His premise is that there has been a steady erosion of nature and the commons over the last several decades, to the point where there those of us who have become accustomed to the new reality and where there is at one generation and possibly two or three, who have known a whole different picture of society and its relation to the biosphere that what was extant in the middle of the last century.

Jensen writes of…

“,,,declining baselines. The phrase describes the process of becom­ing accustomed to, and accepting as nor­mal, worsening conditions. Along with normalization can come a forgetting that things were not always this way.”

As well, he cites Milan Kundera: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

Much of Jensen’s discussion speaks to the disappearance of flora and fauna, to the loss of habitat and to the different nature of our interaction with the living world, though it could apply equally to the changed nature of relations within society. I would cite the state of health care as a prime example, on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border, with health care having become a profit center in the United States, subject to management by large healthcare corporations who insert a huge burden of bureaucracy and profit, as well as largesse to the management class, and stifling premiums for citizens, often with major exclusions from coverage and what seem to be denials of procedure on a whim. A look at an afternoon’s programming on an American television station will say much about the for-profit system: what advertising isn’t for cars, beer or casinos is likely to be for some health care organization. The same is true for the pharmaceutical arm of the health care equation, with a portion of the advertising being aimed at justifying the often outrageous cost of many medications because, we are told, these are R&D pharmaceutical companies. It seems, though, that advertising budgets are substantially larger than the budgets for actual research and development. North of the 49th parallel, we fare only somewhat better with the vestiges of what was once a reasonably competent nationwide health care system that delivered a wide variety of procedures in a timely fashion with relatively low overhead. Once Paul Martin took on the deficit pretty much on the backs of working Canadians by cutting services and transfer payments, the provinces were forced to cut back on what was on offer for patients, and, in many cases, did so with relish and glee, as governments turned a blind eye to the establishment of private, for-profit clinics and dismantled structures like the Theraputics Initiative, aimed at independent evaluation of pharmaceutical products and costs. When our current Prime Minister promised us that we wouldn’t recognize Canada when he got through, he wasn’t exaggerating or engaging in an idle boast, and our destination looks very much like the unregulated quagmire of our American friends and neighbours.

It is hard for us to maintain perspective and to measure change without a firm grasp of what used to be, particularly when, as individuals, we have access only to our personal and anecdotal information, and perceptions of how well the system functioned can vary considerably from place to place and with the influence of different circumstances, both personal and systemic. Sadly, it is hard for us to rely on statistics, given that there has been a campaign by several levels of government to ensure that the information that gets out reflect well on the issuing government, and on any interested parties with whom the government has chosen to work. Statistics Canada used to have a worldwide reputation as a quality provider of data and analysis based on thorough and meaningful methodology. My sense is that this is no longer the case, so we have to rely on our intuitive and personal understanding of whatever changes we perceive.

Changes of the same nature have been wrought in many other domains, from education to the world of work, from protection of water resources to urban sprawl, from foreign policy to basic research. The world I now inhabit is a very different world than that in which I grew up, and there is much that has been done that, for the sake of broader humanity and all the life that shares space with us, it would be better were it undone.

Jensen’s conclusion is an exhortation to gather baseline data now, a baseline against which to measure further erosion, or perhaps, rebuilding of the natural and societal realms, and he cites what might be some indicators to include in the baseline:

“But here is what I want you to do: I want you to go outside. I want you to lis­ ten to the (disappearing) frogs, to watch the (disappearing) fireflies. Even if you’re in a city—especially if you’re in a city—I want you to picture the land as it was be­ fore the land was built over. I want you to research who lived there. I want you to feel how it was then, feel how it wants to be. I want you to begin keeping a calendar of who you see and when: the first day each year you see buttercups, the first day frogs start singing, the last day you see robins in the fall, the first day for grasshoppers. In short, I want you to pay attention.