He belonged, like Olivia, to a generation that felt it had been born on a planet irretrievably damaged by human greed and ignorance. The previous generation had perhaps been preoccupied by the prospect of nuclear annihilation, but for Francis, who was only five when the Berlin Wall came down, there was clearly no need for a war to lay waste to the biosphere; all that was needed was business as usual. In his first conversation with Olivia at the megafauna conference, perhaps already exhilarated by their meeting but not yet prepared to express it directly, he couldn’t help noticing the strangely cheerful, almost rivalrous way they had discussed the inevitable death of nature. They agreed that the Anthropocene Age was more likely to mark the downfall than the triumph of its brash protagonist; or rather, that they would both be parts of a single event, like a property developer cutting the ribbon on a looming skyscraper that bears his name, only to be buried moments later under its tsunami of rubble and dust. He told Olivia that during his adolescence, the weight of ecological doom was sometimes so great that he had felt the pressure of misanthropy and despair. When he read that the acidification of the oceans through the absorption of excess carbon dioxide would lead to the loss of thirty per cent of marine life, the scale of the crisis invited a sense of impotence equal to his sense of horror. He felt that if each soldier killed in a war deserved to have his name inscribed on a monument, an entire species wiped out by hunting or the destruction of its habitat must deserve to have its name recorded as well. After admiring endangered species in captivity, a Hall of Extinction would provide a solemn and natural finale to a day at the zoo. In his early twenties the antidote to his sense of dread was to join other eco-warriors in clandestine operations, releasing beavers into Devon rivers in the middle of the night. The excitement and camaraderie were sometimes outweighed by an angry assumption that the rest of the human population was made up of ‘consumerist zombies’ who regarded nature as little more than a recreational facility, a virtuous alternative to watching television on a cloudless afternoon. In Francis’s experience, ecological angst was in fact almost universal, but most people found it hard to know what to do other than eat and drink around the clock in a conscientious drive to fill as many recycling bags as possible.