You’re so right that if people listened to the past they would avoid falling into the trap of shifting baselines. Like they say, if you don’t learn from history, you’re doomed to repeat it. Fisheries managers need to seriously analyze the differences in population sizes and animal sizes, not just compared to the past few years, but the past several decades. If they did this they would see long term trends, like in the case of the cod, where they got progressively smaller, and populations receded from their former historical ranges.
