Shifting Baseline Syndrome
“If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid.” -Epictetus
Where are y'all?
Shifting abides. Accepting shifting baseline syndrome, the flocks of my childhood are gone: rafter, parliament, gaggle, covey, murder, descent, muster of peacock no more. No schools, shivers, or hovers, just oceans empty of oxygen. Did it start with the honeybee? Cascading insectageddon, an intrusion of cockroaches amble armyless of most important grist and hive, the beds, the hoods of snails dieback waiting to return after the business of flies.
Eye opens on a floor where these ants of honour go crawling, filching on scraps of exploits, waiting for the return of the walled garden. Lady be notorious, destroy your reputation on the eve of this mass extinction in third heaven. “Where are y'all?” the vivid mantra he chants pouring out one of the seven, he adds, “do not affect what you have not effected”. Evil grows trivial, moon and venus sit with the queen of the north hanging over us like a whooping crane.
What have we learned?
Where all y’all...indeed. It is grim, faster and faster die-offs, the spix macaw of rio extinct in the wild; charismatic, talkative, and blue; but, it is the rarely heard cryptic treehunter gone and forgotten with the Alagoas-foliage gleaner . Extinction declared lightly on the force of nature, sea or land; vaquita, the rarest marine animal on earth or the female white rhino. The song of the songbird po’ouli gone in the wild but recorded, cut, nothing left but the poached horn to hold.
Another broken secret in a rulebook, 17 rings… the shape of home plate mathematically impossible. Humans constantly misperceive nature shifting baselines. Build a fake moon and glowing holograms in the sky in the commodification of dark sky nights, a swing and a miss. Pathfinder overlooking Chrysopylae, did you get a glimpse of Xeres? Futurist pioneers, do you really want to take this to space? With an unkindness of ravens...Listen to the serenaders of the sea,
Why do whales sing?
