coe203_farrier.mp3

Speaker1: [00:00:23] Hey, everyone, welcome back to the Cultures of Energy podcast.

Speaker2: [00:00:26] We are in two completely separate locations, so many will be recording this intro.

Speaker3: [00:00:32] Well, trip out, that's like digital connectivity there.

Speaker1: [00:00:36] Simone is in the basement of a U.S. Marines

Speaker2: [00:00:40] Secret base somewhere, and I am. Where am I

Speaker3: [00:00:44] In the bathroom at the space station?

Speaker2: [00:00:46] I guess we didn't inform people that Simone had become an astronaut. It's one of the things she dabbled in during her time away from podcasting.

Speaker3: [00:00:55] The only the only reason I even know about such a thing as the bathroom in the space station is that a parent, a parent here in Houston, apparently works at NASA, and his charge is making sure that those bathrooms work on the space station, which I think is a very important job.

Speaker2: [00:01:14] Is that is that a lavatory? Suggest somebody who who studies toilets and how they work? Is that the problem?

Speaker3: [00:01:20] A level engineer? I mean, he's an engineer, right? It's pretty high tech stuff. But as I understand it, that's his sole. His sole profession and purpose is to say it's his purpose, but his sole profession to.

Speaker2: [00:01:33] It's not necessarily his vocation, but it is what he does.

Speaker3: [00:01:36] I think he's kind of into it because it is kind of a quirky and yet recognizably important scientific endeavor, right?

Speaker2: [00:01:45] It is absolutely. And actually, you know, I'm sure the astronauts are really grateful that he does that work so that they can relieve themselves without the space capsule filling up with, well, yeah, we won't go there. Speaking of poop, though, I have a story to share. Actually, I'm in Los Angeles right now and Simone is in Houston, and I had to struggle rags. Yeah, it's not humble bragging. I'm just saying, you know, here, here, I am really humble about it. But listen, OK, so I had to. One thing we haven't told you about because we haven't been on back for that long is that in the time that we've been away, Rice University, our employer instituted perhaps the worst financial operation system known to humanity. I mean, it is been such a clusterfuck, this thing that it actually resulted in the president of the university having to write to the entire university community, apologizing that they decided to use this piece of software, which I don't mind calling out because nobody should ever, ever, ever use this piece of software for anything. It's called Imagine one or Io. And it's made by Oracle, and it is just the bane of so many of our existences. Wouldn't you say some? I don't know. Like, what's your.

Speaker3: [00:03:06] Yeah, my my favorite little quip was imagine one day it will work. Right, exactly. Imagine that day. Also, let's not forget that the president also gave the staff several extra vacation days because of their pain and suffering that they've had to go through in trying to learn this system and then getting caught up in all of the cobwebs that are the iOS system and having, you know, ornery faculty and upset students and all kinds of people like grad students weren't getting paid. Instructors weren't getting paid because they weren't getting paid because they hadn't been onboarded correctly. They lost their health insurance without knowing it, like students were going for months without insurance and not realizing it. Like, this system did really despicable things. And all the everyone who's had to interface with Io has felt the pain.

Speaker2: [00:03:59] It's like, it's like if you can imagine, like a Marvel villain, a Marvel movie villain has become a routine piece of like corporate like financial mischief, like, that's what we'd be dealing with here. So I just want to paint the picture like, I've got the simplest little task to do this morning. I just have to go in and approve essentially an expense report, right? You log into the system and I swear to God, this system looks in its proper functioning like it's a phishing scam like you suggest every single. Is it a different font? It doesn't look like any like who manufactured this, who designed it. It looks like it's running on Windows Ninety five. It is just terrible

Speaker3: [00:04:42] Looking like them. The main the main part of the screen is all white. Yeah. And then the little words that you're supposed to click on and the different fonts are stuck so far at the top of your screen that you can't read half of them

Speaker2: [00:04:53] With the smallest possible toggle points that you can imagine. It's like you need. This is not on my phone, it's on the computer, and I can't like find the things to click on at the top of the of the interface, it says. And I wrote this down because I wanted to mention this to it, says business process workspace. Now what is it like? What does that mean? Business process workspace like what space aliens looks like?

Speaker3: [00:05:19] That's like the Death Star, right?

Speaker2: [00:05:21] It sure is right. I don't know

Speaker3: [00:05:23] What else it could be.

