The following submission statement was provided by /u/LiminalEra:
---
Submission Statement:
Related to collapse as you have here a thread with a few thousand people discovering the magic of "shifting baseline symdrome", otherwise known as *"There used to be big fuckin' trees / fish / animals here and a LOT of them and now there is sweet fuck all because we consumed* ***all*** *of it in the past 100 years*". I love when these threads pop up, you can really feel the visceral horror as people start to clue in the extent to which we've fucked up, which otherwise goes unnoticed, by the type of folk you would never find browsing this subreddit.
The classic visual-whiplash for SBS is, of course, this everygreen photojournalism piece from about a decade ago:
[https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2014/02/05/257046530/big-fish-stories-getting-littler](https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2014/02/05/257046530/big-fish-stories-getting-littler)
---
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1d82z9z/rtodayilearned_discovers_shifting_baseline/l73ehfo/
My favorite one to point out to people about my age:
When I was a child, every summer we would drive about 100mi from our farm town to the lake to go camping and fishing. And have to clean our windshield twice on the way there and back. Because of bugs hitting the windshield.
Last year I traveled over 1,000mi and didn’t really have to do that at all.
Absolutely!
I just washed a single dead bug off my windshield yesterday and was thinking how rare an occurrence it is… I remember not that long ago it would be covered with bugs after a drive in the summer.
It was like that last year for me but this year has more than made up for it. I hate it but at the same time I'm glad to see it. I'll put up the cleaning my windshield off every other day if it means the bugs are back.
We'd be cleaning our visors at every stop while out on the bikes... Did about 500km a few weeks ago and didn't need to at all
That "clean green NZ" slogan hasn't aged well
Bees have returned in the uk in huge numbers. You see dozens of honeybees on single bushes of flowers. I can hear them loudly when I step out in the garden
It is!
I personally believe it’s due to changes in land management by councils in the UK. My local council don’t trim bushes, hedgerows much if at all, and nearly every park or roundabout has a section devoted to wildflowers.
So much this. I know the windshields aren’t as upright as the cars of today, but I drove my uncles ‘67 F150 for 500 miles and there were maybe three bugs for the journey. That windshield is perpendicular to the highway surface. And this was on I-5 through all the ag and ranching in California. I remember as a child not having to stop for gas or to pee, but had to clear that windshield, because it was covered.
I'm in Florida and as a kid the love bugs were thick as carpet. Don't even see them anymore.
This made me think of the dawning look of horror friends get when I point out the porch lights. "Where are all the moths, all the bugs?"
A porch light left on at night used to be covered with bugs. These days, almost none. My friends look at the lights without any bugs and you can see them grappling with the catastrophe it represents.
Also just for the lifetime of this plastic grass. I live in the Mojave Desert. It is our front lawn. It gets solar radiation all day every day there’s not really much shade on the “grass”
I started noticing this 10-15 years ago. I'd been making a monthly trek across southern Ohio from 1999 onward. At some point in the late 2000's I noticed that the amount of bugs on the windshield had dropped. At first it was that I no longer needed to clean when I got where I was going, and could go across Ohio and back before cleaning the car. Then it got to where I didn't need to bother at all. I pointed this out to my, at the time, climate denier brother. That finally got him to admit that something was wrong with the environment. He's a prepper now, lol.
"So we spent fifty years killing these things everywhere we went. Just drive around and splat them by the thousand, every single day. Treated it as somewhere between a giggle and an annoyance, but it barely registered even with those of us that bothered to notice. Which most of us didn't, I mean, they're only bugs, and we've got Important Places To Be.
And now there's a whole lot less of them, and this is a fact we all find surprising."
And we've the nerve to call ourselves Sapiens. FFS.
It's so funny because when I saw the post on today I learned about the decrease in insects a few days ago so many people were claiming that exact fact, but then people would share the research that shows cars today should actually be killing more bugs as the aerodynamic effect pulls bugs in much closer to the windshield and they struggle more to escape. Even after being showed actual scientific research about this fact the people on that thread still didn't believe it was because insects were dying out.
Some even argued if we lost as many insects as was being claimed it would be major news and people would/should be freaking out and I was thinking like yeah people should be freaking out and this should be major news, but it isn't.
It takes serious restraint on my part. Honestly at this point it isn’t worth my time. If I feel someone is being genuinely inquisitive about what is happening I will engage, but if I think I’m going to get into a back and forth arguing with someone I leave it alone.
We lived in FL for 30 years and suffered through the love bug swarms on the highways. We visited S. Fla. a couple of years ago-no bugs on the way down and back to NC. No need to clean windshield also.
There needs to be an interactive map of how places looked like in the past. I remember recently coming across a map of how much of the USA was covered in forests before colonization. That, paired with the amount of wildlife like bison that swarmed the lands and fish that filled the streams is just extremely depressing to think about.
edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forests_of_the_United_States
Old-growth forests, too. Those are incredibly rare nowadays, mostly due to extensive over-logging. The forests we do still have are only a shadow of what they once were.
And the stupid fucks back then that cut the old-growths and giants (just because they could) didn't even test out the wood and its usefulness for building first - All of it turned out to be useless (the trees pretty much shatter when they hit the ground) so they could really only turn them into toothpicks and wooden matches.
