The Earth Said Remember Me - How to Restore Our Connection With the Natural World

Have you ever stood in a place you love and sensed something missing without being able to say what?Today, a way to see that loss clearly, and why remembering it may be where real hope begins.Earthbound the podcast Helping people like you who feel anxious about climate change challenge the narratives that feel, overwhelm and reconnect with the natural world to help you stay grounded in what you're protecting rather than consumed by what's being lost.I'm your host Tom Schueneman.Today on Earthbound, with author and journalist Jason Dove.Mark, you will learn why the slowest losses are the hardest to see and how each of us quietly resets what we call normal.You'll pick up four small everyday practices that reconnect you with the place you live, whether that's a coastline or a city block, and finally find a kind of hope that doesn't require fooling yourself.Because if we can learn to see slow loss, we can learn to see slow recovery, too.Reconnecting with the natural world doesn't require a grand adventure into the wilderness, though.That's perfectly okay if you know what you're doing.But really, it just starts with going outside.Not the few steps to the car, but simple, intentional observation of wherever you happen to live.A blade of grass, an unassuming elm in the yard, whatever you care to watch over.That kind of attention carries more weight than it seems.It counters what my guest Jason Dovermark calls the great getting used to.Jason spent eight years editing Earth Island Journal in the better part of a decade as editor in chief of Sierra, the Sierra Club magazine.His latest book is the Earth Said Remember Me how to Revive Our Memories and Restore the Planet.The book is built on an idea called Shifting Baseline Syndrome.The fisheries scientist Daniel Pauley noticed in the 1990s that each generation of fishermen described a healthy ocean as the one they found at the start of their own careers.Their fathers would have called that same ocean empty.And we all do this.The world as it looked when we first noticed it becomes normal.So the losses that became before us don't look like losses.Nobody destroyed the record.We just stopped carrying it forward.I live in Pacific Grove, California.Butterfly Town, usa.There's a monarch on the city logo.That's how seriously we take monarch butterflies in these parts.In the 1990s, I used to stand under the trees at the sanctuary here, the branches moving with the weight of folded gold.In 1997, volunteers counted more than 1.2 million monarchs across 101 sites in the winter of 2020.Along the entire California coast.They found about a thousand.The butterflies partly came back, and the press called it a comeback.When I walked down to the sanctuary during one of those recovery years, I was glad to see them, but the branches were mostly bare.What I saw was not what I remembered.And that gap is what Jason writes about.He comes to see it as the engine of environmental destruction.Not greed mainly, or denial.Normalization today is only a little worse than yesterday.So there's never a day when anything obviously went wrong.You accommodate, then adapt, then accept.And acceptance leads to apathy.Jason calls his book one part diagnosis, the four parts antidote, four small things that you'll soon discover against an enormous problem.Which is exactly why I wanted to talk about it.And I put one real objection to him.A person could do everything he prescribes, hold the loss without flinching, and end up not more active, just more precisely miserable.His answer runs through a word worth solostalgia.The philosopher Glenn Albrecht coined it for the homesickness you feel while standing in the place you call home, watching it stop being what it was.But Jason turns the whole thing around.If we can't see slow loss, we can't see slow recovery either.Jason grew up without ever seeing a bald eagle.His daughter sees them at the county dump and rolls her eyes when her father gets excited.Memory, he argues, isn't a backward looking act.It's where imagination comes from.We can only restore a world where we can still remember.Here is my conversation with Jason Dove.Mark, author of the Earth Said Remember how to Revive Our Memories and Restore the Planet.Jason.Mark, I really appreciate your time and I loved your book.I loved your second book, Earth Said Remember Me.It really is a compelling read.And I also just give a plug for your first book, Satellites in the High Country.I really enjoyed that too.

Just thanks, Thomas.Thank you.I appreciate that.

Yeah, I don't know if I have a vague memory.Did you ever give a talk at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco?

Yeah.

Yeah, I think we might have shook hands or something there.Right.

Are you based in the Bay?

Actually, I'm in Pacific Grove right now.

Oh.Oh, that's right.You said that.

Yeah.Yeah, I was in San Francisco for almost 30 years.It was great.Until it wasn't anymore.

Yeah, I hear that.I have the same.Same thing we were.I was in the Bay for 20 plus years and now I live in Bellingham, Washington.

Bellingham.Yeah.I actually.I looked up the Salish Sea.

Salish Sea.

Salish Sea on.On Google Earth yesterday.

Oh, cool.

Looks Like a nice area.

Oh, it's amazing.And is now, I mean, the Sailor Sea now does officially appear on US And Canadian maps.It's renamed by, I mean, they, you know, you still recognize the Puget Sound and street of Juan de Fuca, these kind of sub bodies.But it is recognized as this whole kind of inland sea,.

You know,.

The Mediterranean, the north.

Hopefully it won't get renamed.

Yes, right.

Anyway, your book the Earth Said, remember me?The basic premise is discussing shifting baseline syndrome.So could you explain that?

Sure.So shifting baseline syndrome, but it sounds like this very technical phrase, almost like something from the official diagnostic manual of Psychiatric Disorders.But it's a common malady.I mean, we've all, we've all experienced it.I call it the great Getting Used To.So it describes the way in which humans and of course we're wonderfully adaptable, but maybe we're too adaptable.And it describes the way in which we keep accommodating or growing used to ever degrading environmental conditions.And the kind of classic example and where it sprang from is fishery scientists, right?Where if you grab any cohort of fishermen, you ask them to describe kind of the natural state of the ocean, they'll pretty much fall back on talking about what the fishery was like at the beginning of their own fishing career, not recognizing that what they might consider to be normal, their dads or their granddads or grandmothers, whoever fished before them would consider impoverished.And the real danger, as I write in the book, is that we might just keep accepting these worsening environmental conditions as normal.And then what was once considered abnormal becomes the new norm.

