Thirsty hedgehogs and heartbreak in the Anthropocene/Fafocene

I am in the library. There is someone from a wildlife charity doing a presentation – with live creatures – to a bunch of young boys and girls their mothers, in attendance.

We have, over the last few generations, of course, rendered it harder and harder for young people to have any connection with “Nature”.

Urbanisation, the Sixth Extinction, the rise of surveillance parenting, the telescreens.

She has displayed [at least] a barn owl, a de-glanded skunk and then a hedgehog. Apparently this is the biggest year ever for hedgehogs ending up in sanctuaries, because there is not enough water around for the poor blighters.

These poor children, not getting to have enough unstructured play in natural settings where there is wildlife of any variety. To only see animals pulled from boxes as a special treat. It reminds me of a prescient paragraph in the mid-1970s Doctor Who novel “The Doomsday Weapon”, where Malcolm Hulke imagined the 23rd century, where people only saw animals in zoos.

We are most of the way there, it seems to me.

What a shitshow. We are in the Fafocene, and it is only going to get rather a lot worse, very quickly.