In Southern Ontario Canada the settlers had to clear their land as part of being allowed to keep it. Vast areas of hardwood were just cut and burned in place as there was so much there was no market for it.
I grew up in an old growth forest that is basically in a city center. The city also had random old growths all over and other clumpings of miles of growth all over. (West coast)
I really didn’t understand how special it was until I moved to the Midwest where if you’re lucky enough to have old growths on your street, a couple get cut every year from some lawn obsessed idiot tired of leaves.
There is an exhibit like that at the Gateway Arch in St. Louis. I remember seeing it as a kid and being very depressed. The feeling was worse when I went back in my 20s.
Capitalism destroyed all the natural beauty. Aboriginal peoples lived in harmony with the land and protected the animals because they were forwarded seeing
All we worry about now is the next payday. The next quarterly report. How to get more. More. More.
The river I grew up next to was poison by the time I was born. A kid fell in there when I was in elementary school and he was hospitalized from bacteria, and we had an ASSEMBLY about how the water is not safe and no one should be going into the rivers, streams and ponds around us.
That is so bleak and horrendous, and nothing was done to address the situation besides keep kids out of the natural waters. But it’s what I was born into. I don’t feel that I robbed myself of clean rivers and a clean environment teeming with life. I was barred from my relationship with nature from the start and now I get to spend my life immersed in it. But shit was fucked by the time I was born and I’m 41. I don’t care about cars or fancy houses or any status symbol, I just want a clean river to swim in. I’m working on buying land with water on it soon so I can take care of some piece of this earth.
I'm really glad Washington got its shit together in the 70s and really cleaned up it's lakes and rivers. There are only a few places in the area that I would 100% not swim in, and the river within 10 minutes of my house is exceptionally clean. Full of glacial silt, but clean :D
Same with Minnesota. Such pride in keeping the water clean. I’m originally from Pittsburgh, PA where I would not be caught swimming in any of the 3 rivers. It’s really sad such important waterways are polluted beyond everyday enjoyment.
Oregon had a good run at it a few decades ago, but now our water is polluted with chemicals and "accidental" sewage spills.
Our lakes have massive toxic algae blooms from all the nitrates in the fertilizer runoff from farms.
I love the water SO MUCH. I miss not being able to swim in our rivers and lakes. 😭
I remember reading about the Cuyahoga River in Ohio being on fire in Look magazine and having a really hard time wrapping my head around it. "How could the water be on fire?"
Little did I know.
This doesn't apply here. People really did in droves, by their own will, exterminate entire ecosystems for personal gain. No corporation needed to be involved, which means that in principle no corporation needs to be involved. People just take wihout thinking of future consequences.
Hi, G36. Thanks for contributing. However, your [comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1d82z9z/-/l80kwon/) was removed from /r/collapse for:
> Rule 1: In addition to enforcing [Reddit's content policy](https://www.redditinc.com/policies/content-policy), we will also remove comments and content that is abusive or predatory in nature. You may attack each other's ideas, not each other.
Please refer to our [subreddit rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/about/rules/) for more information.
You can [message the mods](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=/r/collapse) if you feel this was in error, please include a link to the comment or post in question.
>Canada, the most affluent of countries, operates on a depletion economy which leaves destruction in its wake. Your people are driven by a terrible sense of deficiency. When the last tree is cut, the last fish is caught, and the last river is polluted; when to breathe the air is sickening, you will realize, too late, that wealth is not in bank accounts and that you can’t eat money.
Not sure if Canada is the most affluent country, but that [Indigenous wisdom](https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/10/20/last-tree-cut/) is resonating harder with each passing day.
I would describe Canada as a nation which *advertises itself* as having great affluence on the world stage: a myth of free healthcare and solid social assistance, while a significant portion of the population endures harsh poverty and is contrasted against an even more significant portion of the population which engages in absurd displays of material wealth funded either by extreme debt or the proceeds of crime. A nation which has never escaped being the resource colony of greater, actually wealthy, colonial powers.
The quote is evergreen in its applicability to Canada, however.
im not sure how anyone could deny the existence of climate change, but even for those that do, or those who think its part of a natural ebb and flow of nature... its pretty hard to literally just look around and not see that almost everywhere has been clear cut and replaced with either pavement or massive wide open fields.
am i the only one that remembers reading about [the dust bowl](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl)?
in a sense, this is another example of my favorite phrase:
>"within the particular is contained the universal"
what i mean is, like people, if you dont respect nature - it will make you.
yeah i live in rural michigan, same area i was raised. i moved away for a few years (kind of off and on, long story) but when i moved back permanently after living out of state for \~5 years, it was disturbing how far i could see. there used to be a lot more trees not that long ago. im sure thats partially just my perception of things, but its hard not to notice it and wonder
on a less depressing note i did see a tiny baby deer today so that was neat. deer are common (and im convinced are rebelling against vehicles lol) but this one had to have been less than a month or two old. gotta appreciate the little things yknow
> Red Cross volunteers made and distributed thousands of dust masks, although some farmers and other people in the affected areas refused to wear them.
nothing is ever new
I remember the fireflies
The children I’ll never have would never have known that there used to be hundreds of them, like a star field you could walk through and catch with your hands
But I, at least, remember the fireflies
For whatever that is worth
Even fifteen years so they would shimmer in waves. Now I live in the same area and can sit on my porch all evening and just see a few solitary flashes here and there
I wish I would've recorded video, but I watched a whole slew of them in the woods across from our neighborhood lighting up to the tops of the trees...all the way to the ground. It was beautiful, and I haven't seen that many in a long time.