New normal.That, that's a phrase that I guess with the pandemic started to really blossom.And it can be dangerous phrase, the new normal.It's like abandoning the old normal and just forgetting about all that, which is exactly what you're talking about.

I think it's really pernicious.I mean, people sort of toss it off now and actually I had a Google alert going as part of the, you know, research for the book.And I've kept this Google alert going around the phrase new normal.And it popped up a lot this summer in reference mostly to the, to the truly extreme heat waves that battered Europe.I mean, it was like, I lost count.It was at least three, and I think it maybe four separate heat waves that slammed into Europe this summer, causing, conservatively right, tens of thousands of excess deaths.And there was a lot of European media, from the Guardian to German, you know, network television saying, oh, is this the new Normal.And it's understandable, right, that we would try to kind of use that phrase to wrap our heads around things.But my concern is that you accommodate and then you adapt, and then you accept.And acceptance leads to apathy.And so really, this book is about what does it take to sustain the urgency for environmental action and not allowing us to sort of slip along.Along the glide path of the new normal.

And you describe that process in the book as there's four steps.

Yeah, I tried to.I mean, there.As.You know, Tom, as it is, I think listeners at workfound know there's no shortage of environmental books that dwell on ecological problems.Right, right.I mean, there's a whole library of them, and I got many of them on the bookshelf right behind me.Um, so I really wanted to focus on solutions.And so truly, this book is one part diagnosis to four parts antidotes.I try to get through pretty quickly in the introduction, explaining the dangers of shifting baseline syndrome and of ecological amnesia, and then pivoting to what I think are some ways that everybody can practice in their lives, hopefully not just as individuals, but together as part of a community of care.And those four steps are, go outside, bear witness, make a record, and pass it.

And I. I love that you start with go outside.I think that's a lot of.A lot of the problem we're having right now is everybody's inside staring at a screen.And the.So as far as shifting baseline, the baseline is exactly what's on your screen right in front of you at that moment.And.And you just kind of lose track of the greater world around you.You can't really understand what's happening unless you're in the, you know, outside.

That's exactly right.And I.And I recognize that, especially to more outdoorsy listeners, this could sound elementary or immediate.But that's partially the point, right, is for us to try to reconnect every day, or as much as possible, with the elements of the living world.There's no way to form unshakable baselines in our memory unless you're actually outside.This is all going to be mediated either by a screen or some other device.And you're not going to be recruiting all of your senses.Smell, sight, hearing, touch.Right.The feeling of actually, you know, the beach sand or the forest floor underfoot.And those extra senses are what's going to help us not just notice the living world, but then, you know, create memories that really are anchored in the mind and that provide a way of distinguishing, of discerning between the abnormal and the new normal.

Yeah.And it's.It's true.For your more outdoorsy listeners will get.Yeah, go outside.I'm already outside, but I think there's a lot of people that would like to be just kind of maybe forget again.We're talking about forgetting that it is so difficult because everybody's being bombarded with, especially these days with the news and everything's going to hell, and so they lose track of what's just outside.I talked to, I think it was last year sometime, I talked to Charles Hood.Have you ever heard of Charles Hood?

No.

He's an author.He wrote a book called Nature at Night and he's got other book, I think, something like Ugly Nature or something like that.And he's talking about, you know, you don't have to go to.I mean, it's great if you go to a beautiful area and.And soak it all in, but you can just go outside and look at some grass coming up to the sidewalk.That's.

Yeah.

You know,.

I mean, you know, as the kids would say today, go outside and touch grass.Right.Get off the Internet and touch grass.I like Charles.I make the case that, yes, obviously, going to the big capital W wilderness, the big capital and national parks, those places are great.And they're also going to be, let's be real, for most of us, fleeting experiences.It's more important or equally important to form intimate relationships with the wild nature that's as close to you as possible.And that can include, you know, for many, for tens of millions of Americans, that's the seashore or the beach, that's the local woodlot, that's the municipal and regional park where you walk your dog.Because everybody, every place is somewhere.And even a golf course will do in a pit.I mean, truly, just try to get outside.And as the esteemed nature writer and lepidopterous Robert Michael Pyle says every day, come to your senses.Just find a way to reconnect with the more than human world, with the living world that's all around us.

Yeah.And what was interesting, especially for me, is me being in Pacific Grove.You.You talk about the.The butterfly.The monarch butterfly sanctuary just down the.

Yeah.

And just a side note, I was just there yesterday.We were walking.Of course, there's no butterflies.It's not even.

Not the season.

Not the season.It's just a nice place to hang out and soak in some sun, interestingly, because when I was in San Francisco, we would come here at least once, maybe twice a year and do the butterfly.Check out the butterflies.And back in the 90s, I believe it was.I remember seeing all the butterflies in the trees.And now that I'm here, I guess that there was, as you wrote, there was a, what was termed as a recovery few years ago from virtually nothing to a few thousand.But I knew when I saw that, said, well, that's not like it was in the 90s.And there you go.There's a shifting baseline syndrome right there.Because,.

Yeah, they opened the book with the story of the monarch, but the western monarch population, those are the ones that overwinter in mostly coastal California.And it's an all too perfect encapsulation of shifting baseline syndrome because, as you know, because I recall going to natural bridges in Santa Cruz in the winter 2005, 2006, and, you know, the eucalyptus grove there was just swarm, was just mob with, with butterflies.I went back for part of the reason for this book.I think it was 2023.No, it was 2025.Virtually none saw like a handful.