Speaker2: [00:05:24] So and the other thing is like when you when I clicked to follow this task, the screen went blank. There was nothing there at all. There was nothing even to toggle on for a while. I had to keep going back and forth, back and forth until finally I got some toggle menu to come down. And then what I started to do is just to randomly start clicking on things. And until it tells me the task is completed because I can't figure out how to do it otherwise, I'm just randomly like a monkey like the old. The old adage about if you put a million monkeys in front of a million typewriters, one of them will do Shakespeare. Well, one of them can actually solve this. Imagine one interface to a monkey. I was that monkey today.

Speaker3: [00:06:03] Wow. Well, I have to admit that when I went out with a colleague for dinner the other night and we had to decide who was going to put in a reimbursement, and I found out that she had never because she's been on leave, she hasn't used. Oh yes. Oh, I was like, Oh, you should definitely cover the dinner for now and put in the reimbursement, because if you haven't had the experience of Io, then I think you need to be initiated. So I know you'd appreciate that. You know,

Speaker2: [00:06:34] You need to be jumped into the gang. You need to be blooded. Oh my God. Anyway, so I'm sorry to rant about that. But actually, this is a public safety announcement. If any administrator at your institution and I don't care whether you're in the academy or not, because I think this was designed for a terrible corporate environment.

Speaker3: [00:06:52] Yeah, it's a pretty corporate platform.

Speaker2: [00:06:55] Just run screaming. Just say I quit. Like, I know that this will bring hell into my life.

Speaker3: [00:07:00] And then the thing is, is that the purse, the very person who inflicted the system upon us used it to leverage themselves into a fancy Ivy League position. Yeah, that's right. On the eastern seaboard at one of the most elite institutions on the planet. And so we're not going to name names handsomely rewarded for afflicting us here in Houston with this, with this monstrous accounting program, and it's your whole after your whole life. It's not just money stuff. It's like if you want to leave or if you're working with grad student, whatever it like, everything you do now at the university has to go through fuck. And I owe everything.

Speaker2: [00:07:38] Yeah. And we had a reimbursement like for a large amount of money for our field work in the summer that took, what, six months to return. We had to have those charges sitting on our credit cards for six months. It was insane. The person who made the decision to bring this this cursed piece of software to rice, by the way, their only other claim to fame was ownership of three chinchillas that was at three chinchillas. And I think I think they got the job in the Ivy League not based so much on the chinchillas, although maybe they were a contributing factor. Mostly, it was because of this disaster, which they didn't disclose was a disaster, if that's clear.

Speaker3: [00:08:15] Mm-hmm. Well, yeah, the the shoe hadn't fallen yet, I think.

Speaker2: [00:08:19] But OK, that's enough complaint.

Speaker3: [00:08:20] Let's talk about not complaining.

Speaker2: [00:08:22] One one. Feel good story, Simone. And then I'll introduce our guest.

Speaker3: [00:08:26] Ok, well, I had a very lovely day of going around and doing some field work interviews today with two of my amazing graduate students who are we're working together on this project on urban agriculture, climate resilience, local food production, et cetera. It's called growing resilience as the name of the project. It's just a little note, but

Speaker2: [00:08:52] You know you think you should call it business process work escape. That should be the name of your research.

Speaker3: [00:08:56] It's so funny because that is the subtitle, and I think that's why I got the money. But yeah, but we got to go to something today that I've never been to before. It's called a sky farm. It's called the Sky Farm. And, you know, you might say, Oh, it's a rooftop garden, but that's not how they identify it. They identify it as a sky farm, and it's up on top of a

Speaker2: [00:09:22] Very, you know what that's like some that's like saying, that's like saying SkyMall is just a catalog you find on the airline.

Speaker3: [00:09:28] Exactly. It's like saying SkyMall is just another, yeah, shopping catalog. So we got to we got to talk to the people who do that and we got to hear all about the soil and getting it up there and the wind and all the factors. And it was it was pretty interesting. So they're going to grow. I mean, it's all getting set up to go there, putting in the drip lines and the irrigation system, and they're going to grow stuff. They're going to grow all kinds of stuff, all kinds of vegetables. And apparently in the future, there will be scattered across the sky tops of Houston. Many of these sky farms that will be connected by bridges from building to building.

Speaker2: [00:10:05] Oh my God, thank God. That sounds great.

Speaker3: [00:10:07] Well, OK, don't hold your breath. I mean, who knows how long that could be, but it would. It's a super cool idea, and I think it'll take a while to come to fruition. But you know, part of the thing that's motivating this. Sort of infrastructural change is actually like the architects of this building who worked on this project, it's built on an old building that's an old post office downtown, like the main post office where they used to sort mail, which has been now converted into a gallery space and like a really cool food corps like International Street Food Food Court.

