Most people have never experienced a truly wild world.

That may sound strange. We picnic in urban parks, hike in forests, canoe in rivers, visit national parks, and watch nature documentaries. We believe we know what nature looks like. But what if the world we think of as natural is already profoundly diminished?

Ecologists have a term for this: shifting baseline syndrome. First described by fisheries scientist Daniel Pauly in 1995, it occurs when each generation accepts the environmental conditions of its youth as normal. As ecosystems decline, our view of normal declines alongside them. What would have shocked our grandparents has become ordinary. For most of us, our ancestors would not recognize their own surroundings in today’s world.

The result is that we lose not only species and ecosystems. We lose generational memory.

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Conservation is often portrayed as an attempt to stop change. In truth, it is an effort to shape it. A future can hold more life than the present. A landscape can grow more resilient. A river can recover. A species can return.

The opposite of shifting baseline syndrome is not nostalgia. It is imagination—the ability to picture a world richer in life than the one we inherited, and then to do the work of making it real.