In her 1970 “Big Yellow Taxi,” Joni Mitchell famously sang “Don’t it always seem to go / That you don’t know what you’ve got / ‘Till it’s gone.” Dr. Daniel Pauly took that one step further in his 1995 paper “Anecdotes and the shifting baseline syndrome of fisheries” by pointing out that not only do we not know what we’ve got, but due to shifting baselines syndrome, when it’s gone we won’t know we ever even had it.
Not a pleasant thought, to be sure; but then reflections on the destruction of oceanic ecosystems tend not to be. Fortunately, we do know that we’ve got deep-thinking, bold-speaking scholars such as Dr. Pauly who are tirelessly engaged in pointing out to us through books such as his forthcoming Vanishing Fish; Shifting Baselines and the Future of Global Fisheries just what we still have and how we might conserve it.
Vanishing Fish is expected to be published by Greystone Books in May of 2019.
