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An example lies in the platypus. Wide-ranging population surveys of the monotreme didn’t begin until the 1970s, almost 200 years after the forces of colonisation, which included a voracious fur trade, decimated numbers.
The platypus is regarded as so rare and elusive the creature has gleaned an almost mythological status; the concept that plentiful platypus dens might’ve once pockmarked riverbanks is lost to us.
Data collected by Dr Barbara Wilson, an honorary associate professor and conservation scientist at Deakin University, was included in the WWF’s report. She has seen the baseline shift in real time.
The pookila, a native rodent, haven’t been detected in Victoria’s Otway ranges since 2003.Credit:Bruce Thomson
Wilson has studied the pookila, formerly known as the New Holland mouse, since the 1980s. The pookila is a 17-gram rodent that disperses seeds, digs tunnels that refresh soil, and delivers fungal spores to roots that allow plants to draw up more nutrients. Populations were robust at the beginning of Wilson’s career and bounced back even after the 1983 Ash Wednesday fires burnt through their habitat in Victoria’s Otways.
“But since 2013 there’s been a huge collapse. If we hadn’t been investigating them we wouldn’t have known,” Wilson said. “I really at one stage thought I’d never see another New Holland mouse.”
Conservationists are now framing biodiversity goals in the language of climate action, binding the battle for a stable climate with the need to preserve ecosystems.
“Just as the global goal of net zero emissions by 2050 is disrupting the energy sector so that it shifts towards renewables, ‘nature positive by 2030’ will disrupt the sectors that are drivers of nature loss – agriculture, fishing, forestry, infrastructure and extractives,” said the report.
WWF Australia chief executive urged leaders to commit to a “Paris-style” agreement to reverse biodiversity loss at December’s COP15 biodiversity conference.
The slowing rate of the destruction of mangroves - which are critical carbon sinks - was hailed in the Living Planet Report as a “win-win-win” for biodiversity, people and climate change.Credit:Kate Geraghty
Movement is afoot locally; the government has announced a goal to halt extinction and, in line with the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, Australia has committed to protecting 30 per cent of its land and sea.
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And there’s an antidote for shifting baseline syndrome. Studies have show those who have access to “generational knowledge”, and Indigenous knowledge in particular, of how landscapes have changed suffer less from environmental amnesia. If older people share their experiences of the natural world with younger generations, they can better conceptualise how much has been lost.
To get to a “nature positive” world, we must remember what we once had.
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