A Cry for Conservation

Yesterday I read an article from an old Dive magazine that was sitting in the dive shop. It was a article written for divers but as a marine biologist I found it particularly interesting, true, and scary.
Diving on the reefs here off the coast of Utila, I have been taken aback by the colors, the variety of fish, corals and other critters, the seemingly untouched community of coral organisms but deep down I know, and if you look closely you would see the signs too. This is a world devastated and dreary compared to what it used to be. As this is my first time actually diving I really dont know what this reef looked like before, but I do know what coral looks like when it has been damaged, bleached, broken and how many of the worlds fisheries have been almost wiped clean. I dont know what a pristine reef looks like and I think that few people actually know what a color, variety and abundance a pristine reef holds. The article was talking about shifting baselines, a term that came into use in science a number of years ago and has been used heaps with growing ecological conservation and sustainability concerns. A shifting baseline is basically the ruler or measure that we use to rate and compare different things. In ecology this often refers to an ecosystem or community, whether it is pristine, degraded, normal, rebuilding or beyond repair and how that relates to what the ecosystem once was or is now. As ecosystems are being studied the baseline has shifted from what was good is now excellent, what was bad is now ok. Our definition of what an untouched and wild system looks like is no longer relavant because we have destroyed most of the untouched places on this earth.
So while I admire the natural beauty that I see around me and am in awe that there are places like this that still exist, a part of me weeps. If the condition that we now know our world as is bad, then what will it be 25 years from now, and how far will baselines have shifted? If we want to pass some sort of natural beauty to the next generation, the change needs to happen now, standards should be set for a higher baseline, a better pristine.