Yeah.

And the problem, right, is that unless you remember or unless someone has told you, unless you have read about those epic swarms of past generations, then you see two or three and you think it's wonderful, but truly it's not.I mean, you're really, you're really in awe over the last remaining survivors.And it was interesting in talking with the people who are involved in the Western Monarch account, which is an amazing example of citizen science.Right.I mean, they're, they're hundreds, if not thousands of volunteer Monarch watchers from, you know, like Mendocino county down to, you know, basically Pismo beach who are counting these, these butterflies every year.And they were pretty chagrined when and after the really awful year was.The pandemic year was 2020, 2021, when, you know, less than 2,000 monarchs returned to California.And then the following year there was a quarter million.And the media was like popping champagne.

Yeah.

And the, the monk watchers were really torn.They also were relieved that the number had temporarily bounced back.And yet they could see people's really impoverished notions of what abundance looks like.That's a problem.Right.Abundance is relative.You know, one person's many, and that's going to maybe be 12 monarchs is going to be the other person's horribly depressed figure.And, and so we need that historical context, whether it's through personal experience, through natural history or through oral history, to.To sustain these memories.

So what would you say you've been involved in the Environmental editing, Sierra Club.And you wrote for many publications and the books you've written.What would you say is the main challenge, the larger mainstream, if you will, environmental movement has what?How is it not connecting or how is it connecting?

Yeah, that's a big question, obviously.I mean, I think there's no, you know, we should lead.Talk about that.One of the big challenges for the environmental movement at large, that there is a organized and infamously wealthy industry or industries that are preventing progress.I think most obviously the oil, gas and coal industries.Right.Fossil fuel industry has a clear agenda of stopping progress.And part of that, as I talk about in the book, is actually encouraging amnesia.Right.Is what the Czech dissident Milan Kadera called organized forgetting.So the oil and gas company is the fossil, what I call the carbon barons.The carbon barons really want us to think that today is synonymous with always where of course, it's not.So I think that's a major challenge.And it's.We overlooked that at our apparel.Right.I think the environmental movement can often go into cycles, you know, kind of like depression and finger pointing.And it's like, oh, we're, we're not doing a good job of connecting with the public wealth.Remember that there's this giant industry out there that is determined to hold problems.I think that's one.I do think there are real cognitive glitches.I do think, you know, it used to be people who read a lot of environmental journalism and commentary, like 20 years ago, say in the early to mid aughts, and the prevailing view then was that, oh, climate change or the biodiversity crisis is too distant in time and space for us to care.Right.It's a future threat or it's a far off threat, or it's about polar bears in the Arctic, and I don't live in the Arctic.I do think a cognitive glitch is to blame, but that's not the one.Especially now when climate change is front and center.Right.Lahaina, Paradise, Asheville, Altadena.I mean,.

Yeah,.

Many people in this country have a brush with climate chaos in some form or a brush with biodiversity impoverishment in some form, like demonic butterflies or let's say, with common burrs.So I do think that, again, this cognitive glitch of our, our famous adaptation may now be a maladaptation.But I do want to say, Thomas, I mean, I think all that's true.And from what I see, the environmental movement is alive and well and thriving at the grassroots.And I think you see that in the panoply of all of these local watershed based conservation groups, local forest groups, you know, the citizen science I talk about in the book, a lot of that's under the radar.Right.It doesn't percolate up to the centers of power and culture in Washington D.C. or New York or Los Angeles, but it's out there.And so I think this is the issue is that like culturally the environmental movement is as strong as ever in terms of these simmering efforts.Grassroots.

And.

The problem is that it's not, it's not as politically powerful as it's always been.

Yeah, yeah.So that, that speaks to the, like in the climate, especially now, especially now the national level, we can't expect any leadership, take it like the opposite of leadership.So it, it informs the agency that we have at a personal and local level and that's where the action really happens.I remember speaking years ago, number one, Brainerd, I believe his name was, he, he was the mayor of Carmel, Indiana.

Oh yeah,.

Yeah, yeah.And he really spoke of, of he wanted to do something about climate change.Spok at the local level.This is where things can happen.You know, you guys in Washington, you can, whatever, you know, we could use your help.

Yeah.

But we can do it, you know, on our own.And in your book, I mean, you talk about how people can, the citizen science people that were looking for the ice over and the bald eagles, which speaks to the other end of the shifting baseline syndrome is that you sometimes don't see progress.

Yeah, I mean, I end the book talking about just as easy as it is to lose sight of environmental destruction, it can also be easy to lose sight of environmental progress.Yeah.In part because environmental progress is often invisible.It's a triumph of harm avoided.Right.The local advocates prevented this forest from being cut down.They prevented this oil and gas pipeline from going through their backyards.And so it's not something you see because it's.Right, it's, it's, it's, it's damage that, that we've managed to, to fight back.So it's just as important to sustain these ecological memories around stories of progress.And I think one of the most obvious ones, the one I talk about in the book is the comeback and truly a comeback of the bald eagle, which.So, you know, I'm 51 years old.When I go up the 1970s and 80s, bald eagles were vanishingly rare.Yeah, I didn't see it the first time I saw bald eagle.I think I was 27 years old.And it was at, it was at Mount Lassen State park in far Northern California.My daughter.Now, this is also a function of where we live.But living in the Pacific Northwest, I mean, bald eagles are common to the point of mundane.We literally have seen them in the county dump.Right.And this is.But this is also a story that needs to be kept alive because that the recovery of the bald eagle or the tentative recovery of the sea otter, you know, the recovery of peregrine, falcas and ospreys, these are really proof of concept.Right.Of how environmental action and environmental efficacy can work.And so if we can do it, and if we have, we have done it for the bald eagle, what other species can we return from the brink?Yeah.What other progress can we make?So, yeah, it's just as important to be aware of what the British nature writer Robert McFarland calls lifting baselines.