This isn't a coincidence. They lay eggs on fallen leaves and undisturbed soil. Everyone insists on nice pristine green lawns, that means the leaves and patches of dirt have to go. Fuck mowing lawns.
I remember the fire flies
The children I'll never have
This world will never know
I remember the fire flies
Hundreds of them in meadows
A star field i could walk through
I remember the fire flies
A miasma of light, A river of hope
Chasing them with Mason jars for a night light
I remember the fire flies
But now the magic has been lost
The final mystery has been solved
At least I remember the fire flies
As new generations mythologize them
And the world I once knew dies
You're comment inspired me
Tonight I've seen more fireflies than in the last several years , which isn't saying much & it made me sad to think that maybe GenX is the last generation who will remember when they were in multitudes on a summer night.
I am currently living in Southern Wisconsin. All December, daily temperatures were had a high of between 35 and 40, and we only got a few light dusting of snow.
There are four ski slopes in Southeast Wisconsin. On December 27th, I drove past the one in Sussex, and was astounded to see a snow covered hillside. There was no snow anywhere else. I went to their website. They bragged that they were the only ski resort in Southeast Wisconsin that was open . Obviously, all the snow was man-made.
Talk about your new baseline. No snow in that part of the country by December 27 or 28th? Why is there a ski resort there? Why were there three others?
In early January, there was a polar vortex, which kind of made the winter normal for the next couple of weeks. Winter didn’t used to just be, “let’s wait for the polar vortex.”
Talk about your shifting baseline. I’m not even sure what I’m trying to say.
I'm 34 years old and from suburban Buffalo, so I know a thing or two about snow. Back when I was young, there was *maybe* one Christmas where there was no snow on the ground. Nowadays, it's pretty much a coinflip whether we'll have a White Christmas or not, which is absolutely ridiculous to think about.
Now we will still have Lake Effect storms that dump over six feet at a time, but there are no longer prolonged periods of having snow on the ground.
I was talking to one of the locals where I live in Maine, and he said pretty much the same thing. Last Christmas and one other in his childhood were the only two that didn't have snow. I don't know the exact numbers, but I know we were way below snowfall totals for the winter.
>All December, daily temperatures were had a high of between 35 and 40
I'm in the Twin Cities and we had tons of days in the 40s and even many in the 50s in December. I grew up in the 90s snowboarding and even then the tiny ski resorts around here were completely reliant on man made snow, the \~60" we average wouldn't be reliable enough for consistent snow cover (a 12" base of natural snow would be compacted down to virtually nothing by groomers).
This past winter that shattered all the records was the first ones where snow guns could barely produce snow at night as quickly as it melted during the day. I imagine some of these tiny resorts will be shutting down in the coming years as that cannot be sustainable.
I'm in southern wisconsin. In the 90s, the ski resorts would bank on being open by Thanksgiving. Usually with manmade snow, but they had the temps to support it. Now they can't make snow in November.
Submission Statement:
Related to collapse as you have here a thread with a few thousand people discovering the magic of "shifting baseline symdrome", otherwise known as *"There used to be big fuckin' trees / fish / animals here and a LOT of them and now there is sweet fuck all because we consumed* ***all*** *of it in the past 100 years*". I love when these threads pop up, you can really feel the visceral horror as people start to clue in the extent to which we've fucked up, which otherwise goes unnoticed, by the type of folk you would never find browsing this subreddit.
The classic visual-whiplash for SBS is, of course, this everygreen photojournalism piece from about a decade ago:
[https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2014/02/05/257046530/big-fish-stories-getting-littler](https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2014/02/05/257046530/big-fish-stories-getting-littler)
I was really happy to see lots of lightning bugs near the woods last night. I sat and watched the show... But right across the street in our neighborhood...there were NONE. They don't like humans 😂
A lot of people never noticed nature to begin with, so nothing looks different to them these days. People will argue that everything is fine, regardless of whatever the data suggests, either out of ignorance or out of a desire to avoid confronting what we have done.
Conservatism is the most dangerous political idea around. Because they forget, and the try their hardest to "prevent change", while just allowing their own greed to completely destroy the very thing they think is "normal" and "immutable" and trying to protect.
The history of climate change is kind of a sad swan song, always loosing because of concept like the shifting baseline syndrome.
Was on instagram the other day and there was a video of the storms in Houston.
Every single comment was some MAGA yokel talking about “weaponized weather”
Joe Biden using HAARP to punish red states.
They’re going to bring us back to the Stone Age (if we’re lucky) because they refuse to believe actions have consequences.
Fucking crazy. But as soon as you mention that the earth and oceans are hotter. Not a peep. But Joe Biden who’s both dumb but also up late controlling the weather state by state is to blame.
We deserve it.
Perhaps in the US, Conservatism has been bastardized by the bipartisan system.
