Since I was a child in the 1960s, I’ve had an interest in
nature. By the time I was nine or ten, I realised something was wrong, many of
the apparently common birds and insects in my nature books were nowhere to be
seen. I didn’t understand then how ecologically impoverished the English
countryside was compared to the previous decades when the books were written.
What I had experienced was an outcome of Shifting Baseline Syndrome. The
concept is that without memory, knowledge, or experience of past environmental
conditions, current generations cannot perceive how much their environment has
changed because they are comparing it to their own ‘normal’ baseline and not to
historical baselines.
In psychology it is referred to as ‘environmental generational amnesia’.
What we consider to be a healthy environment now, past generations would
consider to be degraded, and what we judge to be degraded now, the next
generation will consider to be healthy or ‘normal’. The result is our tolerance
for environmental degradation increases and our expectations for the natural
world are lowered.
“Four birds” explores that environmental loss through sound, taking recordings
of birds, then manipulating and synthesising them as an analogy for our
increasingly inaccurate memories.
Soon these natural sounds will only exist as distorted and mis-remembered
fragments as our memories fade over time. At some time, we will forget their
songs and finally we will forget what we forgot.
Recordings of Turtle Dove, Skylark, Yellow Hammer & House Martin from the British Library archive (Creative Commons Attribution 4 international licence). Other recordings are my own from 1982-2022)
Cover: Illustration of a turtle dove (Streptopelia turtur) by John Gould and
Elizabeth Gould, 1832-1837
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGZuFl9hCC8