We.

Can also turn back the clock in a positive direction.And it's just as important to.To tell those stories as a way of sustaining environmental accuracy.

Yeah.You.You mentioned the sea otter, and I had mentioned that we come to the Bay area, come to the Monterey Bay area quite a bit before we moved here, but I never really paid that much attention, I have to admit.Now I'm paying more attention and I'm seeing a lot of sea otters.So it seems like there's plenty of sea otters.And of course, it's Monterey Bay.It's a protected marine sanctuary.But you just got me thinking.So I'm thinking there's lots of sea otters, but are there really?I mean, as opposed to what was it like before?

Sure.

So somebody in my position, I would, I guess just do a little research and see what the numbers were like 10, 20, 30, 40, 100 years ago to gauge where I'm coming in to this baseline and then go from there and then keep my record.

Yeah, this is why I went in the book.I mean, there's no substitute, truly.We're talking about sustaining and creating memories that are going to transcend.They're going to span generations.There's no substitute for history, which in this case means natural history.So, yeah, I mean, there's more sea otters in Monterey Bay than there was 50 years ago, and there's certainly less than there was 350 years ago.How are you going to know that?You're going to know that from the annals of natural history.So, you know, a great example that I talk about in the book that have been hugely helpful for working scientists are whaley records.I mean.Right.For several hundred years, whalers in the course of their pretty gruesome vocation went to all corners of the earth, but in the course of doing that, they kept these meticulous records.Obviously meteorological conditions which you need to sail a wooden boat so, you know, wind and temperature, precipitation, but also these very detailed records on marine mammal sightings, on bird sightings.Right on, you know, whether it's eel grass or sargosum, like other things that are living in the ocean, those have become this hugely important record.Thoreau's journals.Now I'm not expecting everybody to, to short the seasons with the, with the type A personality accuracy of Henry David Thoreau.Um, but that's become this hugely important record for people who are charting changes in Massachusetts over time as writing the book.Anybody can do this, just as anywhere is someplace.Everyone can be to some degree a chronicler of the environment around you.So what I do and what I recommend in the book, and I've had some readers already tell me that they've adopted this practice and have found it, you know, really rewarding is to just keep a nature or garden diary or journal.

Yeah.

So I'm a little bit of a, you know, vegetable grower.I keep a little homestead here, about a 600 square foot plot of annual vegetables plus an orchard.And yeah, I mean I mark, when I plant things, I mark the date in which they, they come to maturity.A lot of that obviously has got transactional instrumental benefit.Right.It's like helping me for the next season.

Yeah,.

But there's no, there's no instrumental benefit for me noticing, you know, on what date the, the, the, the oso berry buds out or to note on what date I see the first trillium.And yet I know that when I go back and look at those records some years from now, they're gonna, they're gonna form this chronicle of the living world.They're gonna help me to just, in the, then the mirror act of keeping the diary and keeping the journal.I find myself so much more attuned to the rhythms of the natural world around me because I know I'm going to write it down later.So, you know, for example, we had one of our first truly good, you know, it's kind of storms of the fall season.The other night I put in the, in the, in our nature, in our family's nature diary.You know, though point six inches of precipitation.Like that's, that's going to help me remember it and should I be curious in some, let's say future year in which we're in a Drought year.I might go back and look at that.

Yeah, it fosters observation when you're, you know, you're keeping a record.And speaking of keeping a record, you write in the book the power of oral history.So why don't you go through some of that, how oral history is an important aspect.I, I know some people think oral history.So it's like, like, and you talk about in the book that the game of telephone, all these stories get changed, but it's actually not like that.Oral history is something else.

You know, the book's only been out less than two months, but some of the.Well, I did get one comment from a reader who said that this was the part of the book that really blew his mind that he not really thought about oral history as perhaps being every bit as durable as written history.And what of course it might lack in precision, it makes up for in terms of consistency over time.So a great example of what are called geomyths, and these are stories often from indigenous history or from like far ancient myth that are seeking to create a story that describes an actual phenomenon that happened in the real world.So the most famous example would be like the myth of Atlantis or the myth or the story of Noah's Ark, which many archeologists think, right, actually comes from a great deluge that in which the, you know, the Mediterranean float into the Black Sea from here.In North America, the Klamath tribes have living memory, I mean not living memory, but memories shared across generations of the eruption of the volcano that created the caldera of Crater Lake.I mean that is like a multi thousand, I think it's 125 human generations that story has persisted.If you want a contemporary example, go to the Cineplex and check out Christopher Nolan's odyssey, right?

A.

6,000 Year old story that is still with us today.And the reason why oral histories more often than not don't suffer from the game telephone is because something like say the Klamath tribe's origin stories of that volcano or the Odyssey, you had multiple speakers and multiple listeners, right?And so there's memories working on many different levels.There's both the memory of the story that who, what, when, where, and then there's the memory of you being there and listening to the story.And so this kind of, it's not a.Most oral history doesn't work as a chain, it works as a web, right.And that's what creates the durability of these stories.And I, and what I point out the book is that I mean I share the example mostly of the first nations that are peoples in the greater Pacific Northwest, what some people call Salmon Nation, Salmon Nation is basically right from more or less the San Francisco Bay area or the Eel river north into British Columbia.And they all have these, you know, origin stories surrounding salmon.And it's those.It's those stories of the salmon and the salmon being so integral to their cultures and societies that has sustained native advocacy on behalf of the salmon.I mean, I'm convinced that whatever salmon we still have left in the rivers of, you know, Greater Salmon Nation are there thanks to native leadership.You can see that.Right.Of Northern California, the removal of the dams on the Klamath River.

