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Daniel Pauly

    DOWNLOAD A COPY OF: “Living Water Smart in British Columbia: Communities in Balance with Water – Create a Vision, Build a Legacy” – released by the Partnership for Water Sustainability in September 2022


    Every generation is handed a world that has been shaped by their predecessors – and then seemingly forgets that fact. In a short-but-influential paper published in 1995, legendary UBC fisheries scientist Daniel Pauly argued that this blind spot meant scientists were failing to account fully for the slow creep of disappearing species. Daniel Pauly coined this effect as the Shifting Baseline Syndrome. “You can have a succession of changes. At the end you want to sustain miserable leftovers. And the question is, why do people accept this? Well, because they don’t know that it was different,” he observed.

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    TURNING IDEAS INTO ACTION: “I believe that engineers need to move away from a technocentric approach and adopt a sociotechnical mindset. By this I mean we need to start thinking about the ways in which the social and technical are always connected. These aspects should not be separated, with technical challenges going to the engineers and social challenges going to the sociologists,” stated Professor Gordon Hoople, University of San Diego (January 2022)


    “Engineers spend much of their time absorbed in the technical aspects of problems, whether they’re designing the next generation of smartphones or building a subway. As recent news stories attest, this technocentric approach has some critical limitations, and the result can end up harming rather than helping society. We ask students to spend far too much time solving mathematical equations and far too little time thinking about the human dimensions of the problems they are trying to solve,” stated Gordon Hoople.

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    DOWNLOAD A COPY OF: “Living Water Smart in British Columbia: Know Your History and Context to Offset Generational Amnesia” – released by the Partnership for Water Sustainability in November 2021


    “Every generation is handed a world that has been shaped by their predecessors – and then seemingly forgets that fact. One of the first times this particular type of generational amnesia was observed was back in the 1990s. What this blindspot meant, Daniel Pauly argued in a short-but-influential paper, was that the scientists were failing to account fully for the slow creep of disappearing species, and each generation accepted the depleted ocean biodiversity they inherited as normal,” stated Richard Fisher.

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    DOWNLOAD A COPY OF: “Living Water Smart in British Columbia: Shifting Baseline Syndrome and Resilient Rainwater Management” – released by the Partnership for Water Sustainability in November 2021


    “Every generation will use the images that they got at the beginning of their conscious lives as a standard and will extrapolate forward. And the difference then, they perceive as a loss. But they don’t perceive what happened before as a loss. You can have a succession of changes. At the end you want to sustain miserable leftovers. And that, to a large extent, is what we want to do now. We want to sustain things that are gone or things that are not the way they were. And the question is, why do people accept this? Well because they don’t know that it was different,” stated Daniel Pauly.

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    RESILIENCY PLANNING DURING A PANDEMIC: “Information technology (IT) finally proved its worth, as the transition to working from home instead of the office was almost seamless, albeit with limitations,” stated CAO Emanuel Machado, when describing the Town of Gibsons response to the life-altering and ongoing COVID-19 emergency situation


    “In our resiliency framework, Emergency Planning is identified as an area of focus and includes recommendations to update programs to support neighbourhood preparedness to deal with natural or human-induced disasters. We had barely identified that as an action, and here we are dealing with an extremely serious situation, affecting everything and everyone we know. I wanted to share some thoughts about what I have observed in terms of our local government’s response to this situation,” stated Emanuel Machado.

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    COVID-19 PANDEMIC / WORDS OF WISDOM FROM THE WORLD’S TOP FISHERY SCIENTIST: “We transform the world, but we don’t remember it. We adjust our baseline to the new level, and we don’t recall what was there,” states Dr. Daniel Pauly when he explains the Shifting Baselines Syndrome, a term that he coined for an essay in 1995, and that helped to start the field of historical ecology


    These are challenging and life-altering times as all of us cope with the COVID-19 pandemic. In a very real sense, the situation parallels how it must have felt in 1940 when WW2 changed everything. Our COVID-19 response proves British Columbians can mobilize in a common cause when confronted with a life-altering emergency that impacts all. Viewed in this context, Dr. Daniel Pauly offers timely words of wisdom for “bending the curve” in the years and decades ahead to achieve ecological restoration and, in the process, adapt to a changing climate. When there is a will, there is a way. Keep calm and carry on.

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    DESIGN WITH NATURE: “Man is that uniquely conscious creature who can perceive and express. He must become the steward of the biosphere. To do this, he must design with nature,” wrote Ian McHarg in Chapter 1 of his landmark book that is his enduring legacy (published in 1969)


    More manifesto than scholarly text, Ian McHarg’s now-canonical book arrived amidst the tumult of an ascendant, leftist environmental movement—one that delivered a series of landmark political victories in the 1970s, a period that would become known as “the environmental decade.” It remains one of the best-selling books ever written by a designer, has been translated into Chinese, French, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish, and remains in print today.

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    IMPROVING WHERE WE LIVE: Maybe we are not doomed after all. We have the brains. Do we have the will?


    In 1995, acclaimed marine biologist Daniel Pauly coined the term “shifting baselines” to describe a phenomenon of lowered expectations. This is a foundation piece for implementing restorative development, reconnecting hydrology and ecology, and bending the curve to restore stream systems. Accepted ‘standards of practice’ – especially those for engineering, planning and finance – influence the form and function of the Built Environment. The goal of shifting to an ecologically functioning and resilient baseline and creating a creekshed legacy will ultimately depend on the nature of change to standards of practice.

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