"MacKinnon illustrates this phenomenon, known in psychology as “change blindness,” with an anecdote about fish photographs from the Florida Keys. Old photographs from the 1940s show delighted fishermen displaying their prize catches—marlins as long as a man is tall. When present-day fishermen see those pictures, they flat-out refuse to believe they are authentic.
Human beings tend to be blind to gradual changes in their environment, assuming that the way things are right now is how they always have been and always will be. We do not miss the former beauty of the world, he would say, because we have never known it.
I am not so sure that we don’t miss it. I think we do miss it, but we don’t know what it is we are missing. We feel a void, a sense of poverty, a hunger for something unidentifiable. Transferred onto money or consumer items, that hunger drives continued cycles of destruction. Transferred onto drugs, gambling, alcohol, it drives the unsolvable social problem of addiction. Perhaps the degradation of nature is not without its consequences after all."