Accidental Gods
What ought we be? Hope, despair and the resilience of life with Professor David Farrier
14 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: What does it mean to live in the 'what ought to be'?
What tense will you choose to live in? I choose to live in the what ought to be. And that really hit home with me because what ought to be expresses the fullness of our time of grief and hope. It carries that sense of ache and loss, but it also carries that sense of hope, that conviction and commitment, what ought to be.
It just exploded on the page for me because that encapsulates this extraordinary moment we inhabit of loss and hope together. We can't afford not to hope. We can't afford to let go. But we need to hold on to that sense of what has been lost and what language do we have for thinking about the kind of emotional color spectrum that that involves.
It's such an extraordinarily unique sensation and emotion to inhabit.
hey people welcome to accidental gods to the podcast where we do still believe that another world is possible and that if we all work together there is still time to lay the foundations for a future that we would be proud to leave to the generations that come after us I'm Amanda Scott, your host and fellow traveller in this journey into possibility.
And we are recording this in December, ahead, we believe, of putting it out early in the new year. So, happy new year, in this kind of weird time flip that we're doing.
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Chapter 2: How is humanity driving evolutionary change on Earth?
And this is really appropriate for the topic today, because one of the many things that Professor David Farrier explores in his book Nature's Genius is is how time is not always considered to be linear by other cultures, probably not by other species, and certainly not by the web of life. So let's take a step back and have a look.
And this is important because we, that is we humanity, we the whole of the human species, but particularly our culture, are now changing every facet of life on Earth and are the main drivers for evolutionary change.
combination of a warming world, an acidifying world, the chaos of toxic overspill and everything that we just dump into the environment is pushing either extinction or adaptation in every species on earth including us. And so it's good to have a really clear-eyed look at this. And this is what Nature's Genius does. The subtitle is Evolutions Lessons for a Changing Planet.
And those lessons are both good and bad. In the conversation that follows, you'll hear David say several times that we cannot be complacent. Yes, many species are adapting and evolving very fast. to the horrors that we are imposing on them. But not everything is.
Chapter 3: What lessons can we learn from indigenous cultures?
We are losing species at a terrifying rate, and there are probably limits to the adaptations that can happen. Nonetheless, some of the things that are happening are genuinely fascinating. I had no idea, for instance, that elephants were evolving without tusks. 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.
Chapter 4: How do different species adapt to environmental pressures?
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.
But learning to coordinate our time with nature's rhythms could revolutionise our politics. I've cut several bits out of that. The full quote is early on in the podcast. What you need to know now is that this is a genuinely groundbreaking, mind-opening book, and I cannot imagine better reading as we step into 2026.
And if you need to know that I'm not alone in thinking this, it's been shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize for Conservation Writing, and the Soltar Award, which is Scotland's national book awards for non-fiction. For the New Scientist and Waterstones Bookshop, it was the best popular science book of 2025.
It's beautifully written, fantastically researched, you will learn new things on absolutely every page, and it's a masterclass in bringing together Western thought,
with indigenous knowing, the awe and the wonder and the creativity of some of the things that we can do, together with the horror of what we have done, and the capacity of indigenous peoples to view things differently, and perhaps to offer a way out of this mess. So I genuinely recommend that you read this book. And in the meantime...
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Chapter 5: What role does plasticity play in evolution?
that you enjoy a conversation that left me buzzing long after we stopped recording. So people of the podcast, stepping into 2026, please welcome Professor David Farrier, author of Nature's Genius, Evolution's Lessons for a Changing Planet. David Farrier, welcome to the Accidental Gods podcast.
How are you and where are you as we close to the end of the year and we're jettisoning this out into January so people will hear it in the new year. So tell us how you are.
Hi Amanda, it's great to be with you. Thank you. I'm very well, thank you. I'm delighted to be with you on the podcast. I'm sitting in my office in the University of Edinburgh. It's very quiet here because the teaching semester is over. The students are busy on essays and exams.
Yeah, so it's a quieter period and it's nice to have that point of quiet as the year draws to a close and the darkest point comes upon us. to have that period of quiet to kind of reflect which I really enjoy.
Brilliant. Yes, the looks within time of just let's just settle and see where we are and where we might need to go. And this is the year we have published your book. There will be a picture in the show notes for people not on YouTube, for people on YouTube. This is one of the most exciting and thought-provoking and inspiring books I have come across this year.
And I am so grateful that you connected with me and suggested that I read it because it's opened a lot of doors and brought me again to the edge of realising how thin is the ice on which we are currently skating. And you are a professor of literature and the environment.
And before we dive into the book, even just that, the fact that there is a professor of literature and the environment, which feels such a thoughtful and generative and a Thrutopian thing to be.
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Chapter 6: How can we rethink our relationship with nature?
And I basically want to come and do a PhD with you, but I don't know how I'd fund it or...
managed because you're in Edinburgh and I'm in Shropshire however how did you come to be that was this something you went to Edinburgh and said hey we need to bring these two things together because generally one is in humanities and one is in science and that needs not to be a thing or did Edinburgh come to you tell us how that happened it happened very organically um you know I've been in Edinburgh for about 15 years now and around the time I came here coincided with um
increasing interest I had in writing about the environment, writing about place and writing about how the world is changing and we're changing it. And I discovered lots of people here working in the humanities, in philosophy, in divinity, in art history, who had similar interests and similar questions. And the environmental humanities has been a field for about 15, 20 years now.
And it would just seem like a very natural home and a place to ask those questions. In terms of the job title, it's a bit more of a boring story, really. When I came up for promotion, I had the opportunity to propose my own chair, my own title. Wow.
How cool is that?
It is, it is. But I feel like these are questions, the kind of questions that we have about how we're changing the world, what should the future look like? They're questions for the humanities. They're questions for literature.
Yeah, they're questions for every single living human.
Exactly. What does it mean to be human in this moment? There's a wonderful line that I always come back to in an essay by Amitabh Ghosh, a fantastic novelist and atheist, Amitabh Ghosh. He says, And he says the climate crisis is also a crisis of the imagination. Yes, absolutely.
Yes. And he says we'll blame politicians and bureaucrats for their failure to act. But actually, future generations will also blame creatives because it's not the job of politicians and bureaucrats to imagine different futures.
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Chapter 7: What is the significance of kinship time in indigenous cultures?
Although... I now have friends who are MPs who are very capable of imagining different futures. So I'm a bit more careful than I was. But thank you. This is, oh gosh, now I want to set up our shamanic monastery near to Edinburgh because we need to be working with you on this. I don't know, I'll persuade everyone else that we need to move, but we're in the kind of formative stages.
So guys, this might be a thing. 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.
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Chapter 8: How does CRISPR technology impact conservation efforts?
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. But largely, there is evolution happening as a byproduct of careless impact. And yet, it could be careful impact.
And there is, I think, and I want to know if you think, still time for us to step back from the brink and and do things with more awareness. We'll only do it with more awareness if we understand ourselves to be integral nodes in the web of life. And first of all, does that land with you? How does that land with you?
And second, where does it take us in terms of not being the accidental drive towards things that we don't understand and can't predict?
Yeah, well, I'm fully on board with that, that we need to understand ourselves as, you know, a node in the web of life and not, you know, not a central node either.
Although we are having a profound influence on the world around us and, you know, have also historically put ourselves at that centre for far too long in ways that have, you know, are really at the root of what has taken us to this point. I think as well, this, this,
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.
And to what I was saying, you spent a lot of time travelling the world. You've been to a lot of places to talk to a lot of people with this book. So there's a lot of impressive actual travelling as well as cognitive travelling. Sorry, carry on.
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.
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