Amanda Scott

So, there are so many very exciting bits in this book, and I had thought that we might start at the end with the Maori connection, but we'll move towards that.

Page 11, in the introduction, you say, We, that is we humanity, pollute because we see ourselves as separate from the rest of the living world.

But the way other creatures are learning to live with chemical and plastic pollution can suggest ways to reconnect with the world around us.

Climate change is altering the many wild clocks that regulate migration, breeding and blossoming.

But learning to coordinate our time with nature's rhythms, to make time with a whole forest, could revolutionise our politics.

Understanding better our impact on how living things think, dream and communicate can help us reimagine what it means to live and work together.

And I read that and I cheered out loud and it set off so many spirals in my head.

And then I wanted to read the rest of the book to find out how you thought that could unfold.

And that's where I would like us to go.

It feels to me as if

You are one of the few people I've come across who understands the science of how the living world is having to adjust to the impact of humanity, to what some people call the Anthropocene and other people are calling the Gaiocene and other people are calling other things.

But fundamentally the human species is now driving the evolutionary change, both of ourselves and the whole of the living web of life.

And we're doing it unconsciously.

We're doing it by accident.

And some people, clearly.

We could talk about domestication.

We've been doing some of it very deliberately.

And now we're looking at CRISPR.

And there are people doing things that I think are incredibly dangerous.

We'll get to that deliberately.