Shifting Baselines, Shifting Sands

by Rod Taylor, CHP Environment Critic Every culture and every discipline uses tools to evaluate progress and to define the normal and natural state of affairs. People assess new developments and new behaviours based on their current understanding of existing conditions, policies and practices. In 1995, Daniel Pauly, a fisheries biologist at UBC, coined the phrase “shifting baselines” to describe the incremental lowering of standards as succeeding generations compare existing conditions with those that existed previously but only with those they can remember, those within their own lifetimes. He specifically applied the phrase to environmental conditions and primarily fish stocks. He and researchers following in his path, including Randy Olson, a marine biologist from USC, have made a strong case that degraded levels of fish stocks and other environmental conditions fail to arouse appropriate public concern or action because people are only comparing recent developments with conditions which were already unsatisfactory. Randy Olson gives this example: The number of salmon in the Columbia River system today is twice that recorded in the 1930s. This sounds very good. However, the number of salmon in that system in the 1930s was only 10% of the number recorded in the 1800s. If we use the level of stocks found in the 1930s as our baseline for evaluating change, we and future generations will be unable to assess the health of salmon stocks in that system. We would be basing our assessment on a baseline that had shifted. This concept has been applied to a number of issues and would certainly apply to the conditions surrounding Canadian families today. The cost of homes, the cost of gasoline, annual earnings and the percentage of Canadian families on farms are all items that could be measured and compared with those numbers in former years. More importantly, rates of divorce, incidences of STDs, percentages of single-parent homes, frequency of church attendance, societal norms regarding sexual orientation and the killing of preborn children, attacks on personal freedoms---these are all trends which may be shocking in the short term but are positively appalling when examined over the history of our nation. Indeed, public memory sometimes appears to be very short. In 1999, Parliament voted overwhelmingly against same-sex marriage but for many Canadians the baseline has become the 2003 parliamentary approval of same-sex marriage following the misleading rulings by courts in three provinces. Children who were in grade three in 1999 are graduating this year in a nation where sexual deviancy is protected by the courts and promoted as normal in many public school classrooms. Children in grade three today have never known a Canada where traditional marriage values were considered the baseline. The sports analogy of “moving the goalposts” has often been used to describe the changing of rules, the redefining of normative behaviour and the departure from traditional societal patterns and expectations. “Shifting baselines” could be applied to sports as well, using the analogy of baseball. Imagine a baseball player trying to reach third base only to discover that third base had moved. If the umpire and the fans were to judge that player’s performance based on the new baseline rather than on the original baseline, he would not only be ruled “out” but would likely be ridiculed for his apparent failure to follow the rules. So it is with today’s attacks on Christian values---attacks in the courts, in the media and in the bureaucratic institutions we call government. Today we have schoolteachers being punished for challenging the sexual indoctrination of children, commissioners of oaths being fined and dismissed for refusing to issue marriage licences to same-sex couples, something that was illegal until 2003, pastors being ordered not to preach and teach biblical views about homosexuality and grandmothers being arrested for praying too close to abortion clinics. The tendency of people and societies to forget the distant past could also be described by the analogy of “shifting sands”. Those peoples who live in sandy deserts know that the relentless winds can quickly cover their tracks. As they seek to find their way home or to a life-sustaining oasis, they must have other landmarks because the shifting sands of the desert hide the past and obliterate their path. We do have other landmarks. We have the Bible and the clear instructions it contains for moral living, family structure and personal holiness. Our baseline must not become the standards of the fallen society around us but the unchanging standards of Almighty God. We have a plumbline that does not fail and does not change. We need to hold fast to the Word of God. Only then can we hope to set a standard for this generation and shine a light on the path of those who will follow us. Remove not the ancient landmark, which thy fathers have set. Proverbs 22:28