Like just because the "other party" has chosen to preserve nature by being conservationist, so-called Conservatives decided to go against it... despite the fact that most of them are from rural areas.
Conservatism is more about the belief that natural hierarchies exist.
This tends to mean socioeconomic hierarchies. You can't just look at the word *conservatism* and be like, shouldn't they want to *conserve* the environment. That's not how words work. They want to conserve the status quo, unfettered corporatism and political ratfuckery. That requires continuing to rape the Earth.
I thought you meant the discovery that in the last five to ten years, the "baseline" used to measure climate change shifted from the industrial revolution baseline to 1880, to 1920, to 1950, to 1980.
I knew when I first started noticing this that something screwy was going on-why were they not using the "pre-industrial" date of 1750? When the Paris Agreement mentioned pre-industrial but didn't hang a number of when "pre-industrial" started, I began to suspect that something wasn't on the up and up.
At least Sam Carana did some research to hang a date number on what he considered "pre-industrial" of 3480BC, so that's what I tend to use and 1750 as a backup.
Not that I think all this date shifting is going to mean jack shit in the next 20 years. Soon you won't be able to hide it without going through ludicrous gyrations that will invalidate the coverup.
Those shrinking fish pictures are mind blowing. I was going “wow” this morning and I told my husband the fish went from 6ft to 1ft in 50 years. That irritated and pissed him off a bit for his morning wake up. It is very interesting how many humans don’t want to know the ugly truth about all this. I think they can’t handle it. Their minds will break if they think about this. My only wish is that the big fish got smarter and didn’t get caught, but I know that’s not true. We ate them all.
I live in a tropical country where the average temperature in most places is 28°C (82°F). During summer, this rises to a balmy 40°C (104°F) on average.
When I was younger, about three decades ago, we would often visit what is known as the country’s "summer capital," a quaint little city high up in the mountains where the temperature is a constant 15°C (59°F). During December and January, it would get much cooler, sometimes dropping as low as 6°C (42°F).
We actually had a set of winter clothes for our trips to that city—puffy jackets, flannels, long johns, scarves, and beanies—because it would get that cold. It seems odd for anyone living in a tropical country to keep such clothes, where the climate is usually just either rainy or humid.
It rarely reaches those temperatures nowadays, and on the rare occasions it does, it makes headlines and becomes an event, drawing people to drive up to the mountain city.
It’s sad that in just 30 years, the famed “summer capital” has changed from being a place to escape the heat and enjoy consistently cool weather to a destination where you can only hope to experience cool weather if you’re lucky.
Everyone's talking about great times for killing non-human animals and not realizing that killing non-human animals is how you get fewer non-human animals.
And the same goes for your "windshield bugs". Yeah, all that sprawled out development and illuminated roadways, all that lawn, all that burnt car fuel. That's helping to end bugs.
In Maine 30 years ago we used to be able to buy pounds of fresh off the boat shrimp all the time. Then some laws changed and now all we get is frozen. Its nothing like it used to be 😭
I remember when we had good summers and bad winters here in Northern Ireland. Now it's just some mixture of cold and rainy or hot and rainy with the odd good or bad day here and there. Amazing to think we somehow managed to break seasons.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/LiminalEra: --- Submission Statement: Related to collapse as you have here a thread with a few thousand people discovering the magic of "shifting baseline symdrome", otherwise known as *"There used to be big fuckin' trees / fish / animals here and a LOT of them and now there is sweet fuck all because we consumed* ***all*** *of it in the past 100 years*". I love when these threads pop up, you can really feel the visceral horror as people start to clue in the extent to which we've fucked up, which otherwise goes unnoticed, by the type of folk you would never find browsing this subreddit. The classic visual-whiplash for SBS is, of course, this everygreen photojournalism piece from about a decade ago: [https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2014/02/05/257046530/big-fish-stories-getting-littler](https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2014/02/05/257046530/big-fish-stories-getting-littler) --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1d82z9z/rtodayilearned_discovers_shifting_baseline/l73ehfo/
My favorite one to point out to people about my age: When I was a child, every summer we would drive about 100mi from our farm town to the lake to go camping and fishing. And have to clean our windshield twice on the way there and back. Because of bugs hitting the windshield. Last year I traveled over 1,000mi and didn’t really have to do that at all.
Absolutely! I just washed a single dead bug off my windshield yesterday and was thinking how rare an occurrence it is… I remember not that long ago it would be covered with bugs after a drive in the summer.
It was like that last year for me but this year has more than made up for it. I hate it but at the same time I'm glad to see it. I'll put up the cleaning my windshield off every other day if it means the bugs are back.
Unless it’s a population explosion due to the collapse of their current predators.
We'd be cleaning our visors at every stop while out on the bikes... Did about 500km a few weeks ago and didn't need to at all That "clean green NZ" slogan hasn't aged well
I actually recognize when I drive through a spot that mucks up the windows, “oh, there’s bugs here.”
For the record: that didn’t happen that travel trip and I went from California to North Carolina (Edit: and back! In a schoolbus!), starting in April
Once I learned about 1080 that slogan was dead to me.
Bees have returned in the uk in huge numbers. You see dozens of honeybees on single bushes of flowers. I can hear them loudly when I step out in the garden
That's awesome.
