Living in 'The What Ought to Be' with David Farrier

Professor David Farrier (University of Edinburgh) discusses his 2025 book Nature’s Genius: Evolution’s Lessons for a Changing Planet and explores how rapid, human-driven evolutionary pressures reveal both the fragility and inventive resilience of life. We cover urban evolution (birds and snails), domestication and self-domestication, collective and distributed forms of intelligence across living systems, and how rethinking time can help us reconnect with the natural world. The conversation balances urgency with hope: we can change behaviour and systems  - not by waiting for nature to “fix” things, but by learning from nature’s adaptive strategies.

Key takeaways:

• Human activities are now major selection pressures shaping evolution — sometimes rapidly.
• Plasticity (the ability of organisms to change gene expression and behaviour) offers insights for human adaptation — e.g., city design, economies, conservation strategies.
• Intelligence in nature is often collective and co-evolved; viewing ecosystems as forms of distributed intelligence could reshape politics and policy.
• Time matters: reframing our relationship with temporal scales (wild clocks vs. clock time) supports long-term thinking and reconnection.
• Nature recovery begins with “nature reconnection” — shifting how we see ourselves (embedded, not separate).

Guest bio (brief):
David Farrier is Professor of Literature and the Environment at the University of Edinburgh. His first book, Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils, examined the marks we are leaving on the planet and how they might appear in the deep-future fossil record; it was named a book of the year by both The Times and The Telegraph and has been translated into multiple languages. His new book Nature’s Genius (2025) examines how life adapts under human-caused change and what lessons that offers for our own future and has been shortlisted for major awards.

Buy the book / further reading:
Nature’s Genius: Evolution’s Lessons for a Changing Planet — Canongate Books. Available as hardback, e-book and audio; shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize for Conservation Writing (and other 2025 recognitions). More details / purchase: https://canongate.co.uk/books/4911-natures-genius-evolution-039-s-lessons-for-a-changing-planet/
 

The Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery is interested in promoting a wide variety of views and opinions on nature recovery from researchers and practitioners.

The views, opinions and positions expressed within this podcast are those of the speakers alone, they do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery, or its researchers.

The work of the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery is made possible thanks to the support of the Leverhulme Trust.

Transcript

Stephen Thomas: Welcome to the Nature Recovery Podcast. Today we'll take a closer look at solutions to counter biodiversity decline and meet the people behind those ideas. I'm very pleased that my guest is David Farrier. He's Professor of Literature and the Environment at the University of Edinburgh. David’s work sits at the fascinating intersection of environmental science, literature and time — how human activity is reshaping the planet and what the deep past and deep future might tell us about the present. His newest book is Nature’s Genius: Evolution’s Lessons for a Changing Planet (2025). It’s a powerful exploration of how plants, animals and microbes adapt under stress and how those adaptations might offer clues for navigating our changing world. The book has been shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize for Conservation Writing and for the Saltire Non-Fiction Book of the Year. Congratulations, David, and thank you for joining the podcast.

David Farrier: Thank you very much, Stephen. I'm delighted to be here.

Stephen Thomas: I found Nature’s Genius strangely uplifting. It dives into the calamities of our environmental crisis, yet each chapter contains hope — particularly the plasticity and resilience of nature and of human and more-than-human creatures. The book doesn’t fit easily into a single niche. How would you describe it?

David Farrier: I’d say it’s a book about change. Change has been the story of life on this planet for nearly four billion years, but the book looks at what change looks like in nature today. What astonished me was learning that human activity is now a driving force of evolution. Climate breakdown, habitat loss, pollution and invasive species are simultaneously drivers of biodiversity decline and selection pressures prompting adaptation. We can see adaptations on every continent and in the oceans — and it's happening very quickly.

For example, cliff swallows in the United States have learned to nest along roadsides, under bridges and in culverts. Living alongside traffic has created a dangerous environment, and they've responded by developing shorter, blunter wings to give them the agility needed to avoid vehicles. In the Netherlands, some urban snails have evolved lighter shells to cope with urban heat islands. In Norway, Atlantic salmon in certain rivers have shrunk to about half their previous size since the 1970s because hydroelectric plants reduced river flow — and that shrinkage is genetic.