Speaker2: [00:10:42] Bjork has performed. She's done one of her DJ sets there.

Speaker3: [00:10:44] Yeah, we're Bjork performed, and Dave and I are night for day day, four night night, four day, something like that. And and we're shoplifter had her amazing installation. So yeah, the first time we went there was really for the art, the art forum of it. But now they've got like a pretty cool food court. They're just doing stuff with this space. But the architects who worked on it wanted it to be LEED certified. And so that was part of the invitation to create the sky farm is because it gives them LEED points, which I'm all for. But you know, it's just it's interesting to see all the from the financial and certification metrics and thought processes that go into this.

Speaker2: [00:11:25] How many how many Chinchilla is going to be supported by a sky farm?

Speaker3: [00:11:29] Probably a lot, because I think that they eat like I don't think they even need to eat the carrots. They could eat the carrot tops.

Speaker2: [00:11:35] It would be like a giant like chinchilla hamster trail in the sky as they ran from Sky Farm to Sky Farm.

Speaker3: [00:11:41] Yeah, so right as they ran across the bridges, that would be very fun for them.

Speaker2: [00:11:45] That's the utopia. That's the utopia we've earned, dear listeners. That's the utopia. We've earned a sky filled with chinchillas,

Speaker3: [00:11:52] And it could actually distribute seeds if you want it to get right down to it, like they could actually be in charge of moving seeds like they could consume stuff on once sky farm and then run over the bridge to another one and make a deposit. Yeah, there could be seed scatters a little a little tiny rodent and seeds over

Speaker2: [00:12:10] Well on that. On that lovely note, I want to just pivot quickly to our guest. We have a very distinguished guest who has published a very popular book, David Farrier, who is a scholar. But as some of you might know in the environmental humanities, but also this fabulous writer with his most recent book Footprints in Search of Future Fossils, has really found a wide audience for thinking about deep time and about the legacies material infrastructural that will be leaving to future generations. It's a really interesting and beautiful book, and I think you loved it to some, didn't you?

Speaker3: [00:12:47] I did love it. I enjoyed it quite a bit. I read it when we were in Iceland, and yeah, it's fantastic. It's very beautiful and very philosophical and has some, some some deep imprints and deep meanings going on. And and we get to talk to David about some of that and his process and how he thinks through things. So I think the part is a good one. It's a

Speaker2: [00:13:06] Good one. And actually, just for those of you who really care about the behind the scenes, this was actually the first episode we taped as part of our returning 10 episode run. We definitely were like very conscious of having to shake the rust off and can we still do this? And so we we have a couple of meta comments here and there where we're sort of wondering whether we're doing an OK job. But David was very supportive and encouraging, and he seemed whatever he really thought about how we were doing. He was polite enough not to say,

Speaker3: [00:13:35] Well, he's a good and kind person on top of being a fantastic

Speaker2: [00:13:39] Thinker. He's a terrific egg and he would never, ever dump a terrible piece of accounting software upon us. He's that kind of he's that good.

Speaker3: [00:13:47] I'm sure of it. I'm sure of it.

Speaker2: [00:13:49] So, Sam, do you want to say anything?

Speaker3: [00:13:52] Yeah. Well, I guess my now my moment is to say, Go David.

Speaker4: [00:14:15] Welcome back, everybody, to the Cultures of Energy podcast, we're really excited to be back here with you and we're extra excited to have David Ferrier with us on the line. Hi, David.

Speaker5: [00:14:28] Hi, good to be here.

Speaker4: [00:14:29] Yeah, we're so happy you could find the time to talk with us and talk about this wonderful, eloquent, vivid, really compelling book that you've written. Footprints, which I'm sure many of our listeners are familiar with footprints in search of future fossils. And we're really looking forward to talking to you about that and other projects that have been underway with you as an author and explorer of the world, a commentator on the Anthropocene, among other things. So again, thank you for coming around with us.

Speaker5: [00:15:02] No problem. It's a pleasure to be with you, David.

Speaker1: [00:15:05] So as you know, we've been on a bit of a hiatus, you know, taking a little time off to do other projects away from the podcast. And that meant that we missed out on talking to a number of people about really important projects and certainly footprints is one of those. As Simone was saying, this is a book that I think is incredibly beautiful and has been incredibly resonant in a way that actually, you know, not so many, I think climate related books are. So I think you figured out a way here to really hit a chord that both inspires imagination and also connects to people emotionally. But before we get into the details of all of that, I'd love to hear you talk a little bit about the process, the background. How did you get the idea to write a book like this in the first place? And then if you'd tell us a little bit about the sort of process of researching it and structuring it?