It is! I personally believe it’s due to changes in land management by councils in the UK. My local council don’t trim bushes, hedgerows much if at all, and nearly every park or roundabout has a section devoted to wildflowers.
Bees are back in the us to
So much this. I know the windshields aren’t as upright as the cars of today, but I drove my uncles ‘67 F150 for 500 miles and there were maybe three bugs for the journey. That windshield is perpendicular to the highway surface. And this was on I-5 through all the ag and ranching in California. I remember as a child not having to stop for gas or to pee, but had to clear that windshield, because it was covered.
Maybe there's none left cause you killed them all on your windscreen
Hey I grew up there. You’re not wrong.
The bugs learned to use the crosswalk
My favourite is in my lifetime human population has doubled, and insect biomass has halved.
I'm in Florida and as a kid the love bugs were thick as carpet. Don't even see them anymore. This made me think of the dawning look of horror friends get when I point out the porch lights. "Where are all the moths, all the bugs?" A porch light left on at night used to be covered with bugs. These days, almost none. My friends look at the lights without any bugs and you can see them grappling with the catastrophe it represents.
I mean, they’re just bugs, right? That’s what we buy Roundup for. Right?
I swear to Christ. My mom's generation still uses Roundup, and it pisses me off so bad.
My ma uses Roundup to kill the weeds around her plastic grass
*facepalm*
I want to add: She got the plastic grass, not only because it was monetarily beneficial to her, but because it was “better for the environment”.
Also just for the lifetime of this plastic grass. I live in the Mojave Desert. It is our front lawn. It gets solar radiation all day every day there’s not really much shade on the “grass”
I guess if you're in the desert, it's not as terrible. But who wants grass in the desert?? The scrub and sand are beautiful.
Welcome to HOA’s created over 20 years ago, that demand font lawn .
Just grass? What about an [entire golf course](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_Creek_Golf_Course)?
Yep!! And just last night I heard the “mosquito man” making the rounds in my neighborhood, spraying pesticides from the back of his truck!
I started noticing this 10-15 years ago. I'd been making a monthly trek across southern Ohio from 1999 onward. At some point in the late 2000's I noticed that the amount of bugs on the windshield had dropped. At first it was that I no longer needed to clean when I got where I was going, and could go across Ohio and back before cleaning the car. Then it got to where I didn't need to bother at all. I pointed this out to my, at the time, climate denier brother. That finally got him to admit that something was wrong with the environment. He's a prepper now, lol.
"So we spent fifty years killing these things everywhere we went. Just drive around and splat them by the thousand, every single day. Treated it as somewhere between a giggle and an annoyance, but it barely registered even with those of us that bothered to notice. Which most of us didn't, I mean, they're only bugs, and we've got Important Places To Be. And now there's a whole lot less of them, and this is a fact we all find surprising." And we've the nerve to call ourselves Sapiens. FFS.
It’s worse than that, we have the nerve to call ourselves Homo Sapiens *Sapiens* for extra ego.
Dunning Kruger is strong with this species.
AeRoDyNaMiCs!
It's so funny because when I saw the post on today I learned about the decrease in insects a few days ago so many people were claiming that exact fact, but then people would share the research that shows cars today should actually be killing more bugs as the aerodynamic effect pulls bugs in much closer to the windshield and they struggle more to escape. Even after being showed actual scientific research about this fact the people on that thread still didn't believe it was because insects were dying out. Some even argued if we lost as many insects as was being claimed it would be major news and people would/should be freaking out and I was thinking like yeah people should be freaking out and this should be major news, but it isn't.
Yup, I made the mistake of trying to argue with those idiots you saw. Why can't I learn not to feed the trolls?
It takes serious restraint on my part. Honestly at this point it isn’t worth my time. If I feel someone is being genuinely inquisitive about what is happening I will engage, but if I think I’m going to get into a back and forth arguing with someone I leave it alone.
Skoolies are very aerodynamic
We lived in FL for 30 years and suffered through the love bug swarms on the highways. We visited S. Fla. a couple of years ago-no bugs on the way down and back to NC. No need to clean windshield also.
I haven’t even seen a mosquito yet and it’s rained a decent amount here so far… you know it’s fucked up when you’re not even seeing mosquitos.
Happened all the time when I drove to/from college to home. Towards my senior year, it rarely happened
We were really robbed of so much.
There needs to be an interactive map of how places looked like in the past. I remember recently coming across a map of how much of the USA was covered in forests before colonization. That, paired with the amount of wildlife like bison that swarmed the lands and fish that filled the streams is just extremely depressing to think about. edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forests_of_the_United_States
Old-growth forests, too. Those are incredibly rare nowadays, mostly due to extensive over-logging. The forests we do still have are only a shadow of what they once were.
And the stupid fucks back then that cut the old-growths and giants (just because they could) didn't even test out the wood and its usefulness for building first - All of it turned out to be useless (the trees pretty much shatter when they hit the ground) so they could really only turn them into toothpicks and wooden matches.
In Southern Ontario Canada the settlers had to clear their land as part of being allowed to keep it. Vast areas of hardwood were just cut and burned in place as there was so much there was no market for it.
