 When talking about what is natural we really have no clue what the world was like before human impact, and therefore cannot know what struggles we have to put forward in order to clean up the world and make it liveable and drinkable again.This meaning of "shifting baselines" is a fairly heavy depressing one.However, many people have taken a much more light-hearted approach to the term, using it to refer to the lowered standards of dating, the lowered standards of politicians, traffic, television, etc.