Speaker5: [00:15:55] Yeah, I mean, I guess it came around gradually. There was no epiphany moment that made me think, you know, as Thunderball arrived and there was the book Lying at my feet, you know, as as as many people have over the past decade or so, you know, I've become increasingly aware of the onrushing climate crisis and the emergence of this new concept of the Anthropocene, which we are now all so familiar with. But it's only very recently, really. And it's surprising, I think, sometimes to think back and reflect on how recently. Well, certainly for me how recently I became acquainted with this term, really only going back six or seven years. But the thing that really captured my attention about that was the way that it distorted our experience of our relationship with time and the way it plunged us into an at least kind of newly sharp and newly focused relationship with deep time as well as, you know, as well as, you know, newly appreciating the urgency and the rapidity of the changes that were, you know, that have already happened but are happening and that will come to happen.

Speaker5: [00:17:05] And there was this this strange, multi-speed experience at a time where you know you, you are newly aware of the vast reach of the deep past that you know our energy use connects us to. And you know that the long, long term consequences of the decisions that we're making reaching into deep futures and generations not yet born, but also seeing changes unfold that would take, you know, under kind of if you like ordinary conditions, tens of thousands of years or more to unfold that sense that things were speeding up and that we were in some ways traveling back to, you know, to, you know, to a version of the planet that hadn't existed for many millions of years, but also hurtling into a future that no one could really, you know, no one had any real experience of. So it was that sense of something interesting is going on in our relationship with time. And the question that emerged from me out of that was, what's our legacy going to be? What are we going to leave behind? And what kind of story will that legacy that material legacy tell?

Speaker4: [00:18:13] I mean, I think one of the things that I found really compelling about the book and about your methodological approach was the range, scope and scale at which you were addressing and discovering these future fossils. And, you know, from sort of microbial recordings and the world of microbes and how proliferate that is in our biotic lives, as well as the lives of of animals that are becoming extinct to the sort of meta scale of cities in their sprawl and the insatiable roads that that overtake the planet in so many ways. And so I wanted to ask you about that sort of reckoning with scale going from truly the microscopic up into the the kind of stratospheric dimensions that you address in the book, but also the ways in which the built environment, the human built environment or the extracted environment in the case of. Nuclear proliferation, nuclear energy and waste, how those kind of senses of scale came to operate in your mind as you were working through the book, how to sort of match those up, how to weave them together is because I think that's one of the real challenges that we face in talking about these these processes.

Speaker5: [00:19:33] Absolutely. I think the first task they had in writing footprints and thinking about what our future fossils will be was orient myself in in that field. If you like you know where so many different scales were in players as as you rightly put it. So it was a case of of, I guess, you know, there's a kind of mapping involved looking at, you know, what are the you know, what are likely to be the most durable or most abundant traces of us? And it became it became apparent very quickly that it's the things that we see every day. It's the most common materials, you know, the concrete and the plastic and the glass and steel as much as the, you know, the radionuclide from from nuclear testing or the space junk that's up in the in the, you know, orbiting the planet, there are plenty of fantastical examples of traces that we will leave for the deep future. But I think the most compelling in a way were the most banal. The things that we can reach out and touch in our everyday lives. And that was really helpful in terms of that process of orientation across scales because it it gave me something tangible to work with. It created that that vivid sense that, you know, the deep future is not some distant, chilly remote prospect. It's something that we are connected to every day to the decisions we make, but also through the kind of materials that we're surrounded with. You know, it's going to be it's going to be the concrete that our cities are made from that that that leave, you know, a fossil trace. It'll be the it'll be the things that we see so often that we we barely know just that we take for granted like a credit card or a pair of spectacles. You know, the things that are so ordinary they don't really have a bearing on our sense of what a legacy might mean. And for me, that was a really important way to negotiate that sense of play across scales because it all came back in this very intimate sense to right here and right now.

Speaker1: [00:21:41] So just just to pick up on this, this idea of scales, and obviously this is a book that is is in some ways incredibly intimate in particular and also quite global. And I just wanted to ask you a little bit about the process of selecting your case studies. I mean, did you go into this process with a sense of I know that these particular places have stories I want to tell about future fossils? Or was it actually kind of a process of discovery along the way?