Yeah.

And that work is sustained by oral history.So it's incredibly powerful.It's far more powerful than I think most people would assume.

Yeah, Actually, that was an eye opener for me as well.I mean, I've been aware of oral history, but I didn't really understand its power and durability as far as part of.Really.It's part of history.You talk about the salmon and of course, I'm sure, you know, the government is keeping records and all that sort of thing, but not the kind of records that these oral histories portray.

Yeah, I mean, obviously those government records are going to be a little bit more precise.On the runs is like the exact.What was the exact number of schmuck that went up X river?What's the exact number of Coho that went up, you know, Y river?Again, what the oral histories, and in this case indigenous oral histories offer is a much greater span of time.So I share in the book the experience.The Lummi Nation, which is a Coast Salish nation here in Washington and located just the reservation boundaries a scant 12 miles from my home.In one of their foundational myths which they share with non natives, I was able to share it is the story of Salmon Woman.And is this, you know, it's basically a parable about the importance of safeguarding resources.Well, one of the Lummi guys who I talked with points out that that's a story also of the arrival of the salmon, suggesting, and this has now been confirmed by, you know, Western archeology, that humans might have gone to some places in the Pacific Northwest before the salmon got here.Right.And so that story, that parable, is another geo myth.It's a story about the arrival of the salmon.So if that's the case, that story goes back 12,000 years.Right,.

Right.So these sorts of stories, I'm what I'm getting at is the effectiveness of, you know, the data numbers, hard numbers, as opposed to stories, and how we are a storytelling species.

Yep.

And that without those stories, you really lose the context.And in losing the context, maybe losing.Lose the motivation to.To care.

Yeah.I mean, I think you lose the emotion.So I think that is important.That's why I do have this chapter called Make a Record, and that relies really heavily on, you know, talking about the.These wonderful stories of citizen science.And as a complement to that, you do need the oral histories, the family histories, as I write in the book.You know, I think in some ways, Native societies are exceptional in the way that oral history is the anchor of their cultures, but they're not unique.As you say, we all tell stories.That's something we all do every day.And what makes Native storytelling unique is the way that it blends people and place and family and landscape.So the question is, can we all become in some similar ways and we.I mean, sort of non Native cultures.What can we learn from those Native cultures?And one of them, I do think, is welding ecology onto genealogy of telling family stories in which nature or the living world is not just backdrop or scenery, but it's.It's a central player.I think a lot of people do that already.Right.Famously farmers and ranchers and backcountry hunters and anglers and mountaineers and fisher folk.Right.And so I think, you know, when.When grandfather becomes synonymous with fishing spot, or when, like, in my family, for my kid, when the cousin's summer visit becomes a metonym for berry picking, then you're really.You're.You're linking landscape in human story and emotion, and those create indelible memories.

Yeah.One of my things I think about a lot is lack of connection to nature.And I think what you're describing just these are ways through stories, you can connect your tribe, your.Your people, your families to.To nature.So another concept that you bring up and that I've always been interested in is the idea of solastalgia.Can you speak to that a little bit?Maybe solastalgia is part of this.It kind of speaks to maybe of grief a little bit, but maybe that you have to sit in grief to understand where we are.

Yeah.Thanks for asking about that, Tom.Solostalgia is kind of like shifting baseline syndrome, one of these, you know, very technical terms that's also become like, you know, the Forrest Gump of a lot of environmental discourse.Like, it's always there.And a lot of environmental writing is sort of lurking at the edge of the frame.It's.It's a term that came from an Australian environmental philosopher.Glenn Albrecht coined this term about 25 years ago, and he was seeking to describe this feeling, which I think a lot of us have felt when.Because especially of climate change or other environmental destruction, home no longer feels like home.Like you're at home, you're at your place of that you've always thought of this home, but it now.You now feel like a stranger in a strange land.For him, that was due to strip mining for coal in New South Wales and the environment being completely disfigured.I think I first felt solastalgia and during some of those Bay Area smoke storms in the late teens.Right.And kind of walking through the, you know, Berkeley or Oakland, and under this.This, you know, copper red sky.And it just felt so uncanny.What he's done, this philosopher, is this deliberate plan.Nostalgia.Right.And it's, you know, nostalgia sort of is a bittersweet emotion, longing for home.And solastalgia is the grief one feels when you no longer get solace from your home place.I think it's so important, and I mention it in the book in the context of bearing witness, because.Right.Nostalgia, we're often sort of viewing the world through a rosy lens, and it can.It can disfigure the past or disfigure memory as much as it's accurate representation.Whereas solastalgia only clicks if you have this accurate memory of past, present, future.It.It really requires a fidelity of memory.And so I offer solid as a way to.Yeah.To hold onto memories.And as.As the guy who coined it says, and as I share his hope here, to sort of alchemize that emotion, to take that emotion and turn it into commitment, passion, enthusiasm for continued rainbow advocacy.

Yeah.So nostalgia can.Can motivate action.Of course.

Definitely.

Nostalgia is just kind of sitting there pining for a past that never really was.

I think that's right.I think that's exactly right, Thomas.And so, yeah, another idea that I take in, that there sort of sounds like it came deep from the academy, but I try to make accessible to readers.

Yeah, it's interesting you mentioned the copper red sky.I happen to remember it was 2020 about six years ago this time of year.I can't remember which fire it was, but I remember waking up in San Francisco right before we moved here, and the sky was orange.And it stayed orange through most of the day.It was just the most surreal thing I have ever experience as far as, you know, the natural.It's this.This is not the way it should be at all, you know.

