Shifting Baseline Syndrome is a psychological and sociological phenomenon – usually relating to ecology. Each new generation accepts the degraded environment in which they grew up as the ‘normal’ baseline because they have known no different. I can remember a time when lapwings were a feature of all cultivated ground in England and when shrikes and wrynecks were familiar birds of traditional orchards. Our children have barely clapped eyes on any of these. Only once, at a sanctuary on the Isle of Islay, have I heard the stuck zip croak of a corncrake. And yet, to my Scottish grandfather, born 1866, the hideous noise was part of life in the cornfields until ground-nesting birds were nuked by the mechanised harvesting of hay and silage. Older-style people will remember when the cathode ray tube was not disseminating a 24-hour diet of filth and – I was going to say innuendo –...
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