Lost Words and Lost Worlds: Combatting Environmental Generational Amnesia

This essay explores the problem of society’s environmental memory loss and the potential for literary and cultural works to counteract it. It uses the concepts of environmental generational amnesia and shifting baseline syndrome to argue that our connection to the natural world has been eroded by our severely limited experience of it. Each generation’s perception of what is “normal” in nature is shaped by their own experience rather than an objective standard. As a result, we forget what we have lost and do not realise the full extent of environmental degradation that has occurred over time. People’s baseline expectations of the state of the environment are constantly being reset to a lower level as they are born into a world with fewer resources and a more degraded environment than the generation before. The essay examines two case studies to illustrate how creative works can play a vital role in reversing these trends and curing our planetary amnesia: The Lost Words: A Spell Book and its sequel The Lost Spells by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris, and What Is Missing? , an interactive digital project by Maya Lin.