Shifting Baselines takes its title from the ecological concept of "shifting baseline syndrome": the idea that each generation inherits an altered world and gradually interprets that altered condition as "normal".
For many years I carried in my mind an image of the Scottish landscape formed by coffee table photography books: vast, austere, treeless moorland — mythical topographies, timeless and pure. A short while later, when visiting Scotland for the first time, thick forests of Sitka spruce felt like northern exotica, surely indigenous and entirely natural. Only decades later, through living within and alongside a rewilding project, did I fully understand that all of this was itself the product of long-term depletion: woodland clearance, species eradication and land management practices that had become culturally embedded.
The piece unfolds in three broad sections. It opens with a brief re-enactment: an estate owner recites a seasonal list of species taken in the mid-nineteenth century — administrative traces of abundance, recorded without sentiment. In the central section, a mass of public voices reflect on their own perceptions of the landscape. The final section adopts the tone of a formal report, listing phrases adapted from Scotland's State of Nature Report (2023). The music becomes starker, more empty, and offers no resolution.
