Where are the hedgehogs?

 With the 80th anniversary of VE Day coming up it is how we set the baseline with new generations. The prime minister made an announcement that to mark the celebrations that pubs could stay open from 2300 to 0100. Is this is what we have come to? The leader of the country making this announcement?

It seems trivial but it ground my gears somewhat as the celebration belongs to the men and women who live through that time, and for the current people alive, this should be marked as a commemoration. Have watched several episodes of the World at War we now fail to think the abject horror on a global scale that wreaked on humanity.

We fail to think what brought the world to this point and fail to see how history repeats itself as we become ever more isolated as individuals and nations. Our frame of reference, our story, is how Britain lived through an age of glory. The base line has shifted.

Alice Boyd demonstrated this beautifully when I followed up her Earth Day newsletter with two recordings of song birds taken at the same time and same location but 40 years apart. The reduction was stark and frightening. Alice would have not known any different and her recording was ‘normal’. The base line has shifted.

The insects that splatter on me when I ride in the summer is hardly anything compared with the insects that would decorate my car back in 1992. I see this but Tom does not. The base line has shifted.

What has happened to the hedgehogs? They used pad around the garden occasionally the tell tale signs were their little bodies littering the roads. I remember these and they are no more. Young children will not get to see an hedgehog and so for them this is normal. But the baseline has shifted.

The shifting baseline is hard for each generation to accept as they have never experienced anything else other than the time they have lived. Is there are way to set the baseline like the foundation of a building?

Humans going to war is one thing as they end and then we re-cast ourselves with the hope of a brighter future but what of nature? This is baseline is drifting down and I fear we fail to see it’s importance until it is too late.