So the book is about change and, fundamentally, about our capacity to change. Many of the changes we see are expressions of plasticity — the ability of organisms to express different genes in response to environmental pressures. Humans have plasticity too: we don't need to evolve new bodies the way other species might, but we must change behaviour, how we organise economies, design cities, and how we think about our relationship with time and with other species.

Stephen Thomas: That’s beautifully expressed. I grew up thinking evolution was slow and historical, but your book made me see that selection can be fast. You mention selective breeding, like the classic experiment where foxes—or rather silver foxes—were selected for tameness and within about ten generations became dog-like. Were these insights new to you?

David Farrier: Yes — I came to this having to learn a lot. I work in an English department and last did a science exam at 16, so this was a journey of discovery for me. The domestication experiments—like those by Dmitri Belyaev with silver foxes—were particularly striking. He selected foxes for tameness by measuring how close a human could approach before the animal reacted. The tame ones were bred. Within about ten generations those animals looked and behaved more dog-like: floppy ears, changes in colouration, and so on. That happens because neural crest cells link tameness with other physiological changes. It’s a blunt demonstration of how selecting for behaviour can reshape bodies.

What surprised me further was the idea that humans effectively domesticated ourselves — self-selection for tolerance and cooperation that appears in the fossil record. So our own plasticity and capacity for social cooperation is ancient, and that gives a hopeful angle: we’re not stuck on a path of destruction; there are other ways to organise our lives.

Stephen Thomas: You balance the monstrous aspects — factory farming, etc. — with the hopeful potential. In the book you explore other ways our dominant modes of thinking limit connection with the natural world. Did writing this book change you personally?

David Farrier: Yes, in unexpected ways. I didn’t grow up deeply embedded in nature; I grew up in a suburb. The book taught me other ways of understanding what it is to be human in relation to the natural world. One major shift was how I now think about animal intelligence. We have a narrow, individualistic idea of intelligence — a human exceptionalist view tied to rational problem-solving. But intelligence appears throughout life: bacteria, plants, animals. Michael Levin’s developmental biology shows how cellular behaviour looks like decision-making and memory; scale that up and you see collective intelligence in organs, organisms and ecosystems.

I was thrilled by the idea that intelligence in nature is collaborative and co-evolved. A lovely example is the way certain plants release pollen only when vibrated at a particular frequency; buff-tailed bumblebees have evolved to vibrate at that pitch. That’s species thinking together — an ecosystem-level intelligence emerging through interdependence.

Stephen Thomas: That’s eye-opening. The root-brain/mycorrhizal work and electrical signalling in plants suggest the human brain is not the only “organ” of intelligence. When we talk about change, we must talk about time. You wrote well about time — wild clocks, seasonal rhythms, and the anxiety of targets like “by 2030.” How do you navigate that tension between crisis urgency and living with other, slower clocks?

David Farrier: Time is the water we swim in; it conditions us. Clock time coordinates our societies, but living things carry wild clocks — circadian rhythms, migrations, reproductive cycles — and forests are vast ensembles of interlocking clocks. We’re experiencing seasonal disruption: seasons arriving at the wrong time or with different characteristics. Projects like the Future Library in Norway — a 100-year art project with a grove of trees that will be harvested in 2114 to print work collected over a century — show other ways of paying attention to time. A forest can help us tell time differently, commit generosity to the future, and recalibrate our sense of what is possible.

Stephen Thomas: I ask all guests the same question: what does nature recovery mean to you?

David Farrier: Nature recovery means reconnection. It starts with us changing our sense of what it is to be human — not separate, but embedded amongst other species. The poet Ossip Mandelstam asked, “What tense would you like to live in?” His answer, “the what-ought-to-be,” captures holding loss and hope together. That sense — living in what ought to be — can catalyse reconnection and create the conditions for flourishing for all life.

Stephen Thomas: That’s a beautiful note to end on. Are you working on more writing?

David Farrier: I’m reflecting. There are threads in Nature’s Genius I’d like to explore — animal intelligence especially — but I’ve learned not to force things. Questions come to you; it’s fine to wait and let life tell you what the right questions are.

Stephen Thomas: Thank you very much, David, and good luck with the awards. Thanks for joining us.

David Farrier: No worries — thank you.

Stephen Thomas: You’ve been listening to the Nature Recovery Podcast with me, Stephen Thomas. Please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and consider leaving a review. If you enjoyed this episode, share it with someone who might love the field of nature recovery.