May 18, 2020 By James Dinneen Undark
In 1995, biologist Daniel Pauly made a shrewd observation: Scientists in his field had forgotten about the past. Pauly, who studied commercial fishing at the University of British Columbia, observed that fisheries scientists tended to measure change in the abundance and species composition of the fish stocks they studied relative to what they were like at the beginning of their careers. As fish stocks declined, each new generation of scientists generally accepted the new normal as the natural state of things.