Shifting baselines and the second watershed

In 1995, French-born Canadian fisheries scientist Daniel Pauly gave a name to a quiet kind of forgetting. Each generation of fisheries scientists, he observed, judged the current state of fish populations against what it had found when those scientists started their careers — a truly short-sighted baseline:

Essentially, this syndrome has arisen because each generation of fisheries scientists accepts as a baseline the stock size and species composition that occurred at the beginning of their careers, and uses this to evaluate changes. When the next generation starts its career, the stocks have further declined, but it is the stocks at that time that serve as a new baseline.

Pauly, “Anecdotes and the Shifting Baseline Syndrome of Fisheries,” 430

The result, Pauly wrote, is “a gradual accommodation of the creeping disappearance of resource species.” He called it the shifting baseline syndrome.¹ It’s a terribly truthful version of the well-known (and not scientifically accurate) “boiling-frog syndrome,” which has the virtue of comparing us to frogs who don’t know they’re being boiled if their environment is heated slowly enough.

Tools have baselines too

Illich’s second watershed aims to be a fixed baseline that allows us to identify the harm ahead if it’s crossed. A tool that once extended the things we could do becomes one we cannot do without, and our knowledge and skills atrophy. Monopolists of such a tool may relate to us as addicts and slaves.

A decline toward eventual ruin and collapse is hard to see, because each generation is already, so to speak, living in the ruins of a healthier past. A child who grows up where towns are built for cars takes that radical and antihuman monopoly for the natural order of things.²

Three points on one line

The remedy is to keep three points in view at once: what was promised, what came before, and what is so now. (Kind of like the Norse Fates, the Norns.)

Take the private car —

• What was promised. In November 1895 the first issue of The Horseless Age promised that the horseless vehicle would make city streets quieter, less congested and safer.³ In 1924 Henry Ford argued in the Bismarck Tribune that the automobile could help bring universal peace.⁴
• What came before. In 1910 Canada had 9,158 registered motor vehicles for about 6,988,000 people: about one for every 760.⁵ In 1969, 48 per cent of American children from kindergarten to grade 8 usually walked or cycled to school, and 12 per cent were driven.⁶
• What came after. By 1922 motor vehicles were killing more than 15,000 Americans a year, 4,219 of them children.⁷ By 1975 Canada had about one motor vehicle for every two people.⁸ By 2009, 13 per cent of American children walked or cycled to school, and 45 per cent were driven.⁹

None of these figures says the old days were better. Horses fouled the streets too, and walking to school was not always safe. What the figures do is fix the reference points, so that the change can be measured instead of forgotten.

What Counterfoil will do

• Every scored record will carry a dated, sourced Before: the situation before the tool took over. We start with the private car and the bicycle’s lineage.
• Where we can, a record will also say what was promised, drawing on sources like the Techno-Optimism Archive, a dataset of dated press promises for new technologies, each linked to its original page.¹⁰
• Records keep their score history. When a score changes, the old one stays on the record with its date, so the catalogue cannot quietly shift its own baseline.
• Lineages show what each stage replaced: the boneshaker, the high wheeler, the safety bicycle.
• When the intake form opens, it will ask contributors what a tool was like before they knew it. Pauly began with the memories of older fishers; we can begin with ours.

A baseline that is written down, dated and sourced does not shift.

Notes

1. Daniel Pauly, “Anecdotes and the Shifting Baseline Syndrome of Fisheries,” Trends in Ecology & Evolution 10, no. 10 (1995): 430, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0169-5347(00)89171-5. ↩︎
2. Ivan Illich, Energy and Equity (London: Calder & Boyars, 1974), sec. “The Radical Monopoly of Industry.” ↩︎
3. The Horseless Age 1, no. 1 (November 1895): 8, HathiTrust, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015080361374; summarized in Krystian Łukasik, Techno-Optimism Archive, TOA-CAR-1895-001, https://technooptimism.org/archive/automobile/toa-car-1895-001. ↩︎
4. Henry Ford, “War,” Bismarck Tribune, February 7, 1924, 4; summarized in Łukasik, Techno-Optimism Archive, TOA-CAR-1924-001, https://technooptimism.org/archive/automobile/toa-car-1924-001. ↩︎
5. Statistics Canada, “Series T147–194: Motor Vehicle Registrations, by Province, 1903 to 1975,” table T147–194a, and “Series A1: Estimated Population of Canada, 1867 to 1977,” in Historical Statistics of Canada, 2nd ed. (Statistics Canada, 1983), https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/11-516-x/sectiont/4147444-eng.htm. The vehicles per person are our arithmetic from the two tables. ↩︎
6. National Center for Safe Routes to School, How Children Get to School: School Travel Patterns from 1969 to 2009 (National Center for Safe Routes to School, 2011), 2, 4, https://www.pedbikeinfo.org/pdf/NHTS_school_travel_report_2011_0.pdf. ↩︎
7. National Conference on Street and Highway Safety, Guides to Traffic Safety (National Conference on Street and Highway Safety, 1934), 7, 9, https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/73359. ↩︎
8. Statistics Canada, “Series T147–194” and “Series A1.” ↩︎
9. National Center for Safe Routes to School, How Children Get to School, 2, 4. ↩︎
10. Krystian Łukasik, Techno-Optimism Archive Dataset, version 1.1 (Zenodo, 2026), https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20395896. ↩︎