Human plasticity and cultural evolution

We live in an ever-changing world, but it is not always obvious what kinds of evolutionary change we are seeing in the broader web of life: in physiology, behaviour, language - and human responses to these.  How plastic is the natural world? How resilient?  How capable - or not - of adapting to the chaos of the climate emergency, the cascade of toxins in our air, soil and water, to the plastics, heavy metals and other detritus we throw out into the world as if the entire planet were one vast sewer for waste we forget about as soon as we've had the dopamine drip that acquiring it evoked?

How thin is the ice on which we are skating?  And how can we change the ways we do things so we don't fall into the void of extinction.

Our guest this week spends his life exploring these questions. David Farrier is Professor of Literature and the Environment at the University of Edinburgh. David’s first book, Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils, looked at the marks we are leaving on the planet and how these might appear in the fossil record in the deep future. It was named by both The Times and Telegraph as a book of the year, earned praise from Robert Macfarlane and Margaret Atwood, and has been translated into ten other languages. His most recent book is the one we're going to be exploring today - Nature’s Genius: Evolution's Lessons for a Changing Planet is one of the few non-fiction books I've come across that is capable both of going deep into the science of the anthropocene - the full genetic, chemical, noise-pollution havoc of it and going deep into how we can engage with indigenous cultures, languages and ways of thought so that we in the western trauma culture might become something new.  As he says early in the book, 'We pollute because we see ourselves as separate from the rest of the living world, but…learning to coordinate our time with nature's rhythms…could revolutionise our politics.'  The whole quote is in the episode. What you need to know now is that this is a genuinely ground-breaking, mind-opening book and I cannot imagine better reading as we step into 2026.  If you need to know I'm not alone in thinking this, it has been shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize for Conservation Writing, and the Saltire Award (Scotland's national book awards) for non-fiction. For the New Scientist and Waterstone's bookshop, it is 'Best popular Science Book of 2025'.  You do need to read this.  And in the meantime, enjoy a conversation that left me buzzing for long after we stopped recording.

David's books
Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/footprints-david-farrier/6489943
Nature’s Genius: Evolution's Lessons for a Changing Planet https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/nature-s-genius-evolution-s-lessons-for-a-changing-planet-david-farrier/7811885

David on BlueSky https://bsky.app/profile/david-farrier.bsky.social
David on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/proffarrier/

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