2026 / Environmental Generational Amnesia

Environmental Generational Amnesia

Citation

Kahn, P. H. (2026). Environmental Generational Amnesia. Encyclopedia of the Anthropocene, 1–11. doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-51703-7_79-1

Link to file

A major city street lined with buildings and parked carsEnvironmental Generational Amnesia (EGA) is a psychological effect where each generation decides what a “normal” environment looks like based on what they experienced as kids. The catch is that as the environment keeps getting worse, each new generation grows up thinking a more degraded world is perfectly normal.

Because of this, major environmental losses — things that hurt both people and the rest of the natural world — go unnoticed. It’s already hard enough to solve big environmental problems when people clearly see them. It becomes way harder when most people don’t even realize the problems exist.

So EGA isn’t just a one-time thing. It’s a slow, layered process: the baseline for “normal” keeps shifting downward, generation after generation, making it harder and harder to see the long-term decline happening right in front of us.

Abstract

Environmental Generational Amnesia (EGA) is the psychological phenomenon wherein each generation constructs its understanding of what constitutes a “normal” natural world based on the environment experienced during childhood. The crux of the problem is that, as environmental degradation increases, each successive generation comes to perceive an increasingly impoverished natural world as normal. As a result, profound environmental losses—damaging to both human well-being and the more-than-human world—go unrecognized. It is difficult enough to address large-scale environmental problems when they are clearly recognized; it becomes even more difficult when such problems are barely recognized or not noticed at all. In this way, EGA reveals a temporally layered process, where shifting baselines accumulate across generations and obscure the long-term trajectory of environmental decline.