Professor David Farrier

distortion in our sense of ourselves in relation to the rest of the living world is so much at the at the root of this I think um maybe a way to answer that question is to say just briefly about kind of where the book came from for me actually um it

And the journey that I took in writing it.

Yeah, I felt that, yeah, the travelling, yeah, it's a conundrum because you don't want to travel unless you can possibly avoid it.

And yet in some cases...

It was important to go to places to meet people and to be in those places as well.

We might come on to that.

My last book, very briefly, was about what our long-lasting traces on the planet will be, our future fossils, you know, what our plastic and our concrete and nuclear waste will, you know, what traces will be there, what stories will be told about us based on that.

And having written about kind of deep time, deep future change,

I wanted to write about change right now.

First of all, the thought, the realization that human activity is the driving force of evolutionary change on the planet right now.

Every single one of the main drivers of biodiversity loss and extinction, that is pollution, climate change, ecosystem change, and the introduction of non-native species.

all of these things are driving other species to adapt their bodies and behaviours.

And it's terrifying, but also an extraordinary insight into the abundance of creativity in the natural world.

The potential in nature to respond to new pressure and come up with a new body plan, come up with a new behaviour.

To me, in the midst

all of the you know the darkness and the shadow and and the fearfulness of that this extraordinary creativity was it was an evidence yeah um so much of what we're seeing is about plasticity though it's not just a kind of you know the emergence of new lineages distinct new species we're seeing the expression of what's called plasticity uh that all living things have the ability to devise a new phenotype a new cluster of traits that constitute the organism um

We all have these kind of latent body plans, these latent other cells within us that, you know, because of some genes are not switched on, some combinations of genes have been activated.

New environmental pressures can activate that.

Every living thing has this plasticity.

And it was sort of going from that idea of what change is happening now?