Photo: Early morning on Keurbooms Beach, Plettenberg Bay. Courtesy of Chris Rothman.

The conversation, instigated by the Bitou Trust whose work includes support the Robberg Coastal Corridor Protected Environment and the PlettAid Foundation/Hospice Plett, brought together experts Dr Daniel Pauly, a renowned marine scientist, Marina Psaros, a climate change resilience planner and author, and Herbert (Beto) Bedolfe, environmental philanthropist from the Marisla Foundation.

Hosted by the Impact Trust and Resilience Funders Network, the speakers covered a wide range of topics related to environmental conservation, community engagement, and the challenges of addressing global ecological issues.

You can watch the recording here and read summary highlights below.

Human Impact on Biodiversity and Ecosystems:

Daniel provided a comprehensive historical overview of the human impact on biodiversity, starting from early human migrations out of Africa about 70,000 years ago. He explained how human expansion led to the extinction of large mammals on various continents. He then traced the development of agriculture about 10,000 years ago, which resulted in further reduction of animal and plant biodiversity, before highlighting how practices in European Christianity (such as ‘fish on Friday;) indirectly influenced fishing techniques, leading to more intensive fishing practices.

However, it was the Industrial Revolution that significantly and dramatically increased our ability to exploit this natural resource. A key point in Daniel’s narrative was how the application of World War II technology has had devastating consequence for marine life:

“The 20th century fishing vessel has emerged on the base of technology developed to fight German submarines”. In Europe, Germany was isolated during the World Wars by the North Sea. As a result, it put significant energy developing the technology for submarine warfare. This included technologies like hydroacoustics, precise navigation, and spotter planes, originally developed for warfare, were adapted for fishing. It led to an unprecedented ability to locate and catch fish, likening modern industrial fishing to “fighting a war against fish.”

Shifting Baselines:

Daniel elaborated on his concept of “shifting baselines,” which describes how each generation perceives environmental changes based on their limited experience, often failing to fully grasp the extent of long-term changes. He explained that this concept applies not only to environmental issues but also to social and cultural phenomenon. Indeed, he highlighted that it was serendipitously discovered by sociologists studying children  who had never seen a starry sky due to pollution. He explained:

“The [insight of the] shifting baseline was invented twice … the same month and the same year. A paper was published by a group of sociologists working with a group of disadvantaged kids that had never seen the starry sky because they lived in a polluted area. I myself have had students who had grown up in Seoul and never seen the starry sky either. So, the sociologist had invented exactly the same thing as shifting baseline. They had given it the name “generational amnesia,” which is proper but my term “shifting baselines” became more widely adopted in scientific circles.”

Beto Bedolfe explained the shifting baseline idea in a fisheries example. It is apparent in the fact that fishermen today might consider their catches as normal or even good, unaware that the size and abundance of fish have dramatically decreased over decades.

Daniel extended the concept to social issues, particularly around immigration and nationalism: “Consider the current social movements in the US against immigrants. It’s all professed by people who, two generations ago, were immigrants themselves” demonstrating how quickly people can forget their own history.

We can tie this concept back to the broader human story: “If people knew that that their ancestors emigrated from Africa a few 1,000 years ago, obviously, they would have a different feeling about being nativist and being nationalist and not being aware of the fact that immigrant communities don’t even know that they are immigrant communities.”

The implications of this intergenerational amnesia or shifting baseline syndrome makes it difficult for people to fully grasp long-term environmental changes. Each generation tends to take its own experience of the environment as the norm, making it challenging to recognise gradual but significant degradation over time. Understanding this concept is crucial for addressing environmental issues, as it highlights the need for historical data and long-term perspective in assessing environmental change. It also underscores the importance of passing down knowledge and experiences across generations to maintain a more accurate baseline of environmental conditions.

Community Engagement in Scientific Research and Conservation:

Marina Psaros shared her experience in engaging local communities, particularly youth, in scientific research and environmental planning. She described a program she created called “Youth Exploring Sea Level Rise Science”:

“The curriculum started with traditional classroom learning about climate impacts. It was tied to next generation science standards, which is the US standard for basically how science is taught in the classroom and tying it to standards made it easier for teachers to actually bring it into the classroom.”

Marina explained how students were involved in researching real-world data collection and validating sea level rise projections through community surveys. An unexpected benefit was that students often translated surveys into their home languages, providing rich data from diverse communities that government agencies couldn’t easily access. The importance of co-creating knowledge and responses or solutions is essential for community engagement in planning processes.

“We had students go out and validate projections based on high tides. In other areas students were involved in checking and co-creating the science that was going to be driving the policy.”

An unexpected benefit of involving students was their ability to conduct surveys in multiple languages and involving them in broader community engagement:

“As they were doing their community surveys, they wound up translating into Tagalog or Vietnamese or Korean, or other languages that they spoke at home. And then we got this data back about what all of these local level community folks were experiencing and thinking and feeling, and the results were way richer than what any government agency could get. As importantly, students were able to demonstrate their agency and insight in community meetings, delivering the results of their work at planning and policy meetings, and serving as advisors to the formal planning processes. And what was also great about that is that, of course, all those parents wanted to see their students in action, so we got all the parents to show up at community meetings.”

