Environmental amnesia: How we can't even remember the lost biodiversity of yore

Imagine a child walking along a beach at low tide. Before setting off, they would have to be warned: fishing must be limited and the size of the animals must be taken into account. If they plan to eat what they catch, they need to make sure it isn’t contaminated. Before they get bored, they might gather a handful of razor clams, spot tiny crab shells and pick up a few seashells.

Now picture the same outing 80 years ago. The abundance of life on that very beach would have seemed “almost monstrous” to today’s child – and perhaps even to an adult – according to Claire Nouvian, founder of the Bloom association, a non-profit organization fighting against the destruction of the oceans and the climate. We could explain to the child everything that has vanished, but their idea of the seashore – the memory they will cherish from childhood adventures – will always be the one they have known: severely depleted, emptied of the thousands of species that once inhabited it.

This gradual adjustment to a degraded environment has a name: environmental amnesia. “The real disaster we are witnessing today is not just the loss of biodiversity. It is also the incredible capacity we have for not remembering what it was like before,” wrote ecologist Philippe J. Dubois in La Grande Amnésie écologique (“The Great Ecological Amnesia,” 2012). “This phenomenon is just as serious as the erosion or destruction of the diversity of living things.”

Solastalgia, a neologism coined by Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht, refers to the feeling of grief caused by the awareness of environmental changes, mixed with the anticipatory distress of the planet’s future. Environmental amnesia, on the other hand, is the gradual forgetting of what has been lost.

You have 82.28% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.