Yeah.And another unfortunate example of what some are beginning to accept is the new normal.Right.I mean, I think when the, the east coast, you know, the West Coast, I know, certainly here in the Pacific Northwest started to see those really, you know, uncannily frightening skies and there was some big smoke storms.2016, 2017, Same with the Bay Area.2018, Infamously, in 2020, the day that, you know, the sun didn't seem to rise and the streetlights went on in much of the Bay Area, you know, like 9 o' clock in the morning.And now the East coast has had two of those, right.They had one in 2023 and then one this summer.So like two in the space of a few years.It kind of spins you out, I think, you know, physically and emotionally and intellectually.And the concern is, you know, what if you get used to this, I think, and the danger, right, of younger generations accepting this is normal.Even a fire, red sky can glow with the warmth of childhood.If that's all you.

If that's.Yeah.There's this one gentleman who would take his time to make his comments on my climate change Facebook page.God, you know, bless his soul.Yeah, he kept, he kept telling, like every week I'd post something goes.It's all weather variation.It's just weather variation.And you get that mindset.Well, this is just weather variation.I mean, that's, that's like a classic example of shifting baseline syndrome.Just think, well, it's just the weather.It's the weather changing.And you kind of wonder at what point will people understand that this is not normal?

Yeah, Well, I mean, just to break back to the book, this is why I love this story that I talk about in make a record of the people involved in the community Lake ice collaboration.So this is another wonderful citizen, grassroots citizen science, where people mostly, you know, New England and the.In the Great Lakes region, then up into Ontario and Quebec a little bit, keep records of the ice on and ice off dates of their local pond or lake.And this is such a great citizen science story because it's so accessible.Right.All you need is a calendar and a pair of eyes and a pen.

Yeah,.

Right.You know, when the, the Louisville Pond ice is over in, you know, probably December, November, December, and then you notice and then, you know, when the ice breaks off.All of this data, 40 years of data now, have been going first to a professor at University of Buffalo and now to professor at York University in Ontario.And that is a inarguable right chronicle of how it's not just weather variations.And the people who I profiled for, for that chapter, they're mostly all in Wisconsin.And I talked to these folks who were deep in, you know, dairy, Wisconsin dairy country.I was like, you know, I'll say this lovingly, pretty much in the sticks somewhere like northwest of Green Bay.And they intimated quite clear that they have neighbors there in rural Wisconsin who disagree with the basic science of climate change and global warming.And yeah, they said to me, the crumb sacks, a wonderful family.No, we have the data to prove it.Like we've got 35 years of rec and they haven't yet.Data going back to the 1940s via their parents who've done this same thing.I said, no, we can prove it.We have the information right here.We're not messing with the data.We got no reason to.We're just, you know, committed to our little lake here and there's no arguing with it.So I think, you know what's gonna, if people want to be willfully ignorant, they can stick their heads in the sand as long as possible.But I think that kind of neighbor to neighbor, peer to peer communication, that's what's going to do the trick.I mean, I talk about, and I don't want to give you too long an answer on this, Thomas, but you know, there's a lot of studies that show that one of the best things you can do to address the climate crisis is just to talk about friends and neighbors, that a lot of people self censor and they self censor on this topic because they believe inaccurately that people disagree with them.But in fact, most Americans accept the overwhelming scientific consensus that human activities and the burning of coal, oil and gas and the raising of forests is what's fueling climate change.Most Americans accept that, but most Americans don't talk about it because they're afraid that other people don't share their views.So literally talking about the weather is a way to take a old fashioned neighborly pastime and turn it into a modest, but I think potent political act.

Yeah, it could be actually more effective than because climate change has become such a political football and I don't trust the government, all that sort of narrative.When you have one farmer that's been keeping a couple generations worth or several generations worth of data, they can bring it to their, their neighbors.They say, look at this, that that's how you can move people's minds that are that I mean, like you say, there's some people that, that are just never going to get it.And I learned when I go to let those people go, convince them.But I think it really, your book and what your philosophy is, you really get down to the.Where the action is neighbor to neighbor, community to community has a role to play.But when the government is not there, we have citizen science.

Culture is upstream of politics.Truly.Right.Culture's upstream of politics.Our, our laws are an expression of the culture.And so I think this is why culture change, work and a lot of that is under the radar.It's slow, it's hard to track and hard to see.But you know, having those conversations is so important.Engaging in other, you know, this is more on a family scale effort.But I talk about the work of this wonderful project called the Dear Tomorrow Project, which asks people to write a letter to your future self in mid century, or if you don't think you're going to be around at 2050, write a letter to a son or a daughter or a grandkid or a niece talking about what the environment and the climate is like now and what you wish it to be in 2050.And surveys done by professional researchers have shown that this is one of the most impactful climate actions one can take.Not because it's going to actually reduce carbon pollution, it's not.But it's going to sustain your own.It's going to sustain your own kind of internal batteries to do the work because you're going to feel this intergenerational responsibility.Yeah.So I just love that it's another culture change tactic.And I do want to say, Thomas, that I mean, I try to make sure that all of these actions in the book that I talk about for sustaining environmental advocacy, for, for sustaining environmental memories.Yes, they start at the individual level, but they only matter if they're done collective.That really these, these.Whether it's being outside doing that together with friends and family, whether that's making a record, doing that as a family, whether it's passing down oral history, which is.Obviously takes more than one person.

Yeah.

You have to do it together to have any impact.

Yeah.We're a storytelling and a very social species.So.

Definitely.I.