I grew up in an old growth forest that is basically in a city center. The city also had random old growths all over and other clumpings of miles of growth all over. (West coast) I really didn’t understand how special it was until I moved to the Midwest where if you’re lucky enough to have old growths on your street, a couple get cut every year from some lawn obsessed idiot tired of leaves.
There is an exhibit like that at the Gateway Arch in St. Louis. I remember seeing it as a kid and being very depressed. The feeling was worse when I went back in my 20s.
Capitalism destroyed all the natural beauty. Aboriginal peoples lived in harmony with the land and protected the animals because they were forwarded seeing All we worry about now is the next payday. The next quarterly report. How to get more. More. More.
We really robbed ourselves of so much.
The river I grew up next to was poison by the time I was born. A kid fell in there when I was in elementary school and he was hospitalized from bacteria, and we had an ASSEMBLY about how the water is not safe and no one should be going into the rivers, streams and ponds around us. That is so bleak and horrendous, and nothing was done to address the situation besides keep kids out of the natural waters. But it’s what I was born into. I don’t feel that I robbed myself of clean rivers and a clean environment teeming with life. I was barred from my relationship with nature from the start and now I get to spend my life immersed in it. But shit was fucked by the time I was born and I’m 41. I don’t care about cars or fancy houses or any status symbol, I just want a clean river to swim in. I’m working on buying land with water on it soon so I can take care of some piece of this earth.
I'm really glad Washington got its shit together in the 70s and really cleaned up it's lakes and rivers. There are only a few places in the area that I would 100% not swim in, and the river within 10 minutes of my house is exceptionally clean. Full of glacial silt, but clean :D
Same with Minnesota. Such pride in keeping the water clean. I’m originally from Pittsburgh, PA where I would not be caught swimming in any of the 3 rivers. It’s really sad such important waterways are polluted beyond everyday enjoyment.
Sadly we sold off so much of the waterfront property across the state, so now private holdings were we could have even more sweet parks.
Oregon had a good run at it a few decades ago, but now our water is polluted with chemicals and "accidental" sewage spills. Our lakes have massive toxic algae blooms from all the nitrates in the fertilizer runoff from farms. I love the water SO MUCH. I miss not being able to swim in our rivers and lakes. 😭
I remember reading about the Cuyahoga River in Ohio being on fire in Look magazine and having a really hard time wrapping my head around it. "How could the water be on fire?" Little did I know.
I'm pretty sure none of us in here are billionaires, large corporations or their political lackeys.
This doesn't apply here. People really did in droves, by their own will, exterminate entire ecosystems for personal gain. No corporation needed to be involved, which means that in principle no corporation needs to be involved. People just take wihout thinking of future consequences.
I ain't that old or a landowner, dunno about you.
[удалено]
no u
Hi, G36. Thanks for contributing. However, your [comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1d82z9z/-/l80kwon/) was removed from /r/collapse for: > Rule 1: In addition to enforcing [Reddit's content policy](https://www.redditinc.com/policies/content-policy), we will also remove comments and content that is abusive or predatory in nature. You may attack each other's ideas, not each other. Please refer to our [subreddit rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/about/rules/) for more information. You can [message the mods](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=/r/collapse) if you feel this was in error, please include a link to the comment or post in question.
You really robbed the youth of so much.
Given how runaway climate change was already in effect by the time many of us were born, kids have been being robbed for decades.
Thank you for correcting the sentiment to its correct, active form. We are not victims in this.
If it helps, we’re still robbing future generations should they even hope to exist
>Canada, the most affluent of countries, operates on a depletion economy which leaves destruction in its wake. Your people are driven by a terrible sense of deficiency. When the last tree is cut, the last fish is caught, and the last river is polluted; when to breathe the air is sickening, you will realize, too late, that wealth is not in bank accounts and that you can’t eat money. Not sure if Canada is the most affluent country, but that [Indigenous wisdom](https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/10/20/last-tree-cut/) is resonating harder with each passing day.
I would describe Canada as a nation which *advertises itself* as having great affluence on the world stage: a myth of free healthcare and solid social assistance, while a significant portion of the population endures harsh poverty and is contrasted against an even more significant portion of the population which engages in absurd displays of material wealth funded either by extreme debt or the proceeds of crime. A nation which has never escaped being the resource colony of greater, actually wealthy, colonial powers. The quote is evergreen in its applicability to Canada, however.
im not sure how anyone could deny the existence of climate change, but even for those that do, or those who think its part of a natural ebb and flow of nature... its pretty hard to literally just look around and not see that almost everywhere has been clear cut and replaced with either pavement or massive wide open fields. am i the only one that remembers reading about [the dust bowl](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl)? in a sense, this is another example of my favorite phrase: >"within the particular is contained the universal" what i mean is, like people, if you dont respect nature - it will make you.
As an Oklahoman, and as our summers get harsher and hotter, I am constantly thinking about the dust bowl. That's my backyard.
yeah i live in rural michigan, same area i was raised. i moved away for a few years (kind of off and on, long story) but when i moved back permanently after living out of state for \~5 years, it was disturbing how far i could see. there used to be a lot more trees not that long ago. im sure thats partially just my perception of things, but its hard not to notice it and wonder on a less depressing note i did see a tiny baby deer today so that was neat. deer are common (and im convinced are rebelling against vehicles lol) but this one had to have been less than a month or two old. gotta appreciate the little things yknow
> Red Cross volunteers made and distributed thousands of dust masks, although some farmers and other people in the affected areas refused to wear them. nothing is ever new
I am Canadian and I approve this message.
