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Highlights
- This is the remarkable and mind-expanding story of how we shape the lives of animals and plants - and how they shape us - by professor David FarrierFor nearly four billion years, life on Earth has found new ways to adapt, reproduce and thrive, taking on new forms to meet the environment of the moment.
- About the Author: David Farrier is Professor of Literature and the Environment at the University of Edinburgh.
- 288 Pages
- Science, Life Sciences
Description
Book Synopsis
This is the remarkable and mind-expanding story of how we shape the lives of animals and plants - and how they shape us - by professor David Farrier
For nearly four billion years, life on Earth has found new ways to adapt, reproduce and thrive, taking on new forms to meet the environment of the moment. Human impact on the planet, and the potentially devastating threat of climate change, have stressed that adaptability as never before. Yet life still finds a way. Animals, plants and insects rise to the challenge and are still adapting, reproducing and thriving, even in our rapidly transforming environment. In their example we may just find ways that we too can adapt, ways to stop the destruction we're causing to the planet.
Review Quotes
"Wise, eloquent and often very moving, Nature's Genius is a hymn to the power of possibility embedded in both the natural world and ourselves."--JAMES BRADLEY
"Nature's Genius is a superb book: subtle, sharp-eyed and fascinating. It asks how we might learn from nature's "flair for transformation" in order to shape a liveable future on Earth; it explores both the losses and possibilities presently being driven by the anthropogenic super-acceleration of evolution. Here, everyday beings and objects - dogs, buildings, spiders, clocks - are lit anew; thrown into surprising configurations and relationships. Damage and disorder are faced with clear eyes, but hope is also found in unexpected places. A tight, shimmering web of words"--ROBERT MACFARLANE
"We are negligent: the natural world is vigilant. We spawn ugliness: the wild responds with beauty. Farrier's exhilarating, splendidly written account of nature's care for itself and us will help you sleep at night"--CHARLES FOSTER
Praise for Footprints: "As we hurtle into the Anthropocene, blindly at the helm of this inconstant planet, Farrier gives us our bearings within the landscape of deep time. Eons buckle under his pen: the world before us made vivid; the paradox of our permanence and impermanence visceral. Stunning"--GAIA VINCE
"David Farrier argues that one day we will not only understand ecologies, but will be able to assemble them"--SIMON INGS "New Scientist, 'Best Popular Science Books to Look for in 2025'"
"A fascinating, boundary-breaking, shape-shifting chimera of a book that shows how we might evolve to solve the problems we have caused our planet. Brilliantly written, surprising, inspiring and, ultimately, hopeful"--ISABELLA TREE
"A book of hope and wonder. I learned something new and thought-provoking, even inspiring, on every page"--CAL FLYN
"A brilliant, unsettling book; a deep-time delving into our future fossils - an examination of what humans have inherited, and what we might leave as our long-term legacies upon - within - the Earth. Subtly thought and beautifully written"--ROBERT MACFARLANE
"A wonderful exploration of nature's unrivalled ability to adapt to changing environments, and what we might belatedly learn from these interconnected ecosystems that we're also a part of as we navigate a more perilous Anthropocene. Full of fascinating details and insightful observations about the richly diverse behaviours and interactions of the world's extraordinary creatures"--GAIA VINCE
"A haunting study of the fossils that twenty-first-century life will leave behind"-- "Times Literary Supplement"
"Nature's Genius is a wide-ranging work of energy, sensitivity and subtle intelligence that offers glimpses of genuine possibility and hope"--CASPAR HENDERSON
"Footprints by David Farrier has changed the way I navigate the world"--KATIE PATERSON
"A signal book, and a profoundly significant one, of warnings and prophecies, of explorations and discoveries. With wry, persuasive intelligence it surveys the landscapes and cityscapes, the art and the literature, of this pivotal moment in the Anthropocene"--GAVIN FRANCIS
"Darkly, exquisitely, oh-so-carefully, David Farrier lays out the future we can see from here: the ice singing its own dissolution, the plastic without a memory that will last for eternity, the deepest ocean and the highest air which will remember our carbon traces in millions of years to come. Farrier is an exacting dissector of human culture and natural history; his book is a brilliant and surprising beautiful requiem for what we have lost, but also, crucially, what we might save from the wreckage"--PHILIP HOARE
About the Author
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. He has had pieces published in the Atlantic, BBC Future, Emergence, Prospect, Daily Telegraph, Orion and Washington Post. He has spoken at numerous online events, has given an invited lecture at the Royal Geographical Society, and has appeared on radio and podcasts such as BBC Free Thinking and Little Atoms.
@David_Farrier