CONCEPT
Landscape Amnesia
The generational loss of awareness in which each new generation's baseline is the inheritance of cumulative prior depletion — so that no one alive remembers what was lost, and the depletion becomes invisible.
Landscape amnesia is Diamond's term, developed in The World Until Yesterday, for the generational mechanism through which cumulative environmental change becomes culturally invisible. Each generation perceives its own environment as the baseline — the normal condition against which subsequent changes will be measured — and loses awareness of how different conditions were before its lifetime. The cumulative effect, across multiple generations, is the progressive erasure of the pre-depletion baseline from collective memory. By the time conditions become severe enough to threaten viability, no one alive remembers the abundance that came before, and the society cannot measure its current state against what it has lost.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The phenomenon was first documented systematically in fisheries research. Daniel Pauly's 1995 paper on 'shifting baselines' in marine fisheries showed that each generation of fisheries biologists calibrated their sense of 'normal' fish populations to the populations they encountered early in their careers — which were already depleted relative to