In my father's 100th year of life we spent lots of time driving around on local back roads. It was one of the few activities he could enjoy, Alzheimer's and a life of physical labor having taken their toll. As we traveled the hills and hollers he would often ask where all the people were, remembering earlier times when farming was the main economic activity. The empty countryside seemed normal to me since I knew most of the inhabitants worked in town, or beyond at the plants that lined the Ohio River. These drives always made me think about the enormous changes in the landscape he had witnessed in his lifetime.
Back in his early days, the smoothly paved roads we now travelled were most likely dirt tracks or even nonexistent. There were no doubt fewer trees then, but many more cattle, and the sprawling farms had yet to be divvied up for sale to professionals with thoughts of McMansions dancing in their heads. Beyond noticing the lack of people, my father rarely commented on the immense changes in the landscape, due to the disease that had ravaged his memory. My own long term memory, still relatively intact at just over half past the century mark, seemed little better than his. While I knew that the scenery was very different when I was a child, it was hard to remember how things had looked. This inability to mentally picture the recent past has a name: landscape amnesia.
Nowhere is this malady more obvious to me than on the state road that connects the semi-rural area where I grew up with our small city. At age nine I outgrew the tiny local elementary school and begin riding the bus into town to a slightly larger grade school, traveling this highway every weekday during the school year. Logic and photos may tell me that the scenery was radically different in the seventies, with more cornfields and fewer car dealerships and shopping plazas, but I have precious few memories to call up from this time. This so-called development was so gradual--one tree cut down or one old farm house demolished at a time--that by the time I graduated high school the route to school was choked with buildings and parking lots, yet seemed unremarkable. This "developed" state was the new normal.
Combine the changes erased in my memory by landscape amnesia, with the huge transformations my father and his ancestors witnessed in their lifetimes, and you get a kind of generational forgetting. Over time it becomes impossible to know how things looked, or what was "normal" in the past. Nerdy academic folk call this shifting baseline syndrome. It's not just a concept for lofty academic papers; it has real life consequences for anyone involved in ecological restoration.
Author Ben Goldfarb discusses shifting baseline syndrome in Eager:The Surprising Secret Life of Beavers and Why they Matter. He writes that it is "a form of long-term amnesia that causes each successive generation to accept its own degraded ecology as normal." Much of Goldfarb's book describes successful beaver reintroduction projects across the country; but in California, proponents of using beavers for ecosystem restoration--Beaver Believers--encountered pushback. The reason? According the California Department of Fish and Wildlife the beaver wasn't native to most of the state. Goldfarb explains that by the time biologists arrived in the state with exploration parties of Europeans, trappers had already been and gone, taking tens of thousands of pelts, and leaving a landscape devoid of the rodents. The early naturalists dutifully recorded their observations of wildlife, which did not include beavers, and the belief that beavers didn't belong there became commonly accepted. The forests and rivers probably appeared pristine and beautiful to the explorers--natural, you might say--though in reality they were much drier and less biologically diverse than a few generations earlier. The baseline had shifted to the new normal of a beaverless California, which persisted into the 21st century.
This particular story has a happy ending for those interested in restoration work. Around 2010, Beaver Believers, including trained scientists and laypeople frustrated with their inability to move relocation projects forward, did a deep dive into history and found plenty of evidence showing the ubiquity of beavers in the state prior to arrival of Europeans. It was actually a no-brainer considering beaver place names were everywhere and all the coastal Native American tribes had a word for beaver. But if the state of California was so easily misled about its native species, what other mistakes are we making in our assumptions about what constitutes pristine wilderness?
Accepting the fact that beavers used to inhabit most of the continent doesn't necessarily bring understanding of how they influenced landscapes. Goldfarb's book includes tales from early explorers and colonists describing rivers and streams choked with dams; vast swamps and treacherous stilted up meadows; intricate networks of ponds and islands amidst braided water courses. I've done quite a bit of backcountry hiking in the eastern U.S, but with the exception of northern New England, I haven't come across these vast soggy areas. There's a reason for that: They aren't there anymore. When beavers removed, so was an almost unimaginable amount of stored water.
Without beaver dams, docile rivers and streams stayed within their banks rather than spreading out to form marshes and swamps. Drained meadows with rich deposited soil became prime farmland. The Swamp Land Acts of the mid 1800s empowered states to drain many remaining wetlands to "reclaim" the land for agriculture, thus removing even more stored water. Long story short, most of North America is much drier than it was before Europeans arrived, but we have accepted this as normal because we don't remember how it used to be. The impact "remembering" might have on how we solve our environmental problems will have to be covered in another post. One question to ponder for now: What if we stopped blaming climate change alone for increasingly severe droughts and floods, and considered the immeasurable amount of stored water and flood mitigation capacity that once existed? (Hint: We might actually come up with some solutions.)
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