Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figure and Tables
- About the Contributors
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Part I National Environmental Legacy Act
- 1 The Case for the National Environmental Legacy Act
- 2 The Necessity of Procedural Reform
- 3 Shifting Baselines and Backsliding Benchmarks: The Need for the National Environmental Legacy Act to Address the Ecologies of Restoration, Resilience, and Reconciliation
- 4 Valuing Nature: The Challenge of the National Environmental Legacy Act
- 5 Citizen Science and the Next Generation of Environmental Law
- 6 Creating National Environmental Legacy Act Information: The Double Standard
- 7 The Constitution and Our Debt to the Future
- Part II Environmental Competition Statute
- Index
- References
3 - Shifting Baselines and Backsliding Benchmarks: The Need for the National Environmental Legacy Act to Address the Ecologies of Restoration, Resilience, and Reconciliation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figure and Tables
- About the Contributors
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Part I National Environmental Legacy Act
- 1 The Case for the National Environmental Legacy Act
- 2 The Necessity of Procedural Reform
- 3 Shifting Baselines and Backsliding Benchmarks: The Need for the National Environmental Legacy Act to Address the Ecologies of Restoration, Resilience, and Reconciliation
- 4 Valuing Nature: The Challenge of the National Environmental Legacy Act
- 5 Citizen Science and the Next Generation of Environmental Law
- 6 Creating National Environmental Legacy Act Information: The Double Standard
- 7 The Constitution and Our Debt to the Future
- Part II Environmental Competition Statute
- Index
- References
Summary
A BASELINE IS A POINT OF DEPARTURE; A BENCHMARK, A POINT along a continuum that marks progress toward a goal. Central to the design of the National Environmental Legacy Act (Legacy Act or Act) is the collection of baseline data about natural resources, the definition of the nature and quality of the environmental legacy to be preserved, and ongoing monitoring to ensure preservation of the desired legacy. If the goal of the Legacy Act is to ensure the intergenerational transfer of a legacy, then a baseline must be set, benchmarks for success established, and current ecological realities confronted. None of these are simple tasks, and they have been made infinitely more complicated by the accelerated pace of anthropogenic change, which has resulted in both shifting and already-shifted baselines. We use the term “shifting baselines” to describe the phenomenon of how humans' perception of normal or baseline environmental conditions can shift dramatically over time, particularly between generations. The pitfall of shifting baselines is that environmental degradation often goes unrecognized by successive generations, which may not appreciate the degraded state of what they perceive as a pristine and functional ecosystem.
The shifting-baselines phenomenon poses several major challenges to designing an effective Legacy Act. First, if we fail to consider historical environmental conditions and set conservation goals based on already-shifted baselines, we may constrain – even doom – the resource legacy we seek to transfer.
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- Beyond Environmental LawPolicy Proposals for a Better Environmental Future, pp. 53 - 80Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010
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