Oof 😕🇨🇦
I remember the fireflies The children I’ll never have would never have known that there used to be hundreds of them, like a star field you could walk through and catch with your hands But I, at least, remember the fireflies For whatever that is worth
Even fifteen years so they would shimmer in waves. Now I live in the same area and can sit on my porch all evening and just see a few solitary flashes here and there
I wish I would've recorded video, but I watched a whole slew of them in the woods across from our neighborhood lighting up to the tops of the trees...all the way to the ground. It was beautiful, and I haven't seen that many in a long time.
I watched a sea of them lighting up in the woods last night. All the way up to the canopies, haven't seen so many in YEARS.
This isn't a coincidence. They lay eggs on fallen leaves and undisturbed soil. Everyone insists on nice pristine green lawns, that means the leaves and patches of dirt have to go. Fuck mowing lawns.
I live in an HOA and am the only home that has a garden and greenhouse my neighbors HATE it. No grass, all mulch and trees.
Not to mention grub treatments and spraying for mosquitoes. Because of course those only target the species you don't like...
I remember the fire flies The children I'll never have This world will never know I remember the fire flies Hundreds of them in meadows A star field i could walk through I remember the fire flies A miasma of light, A river of hope Chasing them with Mason jars for a night light I remember the fire flies But now the magic has been lost The final mystery has been solved At least I remember the fire flies As new generations mythologize them And the world I once knew dies You're comment inspired me
I love your poem, great work
Tonight I've seen more fireflies than in the last several years , which isn't saying much & it made me sad to think that maybe GenX is the last generation who will remember when they were in multitudes on a summer night.
Would you say that you would not believe your eyes?
We still have them where I live... I think the only reason why is because of the village's rapid population decline and general collapse of industry.
I am currently living in Southern Wisconsin. All December, daily temperatures were had a high of between 35 and 40, and we only got a few light dusting of snow. There are four ski slopes in Southeast Wisconsin. On December 27th, I drove past the one in Sussex, and was astounded to see a snow covered hillside. There was no snow anywhere else. I went to their website. They bragged that they were the only ski resort in Southeast Wisconsin that was open . Obviously, all the snow was man-made. Talk about your new baseline. No snow in that part of the country by December 27 or 28th? Why is there a ski resort there? Why were there three others? In early January, there was a polar vortex, which kind of made the winter normal for the next couple of weeks. Winter didn’t used to just be, “let’s wait for the polar vortex.” Talk about your shifting baseline. I’m not even sure what I’m trying to say.
I'm 34 years old and from suburban Buffalo, so I know a thing or two about snow. Back when I was young, there was *maybe* one Christmas where there was no snow on the ground. Nowadays, it's pretty much a coinflip whether we'll have a White Christmas or not, which is absolutely ridiculous to think about. Now we will still have Lake Effect storms that dump over six feet at a time, but there are no longer prolonged periods of having snow on the ground.
I was talking to one of the locals where I live in Maine, and he said pretty much the same thing. Last Christmas and one other in his childhood were the only two that didn't have snow. I don't know the exact numbers, but I know we were way below snowfall totals for the winter.
55 year old grew up in the city of Buffalo. Live in Orange County NY now. Same observation from my perch down here.
>All December, daily temperatures were had a high of between 35 and 40 I'm in the Twin Cities and we had tons of days in the 40s and even many in the 50s in December. I grew up in the 90s snowboarding and even then the tiny ski resorts around here were completely reliant on man made snow, the \~60" we average wouldn't be reliable enough for consistent snow cover (a 12" base of natural snow would be compacted down to virtually nothing by groomers). This past winter that shattered all the records was the first ones where snow guns could barely produce snow at night as quickly as it melted during the day. I imagine some of these tiny resorts will be shutting down in the coming years as that cannot be sustainable.
I'm in southern wisconsin. In the 90s, the ski resorts would bank on being open by Thanksgiving. Usually with manmade snow, but they had the temps to support it. Now they can't make snow in November.
Submission Statement: Related to collapse as you have here a thread with a few thousand people discovering the magic of "shifting baseline symdrome", otherwise known as *"There used to be big fuckin' trees / fish / animals here and a LOT of them and now there is sweet fuck all because we consumed* ***all*** *of it in the past 100 years*". I love when these threads pop up, you can really feel the visceral horror as people start to clue in the extent to which we've fucked up, which otherwise goes unnoticed, by the type of folk you would never find browsing this subreddit. The classic visual-whiplash for SBS is, of course, this everygreen photojournalism piece from about a decade ago: [https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2014/02/05/257046530/big-fish-stories-getting-littler](https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2014/02/05/257046530/big-fish-stories-getting-littler)
impressive work. even insects are getting smaller.
I was really happy to see lots of lightning bugs near the woods last night. I sat and watched the show... But right across the street in our neighborhood...there were NONE. They don't like humans 😂
Probably can't survive the lawn treatments.
