New book by local author tackles ‘shifting baseline syndrome’ for environmental conditions.
My next book is set to publish in just a few days, and there’s one question that I keep getting from just about everyone I talk to: Why did you write this book?
When it comes to “The Earth Said Remember Me: How to Revive Our Memories and Restore the Planet,” there are two answers. One is cerebral. The other is a bit more West Coast woo-woo. And they are both integral to how this book came to be.
First, the cerebral. “The Earth Said Remember Me” is all about the idea of “shifting baseline syndrome.” The clinical term, like something from psychiatry’s manual of disorders, describes the ways in which we keep getting used to ever-degrading environmental conditions — how easily we accommodate and adapt to loss. It’s a powerful idea, one of those concepts that helps us to see the world, and some years ago I noticed that various environmental authors, no matter their subject, kept coming back to it.
In book after book, shifting baseline syndrome would be given a brief cameo, a two- or three-page detour as the author would make a swerve to unpack the idea and explain how it connected to their specific topic and concern. There was shifting baseline syndrome in George Monbiot’s “Feral,” a book about rewilding, as Monbiot bemoaned how “our memories have been wiped as clean as the land.” There it was again in Jon Mooallem’s book, “Wild Ones,” about humans’ conflicted relationships with wildlife: “So many of the ecosystems … are, in fact, mostly ruins.”
I spotted shifting baseline syndrome in Melanie Challenger’s “On Extinction,” in which she called the intellectual concept “such a hot topic in research.” Lydia Millet touched the hacky sack in “We Loved It All.” Shifting baseline syndrome has become like the Forrest Gump of environmental letters, always there at the edge of the frame, lurking above history.
Someone should write a whole book for a lay audience about this concept, I felt. That person should be me, was my next thought.
Now, the woo-woo. Five years ago, my family and I were coming back from a weekend getaway to Orcas Island, and as we drove north up Chuckanut Drive back to our home in Bellingham, we passed over Colony Creek near the community of Bow. Just as we went over the bridge there, a big bald eagle zoomed above the car. It was January, the season when bald eagles gather in big numbers across the Skagit plain, and the sighting wasn’t unusual. But something happened in that moment: a visitation from the muse. Time twisted and warped and I felt myself pulled into the distant future as I wondered, What will my daughter know of bald eagles?
When I was growing up in the 1980s, bald eagles were still listed as endangered and vanishingly rare. Today, they are common; my daughter and I have even spotted them at the dump in Ferndale. The eagle seemed a perfect example of how baselines can shift, of how our experiences of the natural world are based on our expectations of what is “normal.” It was, more importantly, an example of how sometimes baselines can shift in virtuous directions, of how we can lose sight of abundance just as easily as we can ignore loss.
I’ve spent the years since unpacking those ideas. I’ve crisscrossed the United States speaking with citizen scientists, butterfly lovers, bird watchers, mountaineers and Native peoples who are working to hold onto ecological memories as a way of sustaining the urgency for environmental action. What I’ve found — what you’ll discover if you read the book — is that memory is most valuable for the ways in which it informs our imagination. Truly, our ecological imaginings and our idea of what is possible will only be as fertile and as wild as our remembrances of Earth’s past.
So, folks: There’s your answer. I wrote the book with my head and a whole lot of heart.
Jason Dove Mark will appear at Village Books in Fairhaven on Thursday, July 16.
—By Jason Dove Mark
Jason Dove Mark is a Bellingham-based environmental journalist. He is the author of “Satellites in the High Country: Searching for the Wild in the Age of Man.” His next book, “The Earth Said Remember Me,” will be published summer 2026 by Norton.