness to hidden ecological patterns that drive changes which we cannot see (p. m161). In one of the most cited and seminal ecological studies, Robert T. Paine removed ochre sea stars from a small area of intertidal coastline in the Pacific Northwest; this led to a rapid restructuring of the ecosystem as mussels moved in and depleted biodiversity (Parker, 2017, p. m164). This manipulative experiment reshaped ecological science and displayed with rigorous results the second and third-order effects the removal of a single species from the web of life can have.

The interconnectedness of ecosystems with their webs of relations is a labyrinthine puzzle of complexity. While a few cultures in the world still live in close proximity to earth-based ways of knowing and tend to that web in daily life, globalization and the dominant system of human trade networks have left almost no place on the planet untouched.

Yet, we cannot go back and undo the actions of our ancestors, of culture, of growth. Nor will shaming ourselves return the western black rhino, the passenger pigeon, the dodo bird, or many other now-extinct earthlings. So what do we do?

This is the question I am taking with me as I move through my everyday life, a question that evokes an inner calling. Can I let the grief of loss awaken me to the preciousness of all who are here now? That is my hope, and I couple it with taking a deeper interest in how my actions today may affect our shared baseline going forward. 

I am buoyed, too, because I know it really matters. I know and believe that each of us, human and more-than-human, belongs and is intrinsically valuable to this great and beautiful home and cosmos. And I believe in this ongoing evolution of consciousness transpiring with and within our human species. The call of the earth is growing more urgent every day.

Will we answer it?

References

Kahn, P. H. Jr., & Hasbach, P. H. (2012). Afterward. In P. H. Khan, Jr., & P. H. Hasbach (Eds.), Ecopsychology: Science, totems, and the technological species (pp. 309–322). MIT Press.

Maloof, J. (2016). Nature's temples: A natural history of old-growth forests (Rev. ed.). Princeton University Press.

Parker, I. M. (2017). Remembering in our amnesia, seeing in our blindness. In A. Tsing, H. Swanson, E. Gan, & N. Burbandt (Eds.), Arts of living on a damaged planet (pp. m155–m167). University of Minnesota Press.

Pyle, R. M. (1993). The thunder tree: Lessons from an urban wildland. Houghton Mifflin.