In ecology, "shifting baseline syndrome" suggests we systematically underestimate how ecologically different the past was (i.e. landscapes we see as pristine/biodiverse would have looked impoverished and degraded to previous generations). Is this idea relevant to the time and place you study?

When I read history, unless it's explictly about environmental change I tend to imagine natural landscapes as I know them and just change, like, people's clothes and the buildings and so forth. I imagine that since previous generations had their own baselines, outside of naturalists or travel narratives, mostly these qualitative differences would have gone unremarked upon but would really stand out to, say, a time traveler.

Do you tend to get hints of this in your area of study? Does it take special effort to remember or communicate that when someone mentions strolling through a grove of old American chestnut trees, they were possibly immersed in a world that was unremarkable to them but which might be difficult for us to imagine? If we could bring Caesar to a rural farm today in a location where had once camped on campaign, would he find it unsettlingly quiet—not enough insects and birds and frogs, rivers emptied of fish, etc.?

(To be clear, I don't assume we are currently at peak ecological degradation today at every single location on the planet. I'm sure some of you study periods where the local environment was much more degraded than in the same area today. But of course there can be little doubt general trend is toward dramatic biodiversity loss and environmental degradation.)