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.
Gaia Vince’s Adventures in the Anthropocene; a Journey to the Heart of the Planet We Made (Milkweed Editions / Chatto & Windus) has been awarded the 2015 Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books.
In their decision, the Winton Prize judges said, “Vince’s passion and strong voice grabs you instantly and the story she tells is truly original. A finely-crafted book on an important, urgent topic.”