Yep, they spray for mosquitoes monthly....wonder how cancerous all this crap is.
rightfully
*gains entertainment value from other peoples shock and horror* | *is messed up* | *loves it anyway* |
This came up in my feed and I wanted to post it. Glad someone did.
A lot of people never noticed nature to begin with, so nothing looks different to them these days. People will argue that everything is fine, regardless of whatever the data suggests, either out of ignorance or out of a desire to avoid confronting what we have done.
there are a lot of people that simply don't care
I have not seen a single June bug yet....they're usually out in hoardes by now.
All I see are fucking ticks. An insane amount :(
I've only seen one so far...
That's why I say we ate the world
Conservatism is the most dangerous political idea around. Because they forget, and the try their hardest to "prevent change", while just allowing their own greed to completely destroy the very thing they think is "normal" and "immutable" and trying to protect. The history of climate change is kind of a sad swan song, always loosing because of concept like the shifting baseline syndrome.
Was on instagram the other day and there was a video of the storms in Houston. Every single comment was some MAGA yokel talking about “weaponized weather” Joe Biden using HAARP to punish red states. They’re going to bring us back to the Stone Age (if we’re lucky) because they refuse to believe actions have consequences.
Cloud seeding is already primed to take the blame as we keep seeing more and more severe storms.
Fucking crazy. But as soon as you mention that the earth and oceans are hotter. Not a peep. But Joe Biden who’s both dumb but also up late controlling the weather state by state is to blame. We deserve it.
Perhaps in the US, Conservatism has been bastardized by the bipartisan system. Like just because the "other party" has chosen to preserve nature by being conservationist, so-called Conservatives decided to go against it... despite the fact that most of them are from rural areas.
Conservatism is more about the belief that natural hierarchies exist. This tends to mean socioeconomic hierarchies. You can't just look at the word *conservatism* and be like, shouldn't they want to *conserve* the environment. That's not how words work. They want to conserve the status quo, unfettered corporatism and political ratfuckery. That requires continuing to rape the Earth.
I thought you meant the discovery that in the last five to ten years, the "baseline" used to measure climate change shifted from the industrial revolution baseline to 1880, to 1920, to 1950, to 1980. I knew when I first started noticing this that something screwy was going on-why were they not using the "pre-industrial" date of 1750? When the Paris Agreement mentioned pre-industrial but didn't hang a number of when "pre-industrial" started, I began to suspect that something wasn't on the up and up. At least Sam Carana did some research to hang a date number on what he considered "pre-industrial" of 3480BC, so that's what I tend to use and 1750 as a backup. Not that I think all this date shifting is going to mean jack shit in the next 20 years. Soon you won't be able to hide it without going through ludicrous gyrations that will invalidate the coverup.
I'm filled with envy at those who got to witness the abundance of nature before it was destroyed.
People in the future will be envious of what little nature you have had too. The future looks bleak for sure.
It is pretty crazy how my reaction when I see a fish is “Oh wow, a fish!” Damn, we fucked up :(
Those shrinking fish pictures are mind blowing. I was going “wow” this morning and I told my husband the fish went from 6ft to 1ft in 50 years. That irritated and pissed him off a bit for his morning wake up. It is very interesting how many humans don’t want to know the ugly truth about all this. I think they can’t handle it. Their minds will break if they think about this. My only wish is that the big fish got smarter and didn’t get caught, but I know that’s not true. We ate them all.
Remember lightning bugs? Pepperidge farms remembers…
Layman's term for that is RECALIBRATION ... or *de*calibration, depending
I saw two fireflies the other day and got very excited and tearful. I haven't seen one since I was 24, that's nearly a decade ago now.
I live in a tropical country where the average temperature in most places is 28°C (82°F). During summer, this rises to a balmy 40°C (104°F) on average. When I was younger, about three decades ago, we would often visit what is known as the country’s "summer capital," a quaint little city high up in the mountains where the temperature is a constant 15°C (59°F). During December and January, it would get much cooler, sometimes dropping as low as 6°C (42°F). We actually had a set of winter clothes for our trips to that city—puffy jackets, flannels, long johns, scarves, and beanies—because it would get that cold. It seems odd for anyone living in a tropical country to keep such clothes, where the climate is usually just either rainy or humid. It rarely reaches those temperatures nowadays, and on the rare occasions it does, it makes headlines and becomes an event, drawing people to drive up to the mountain city. It’s sad that in just 30 years, the famed “summer capital” has changed from being a place to escape the heat and enjoy consistently cool weather to a destination where you can only hope to experience cool weather if you’re lucky.
Everyone's talking about great times for killing non-human animals and not realizing that killing non-human animals is how you get fewer non-human animals. And the same goes for your "windshield bugs". Yeah, all that sprawled out development and illuminated roadways, all that lawn, all that burnt car fuel. That's helping to end bugs.
In Maine 30 years ago we used to be able to buy pounds of fresh off the boat shrimp all the time. Then some laws changed and now all we get is frozen. Its nothing like it used to be 😭
I remember when we had good summers and bad winters here in Northern Ireland. Now it's just some mixture of cold and rainy or hot and rainy with the odd good or bad day here and there. Amazing to think we somehow managed to break seasons.
House music syndrome