Want to briefly touch on, and I think you did in our conversation here, it's about shifting baseline syndrome and the forgetting of history and how that's a tool for authoritarianism and how we're seeing that right here in the United States.President.

Yeah.You know, I write in the book that remembering is a Scam of resistance.That's certainly true.I think in, in the political world, we know this authoritarians have always sought to erase or rewrite history in order to sustain power.You can see that in Vladimir Putin's Russia.Right.We're, we're one of the most important human rights groups.How hot, but still operating from abroad is called Memorial.You can see that in China, where the Communist Party has a virtual monopoly on history and an underground publication there is called Remembrance.And you can see that here, as I say, the United States, where the, where the federal government currently is waging a war on history and memory.Right.Rewriting plaques at national monuments or battlefields or national parks, where the federal government is, is essentially waging an assault against that great repository of history, the Smithsonian Institution.

Yeah.

When you put it in that context, you can see that remembering and holding onto people's history is part of the work of, you know, justice and democracy.And so it doesn't take many dots to connect to see how that's also true of natural history, that the things that we forget are more likely to go extinct and the things that we remember were more, we're more likely to sustain.

Yeah.

So yes, remembering is part of the work of resistance.

I wanted to ask that question to kind of bring that circle it all, how we are in the world with the environment, with each other, with our, you know, politics and economies.If forgetting is, is our Kelly's heel.

Forgetting is, is our Achilles heel.Yes.And yeah, I'm just gonna come, you know, come back to Milan Kunder and this idea of organized forgetting.There, there are people who want us to forget, who want to sort of trap us in a, A, a never ending present.And it's the ability to, I mean, one of our most incredible powers, right, as a species is the fact that we can shuttle back and forth between past, present and future.So I talk in the book in the end, and I make very clear this work of remembering is not just about the patents.It's not just about kind of putting days gone by under like a bell jar and protecting them.It really is about the future because I talk about this at the end of the book.Scientists clearly demonstrated that imagination and memory are linked.You know, I think historians have always known this and artists have always known this and poets.It wasn't until this century that neuroscientists using brain scans established that the hippocampus, which is like the seat of memory, is more activated when we imagine than when we remember.And so truly, memory is part of the work of flourishing.That the only way we're going to be able to revive landscapes or restore them or rehabilitate them or rewild them is to sort of take our memories of past ecosystems and then.And then catapult ourselves to the future.So this.This connection between.When you.When you see the connection and you understand the connection between memory and imagination, then it becomes clear why memory is part of the work of building a better world.

Yeah.You speak of the invisible present.

Yeah.And it's a. I got that phrase from a guy named John Magnuson.He's now like in his 90s.It was a one wonderful guy to talk to.And he coined that some years ago.And it really, I think like falls neatly within this idea of shifting baseline syndrome, or what Robert Michael Pyle called the extinction of experience.Right.Is we're just sort of becoming more detached in the living world.And it's so easy to fall.To fall into the invisible present, to not have that context.And as I said earlier, think that today is synonymous with.With forever.It's.It's really easy to be sort of blinded by the glare of now.

Gonna say especially now because.Because everything is moving so fast.You know, it's.

Everything is.This is one of the.Another term of art that I try to bring from the academy to a labor making sense was the idea of the great acceleration.Geographers and other environmental scientists say that we've been in part of the great acceleration.They usually market from the end of World War II.And everything actually is speeding.Not your imagination, but things are speeding up in part because time is a function of motion.And so as we're building more roads, more bridges, telecommunications go faster, time is speeding up.And that's an invitation to forget it used to be.Right.I think this is true for some of us that environmental destruction would happen so steadily that it could be hard to notice what one scholars called the slow violence.Environmental destruction.Well, now environmental destruction happens so fast that it's hard to keep sight of.And that's really the danger is that we're moving so fast that we're losing the sense of context.In which past and present.

Do you think that makes what you talk about in shifting baseline syndrome more challenging?

Oh, definitely.I think the great acceleration is one major cause.Ecological impeachment.

Yeah.Yeah.

Just the piece of destruction.I think, you know, you can certainly see that within biodiversity.You know, this study from the National Audeman Society and the Cornell Ornithology, some years ago, I think it was like 20, 20, 2021.That said, since the 1970s, we've lost basically 3 billion birds in North America.3 Billion individual birds.It's hard for a younger person to grasp, but when I go out, I have a year in town, a retired academic, he's in his early 70s and he thinks woods have become eerily quiet.But how else to know that unless you've got that long baseline.

Yeah, yeah, that birds and insects.And you mentioned the book about.I can't remember the guy's name, but the insects on the windshield.

Yeah, the windshield phenomenon.

Again, I wasn't keeping records, but I was thinking like I remember being a kid being in the car, we're driving across the country on some sort of trip and going to the gas station and wiping off the.

Yeah,.

The insects.And I'm thinking, you know what, I don't really, I don't really see that anymore.

That doesn't happen.I mean this windshields and all that I think is another really powerful.It's also become, I mean it's become a me.You can go online and see lots of these, you know, like little cartoons, you know, with a splattered windshield, the 1970s and a clean windshield in the 2000s.It's a very immediate, visceral, intimate memory for many of us of a certain age.And again, I've just barely the half century mark, but I can remember going on road trips with my family and just bugs splattered across the windshield of the grill of the car.That doesn't happen any longer.And actually the windshield phenomenon has become a really powerful way for entomologists to track insect declines.And there's a clear line, I mean, you know,.

Between.

