The process by which our perception of the ‘natural’ world
becomes degraded as the ‘baseline’ shifts with each generation.
for Peter Fiennes
When you said ‘Shifting Baselines’ I believed
You were paying deference to those
Hard Bop inventions of Charlie Mingus,
Ron Carter’s steady licks alongside Miles,
Or Jimmy Garrison’s pulsating sound
On John Coltrane’s sublime A Love Supreme,
But you were talking about how, today,
‘Natural’ would be seen by those before us
As ‘spoiled’, and what we see as ‘neglected’
Our children will soon see as ‘natural’…
The way that the sound of the A38
At the end of the garden has replaced
The ambience of birds, with countless tyres
Thrumming their hungry pulse against the pitch.
Andy Brown