Marina highlighted how important it is to make scientific data accessible and relevant to local communities and to involve them in developing solutions and responses. Similar community engagement models could be applied to various fields, including public health, as was being done by the PlettAid Foundation.

“The model of working with youth, doing formal education in the classroom, having them act as community ambassadors, and then bringing them back into decision making, is a model that can be used in other areas”. She highlighted how they were currently “working with Chief heat officers in a couple of cities around the world who are looking at how to build heat resilience in their communities. And we’re actually having students recreate their towns in Minecraft and then put their ideas for heat resilience, green roofs and shade corridors as cooling centres, into these Minecraft builds.”

Balancing Global Issues with Local Action to Environmental Challenges:

The discussion highlighted the tension between global and local approaches to environmental challenges. Daniel emphasised the importance of global data and policy:

“Lots of Foundations fund local stuff which cannot be scaled up. That’s the problem with too much localisation …  it doesn’t scale.”

Marina’s focus, on the other hand, is more on local implementation and community involvement, arguing for the importance of making global issues relatable and actionable at the local level.

“If often feels very much like, well, I can protect my own in some ways. And it’s …, horrifying to try and hold in, in one’s mind, the global community of which we all belong in, our global resources, versus a smaller thing that I have control over.”

Ocean Conservation and Fisheries Management:

Daniel provided a detailed explanation of how fishing technologies have evolved, leading to overfishing and collapse of fisheries. He used a vivid analogy to describe modern industrial fishing:

“Imagine 500 years of fishing with lines which skimmed off only the cod that were exposing themselves in shallow water, like, getting money from your bank through a teller. Then all of a sudden, the treasure, the bank vaults are open, and you can pillage it with a truck. That is what happened in in in the 60s, 70s, and that’s what we do with everything now.”

The importance of conservation corridors and how they work in oceans.

As the conversation was instigated by the Robberg Coastal Corridor Protected Environment, the subject of ‘conservation corridors’ and how they worked in oceans was explored. Daniel gave an insightful explanation of how ecological corridors function differently in terrestrial and marine environments. He highlighted that oceans have implicit corridors, though they are less strict than on land. Factors like temperature, light, and oxygen levels limit species movement in the ocean. Human activities, particularly fishing, have also reduced many natural barriers in the ocean.

On land, however, corridors are more defined and can also be more easily disrupted by human infrastructure such as roads. A road can block the distribution can the distribution of animals or seeds very easily. It can stop the spread of forests.“

Man-made structures like roads thus function as significant barriers to the movement of terrestrial ecosystems and species, effectively breaking corridors. In marine environment, in contrast, there are fewer rigid barriers, making corridors less defined but more fluid. Daniel explained:

“We don’t have such barriers in the marine world. It’s not totally open, and it is wrong to think that fish can go anywhere. They cannot because they are limited by temperature, by light, which produce food that that can be consumed. So, for example, when it’s warm for them, they can move where the temperature is not elevated, or they can move deeper where the water is also cooler. But deeper, they don’t get enough food because the light cannot penetrate, and there is often less oxygen. So, there is a limit to what they can adapt to. Currently the movement toward the poles (cooler) is stronger than the movement deeper.”

Daniel also noted that human activities, most especially technology in fishing, have reduced many natural barriers in the ocean and allowed for exploitation of previously unreachable areas and potentially disrupting natural marine corridors:

“What we see as progress in fisheries is the abolition of limits, the abolition of voters. If you read the literature 100 years ago, there were places where boats couldn’t go because of ice, or depth, or  cost. Today, subsidies in big boat building and the development of technologies like the huge winches on engines that on allow a net to be retrieved from a kilometre depth, these have removed those barriers to mass-scale fishing.”

Climate Change Impacts and Community Resilience:

Marina discussed her work on community-level coastal planning and the importance of making climate science accessible to the general public. She highlighted the need for building agency and ownership in communities:

“I wrote this book, The Atlas of disappearing places. After spending about a decade working on community level coastal planning, I worked for NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and had been doing a lot of work in translating the science that was being generated from NOAA and NASA and some of the big federal agencies to the level of local decision making in coastal areas.”

Environmental Education and Awareness:

The discussion touched on the importance of integrating environmental and human ecology education into school curricula. It was noted by a participant that “It seems like recently students have been learning more about turbocharged greed, how to be successful, conformist slaves to capitalism, get a job it, as opposed to, what are we here for, and what keeps us safe and what is common so Daniel’s explanation of the top line aggregate realities should be common knowledge for every child.” The need for a more integrated approach to environmental education and management, one that starkly emphasises the need to balance global awareness with local action, and the importance of fostering a sustainable mindset from an early age, is imperative.