Insect declines, a bird decline, and one of the main reasons we have these bird declines, because there's fewer bugs for them to eat.So all these things are, are truly connected.And again, I think that's part of the work.It's.I will admit it's hard to get a 10 year old interested in bugs on the windshield, but I think sharing those little stories of wow, do you see that there's no bugs splattered here.What does that tell us about this environment we're driving.

That can be a way in for people to start to do what you're describing, the book, you know, start to keep actual.Like I described a couple of things, like I really wasn't noticing, but now that I have, I've, I see that there has been a change.So you have inspired me to say I'm just going to start keeping a simple little I don't know the temperature, that it was sunny out or just something.And it will connect me to outside.

I'm glad to hear that, Thomas, that the book is resonating with you like that.And.Yeah, I mean, I do think what I've found hearing from folks who've read the book is that when they hear about shifting baseline syndrome.And again, I said it sounds technical, but we've all experienced it.People do have an aha moment where they're like, oh, I've definitely experienced this.It gives you almost like a X ray glasses to sort of view the world in a different way and to experience the world a different way.A lot of this is about tension.Once you sort of notice it, then you can't.You can't help but notice.And so, you know, trying to get people to simply be more attentive is.Is that it's about to go outside.

That's the first step.Yeah.And.And everybody's.It's a world that everybody's trying to grab your attention and just, it's.It's an opportunity to disconnect from that and focus.You know, attention is.Is ours.It's what we have.

Yeah.

And we can.We can aim it wherever we want.And so to wrap this up, I think what I really like about the book, first of all, it is kind of an eye opener about shifting baseline syndrome, but it gives a clear and frankly, a relatively simple way for people to go about and do something about that.One of my things that I think about a lot is how to.How to express people have agency to face these enormous challenges that we have.Because it can seem like, oh, climate change, oh, my God, there's nothing I can do about it.

Yeah,.

Well, you know, there is.And it might not, you know, you might not be changing the world by keeping a record, but.But maybe you are.You know, your record combined with everybody else's record over generations, it can be the difference between thriving and whatever would happen if we don't do this.

It's thriving and just merely surviving and muddling through.And yes, you're exactly right, Thomas.I mean, the book is designed to truly be simple, achievable, practical steps towards sustaining the urgency to do all that other work to protect the environment.So whether that's, you know, solar panels on the roof, riding your bike more, getting an ev, you know, having a little bit of a garden where you grow some of your own, whatever it is, this book is not.This is not like a 10 steps to save the World.This is more like what does it take to sustain the urgency?

I.

Want to be clear, you know, it's simple.Some of these do take work, but I don't want them to.They shouldn't.They shouldn't feel like work.Right.Some of this can be as simple as literally, you know, walking the same stretch of beach or walking the same local forest, regional park on a regular basis and in making those routines of joy part of clinical action.

Yeah.And it's also very well written too.

Thank you.

Obviously, you're obviously well read as well.I love all the references.It's just a.Well packaged.Well, excellent read.And that in your.Your first book, Satellites in the High country, your writing has always resonated with.With how I'm trying to see the environmental movement.There's just a lot of, you know, numbers and 1.5 and you know, we're all gonna die or, you know, it's all a hoax.And I really wanted to get beyond that.And you do that very well.So I.Kudos to.To your work.

Sounds.I mean, I am trying to bring us back and by us, I mean, you know, people who are committed to conservation and environmental protection and climate action bring us back in a way to emotion.Do you think it's right that, you know, a lot of the environmental movement has become this kind of argo of acronyms and that's.That's important, but it's insufficient to sustaining action over time.That truly is going to come from emotions.And.

You.

Can look at the.I quote, you talk about how there's lots of.You know, I, I try to reach back in the literature.My favorite book by Rachel Carson is.Is not Sound and Spring or the Sea Around Us.It's the Sense of Wonder.You know, her book that's all about celebrating wonder with the natural world.And she's got these wonderful scenes of taking her nephew out onto the rugged Maine coast.Like that's going to be truly our lifeline.More than.Yeah.A whole stack of studies from here to the moon.

I definitely agree with that.Yeah.We've got to connect to our emotions, to the environment.To our environment.

That's right.

Thank you very much for your time.I appreciate it.

Thank you, Thomas.This is a real thrill and I appreciate being on Earthbound.

I recommend the Earth Said Remember Me.It's an excellent read and very important book.So.

Thanks, Thomas.

Keep up the good work.That was Jason Dove, Mark author of the Earth Said Remember how to Revive Our Memories and Restore the Planet.I told Jason on the record that his book got me started on a small record of my own.I'll admit here that I expected it to feel a little bit like homework.It doesn't.The surprise, which he warned me about is that knowing you will write it down later changes how you look at things.Now you notice, and that turns out to be the point.And it is a cheaper and better antidote than I expected.Four practices go outside, bear witness, make a record, and pass it on.Not one of them will cut a ton of carbon by itself, and Jason is clear about that.The solar panels and the policy and the organizing are still the work.These are about keeping fuel in the tank to do the work, which is its own kind of problem, and one that nobody else seems to be writing about.What resonates with me is his line that remembering is a form of resistance.What we forget is more likely to be lost, and what we hold on to has a chance in whatever we hope to restore.The forest, the river, the butterflies, and those trees down the road from me.We can only build it out of what somebody stands, remembers.So go stand somewhere you love and pay attention and tell somebody about it.That's the whole assignment.Check the show notes for more on Jason Dove, mark his book and the other people and projects we discussed.I'm Thomas Schuenemann and this is Earthbound Stories from the Life on a Warming Planet.If this episode resonated with you, please leave a rating and review wherever you listen.It genuinely helps others find the show and if you haven't already, subscribe so you don't miss what's next.Thank you, dear listener.I'll see you next time.And in the meantime, stay safe.It.