Footprints

“Despite its sobering theme, Mr Farrier’s prose glitters. His journey takes in marvels . . . Wonder rather than anger is his default response in contemplating humanity’s legacy . . . His central idea, that language and storytelling might be the most enduring of human traces, is beautifully expressed . . . ‘The challenge is to learn . . . to examine our present,’ he writes, ‘by the eerie light cast by the onrushing future.’ His subtle, elegant book rises to that challenge.”—The Economist

“There is a way of writing about the natural world in which intensity of description stands in for perception. Everything has the same gleam and tang, as if glazed in aspic . . . The more radical and vital writing comes from those who can more easily imagine their own diminishment. Farrier is not of the school of aspic. He’s good at pulling books off the shelf as a connection arises, confident with facts and technical detail, video installations and folklore. He leaves us to form our own questions while loosely gathering together material that addresses the scale, extent and lasting impact of what we do to the world.”—Lavinia Greenlaw, London Review of Books

“In what endures after thousands of years, we can see something of the unspoken values of a people. And that’s precisely what Footprints reveals to us . . . [Farrier’s] science is clear and well-written . . . A powerful and fascinating approach to the great crisis of our time.”—Theodore Richard, The New York Journal of Books

“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 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, author of Risingtidefallingstar

“What have we done, what are we doing, and in what sort of state are we leaving our home? David Farrier’s natural history of the junkyard Anthropocene is devastating in its answers to these questions. Since the prognosis is not good, this deep-time almanac reads as a precocious elegy. It is a mind-bender that will make you cry like any new born baby. Farrier has terrifyingly and superbly mapped the darkness.”—Tim Dee, author of A Year on the Wing

"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. From ocean to icecap, outfalls to landfill, it seeks answers to the defining question of our times: ‘How can we be better ancestors?'"—Gavin Francis, author of Shapeshifters: A Journey Through the Changing Human Body

“[Farrier's] in-the-moment descriptions are precise and vital, but he renders them uniquely evocative and haunting by paralleling current dilemmas with ancient myths, Greek tragedies, literature, and art . . . Farrier sees Earth as a vast library, and encourages us to recognize and think deeply about the indelible stories of destruction and catastrophic loss we’re adding to the planet’s archive.”—Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)

"Blending science, literature, and art, this work leads readers to imagine time, backward and forward; writing in a remarkably fluid style, Farrier is as adept at retelling ancient myth as he is at explaining little-known science . . . Compelling . . . Sometimes unsettling in its findings but always cleverly conceived and beautifully expressed."—Robert Eagan, Library Journal (starred review)