Amanda Scott

simply by the pressures of poacher predation.

If you don't take the ones without the tusks, then more evolve without tusks.

What this does to the general elephant population is, as yet, unknown and unknowable.

And this is one of several points that we get to in the podcast.

We are doing this without thinking.

We're doing it just as a byproduct of being human.

of being ungrown adolescents in a wider world where all we care about en masse is GDP growth, acquiring stuff, keeping the wolf from the door.

And this is not sustainable.

We know this.

And we know that we have to consciously evolve to be something else.

but I rarely have the chance to have a conversation with someone who really gets this, who takes this as their starting point and then moves on.

And David Ferrier does this.

He is Professor of Literature and the Environment, yes, both of these, at the University of Edinburgh.

His first book, Footprints, In Search of Future Fossils, looked at the marks we're 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 McFarland and Margaret Atwood, and has been translated into 10 other languages.

His second and most recent book is the one we're going to be exploring today.

As I've said, Nature's Genius, Evolution's Lessons for a Changing Planet.

This is genuinely 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, oil pollution havoc of it, and going deep into how we could possibly engage with the remaining indigenous cultures, understanding the ways that they see language,

the ways they think, the ways that they know themselves to be integral nodes in the web of life, not separate, so that we in the Western trauma culture with all our myths and stories of separation might become something new.

As David says early in the book, we pollute because we see ourselves as separate from the rest of the living world.