Speaker5: [00:22:07] Yeah, it was definitely a process of discovery. I began by kind of drafting our potential chapter headings and thinking about, you know, what are the the best examples of different kinds of of future fossils? What represents our, you know, our connectivity and our addiction to Fossil and, you know, fossil sources of energy and, you know, roads immediately and bridges in particular immediately jumped out at me. But often it was a case of, I guess, looking out for, you know, where the opportunities were to to find a way into those subjects. I was very fortunate in a way thinking about robots that just as I was beginning to write that chapter, a new bridge across the Firth of Forth in Scotland opened only five or 10 miles from my house, and there was a big opening ceremony and people could walk across this bridge rather than drive across it just for one time in its life. And that was, you know, that became the opening section of the first chapter. But, you know, it was very much a case of, you know, gradually building up a picture of how to tell these stories. And that's a really important point to make, I think, is that I really began to see these future fossils, whether it's a fragment of plastic or any impression of training shoe or what have you, there are stories of some kind told to the future. And so I wasn't just looking for, you know, the physical example Shanghai of presented itself as a really good example of a global megacity that has is almost certain to leave some kind of trace in the fossil record because of its its the density of materials, because it's sinking, because it's on a coastline that's rising for all these reasons come together and virtually guarantee that Shanghai will leave a material trace in the fossil record tens, if not hundreds of millions of years from now.

Speaker5: [00:24:11] But it was also a case of finding, you know, what are the. The narrative or the literary are the metaphorical examples to put alongside those that help tell this story, and that's a big part of footprints. I'm a literary scholar. I teach literature, English literature at the University of Edinburgh. That's my my background, and it's the focus that I bring it my perspective. And so I was always looking for, you know, examples from my world to bring to this as well. So something like Italo Calvino Invisible Cities, which is a series of vignettes of the most incredible, fantastical cities you can imagine from cities built entirely and spider webs to cities that are composed of positive and negative versions of one another above and below ground. In anything that you can imagine, cities that are endlessly being built and never come to a kind of a place of completion or cities that have the kind of shadow form in terms of a kind of neighbouring city composed of all of their junk and waste. This seemed like a really apt way to set the kind of a physical trace and physical story of our cities as future fossils alongside other kinds of stories of the city.

Speaker4: [00:25:29] I mean, I think one of the ways in which the scaling of the book works so well is in the kind of ethnographic reflexivity that you have throughout where we, we see you or we we experience what you experience. As you were saying with the bridge, when you're biking across it and and having that experience of encountering it or when you're, you know, out walking in the heath with your students and you go up to there's a moment early in the book where you either look at or go by Arthur's seat, and I was right there in the gorse with you, and I think it really it. It works wonderfully the way that you've tied this together through the narrative form, you know, on the one hand, referring back to, you know, eminent and preeminent works of literature from the Greeks all the way up through the present, but also through your own experience. There's a lot of humanity in the book, as well as a lot of objective scientific renderings of the present. But I wanted to ask you, is speaking of that humanity? There were times in the book where I had this sort of lingering spectral feeling, if you will, maybe a sort of haunting and that is, who are the discoverers or wondering about who is discovering or what is discovering our future fossils? Do you imagine? Is this is it a kind of mutated form of humanity? Is it ourselves in some kind of differently evolved form? Is it earthly beings who are discovering these future fossils? Or is there may be no discovery and agent at all? This was just a kind of a kind of haunting that I felt through the book, you know, in this deep future. Who? Who is it that's encountering our future fossils of the present?

Speaker5: [00:27:13] Yeah. I mean, I guess there are various ways to answer that. One way to would be to imagine, you know, a kind of extraterrestrial visitor who you know, discovers, you know, traces of a vanished civilization. A more hopeful way to put it would be to imagine that, you know, that there will be versions of us, at least, you know, millions of years or tens of millions of years from now in in, you know, living in civilizations that are, you know, culturally and technologically advanced enough, thriving enough, interested enough to discover, you know, traces of who we were and how we lived. And I'm drawn to that. I'm drawn to this idea that we invest imaginatively in there being that kind of future for our descendants. But ultimately, I think for me, it what matters most is not who would find it, it's the fact that it will be there. I mean, there are there is, you know, there are no species really has has or will have left the kind of legacy that we are. We have already made and we are going to continue to leave in terms of the advancing of chemical cycles, the carbon cycle in terms of what we're doing to the oceans, in terms of the collapsing biodiversity and in terms of the material legacy, we're leaving this great quantity of synthetic materials and transported materials that cover every continent.

Speaker5: [00:28:46] Now what matters, I think most of all, is that it's there. And if nothing else at the scale of that, the surprise of that, I think ought to give us a reason to stop and think I'm very open to the idea that we can imagine, you know, a future paleobiologist, a future archaeologist or geologist looking through our fossil traces and learning a. Our guys, but we also need, I think, take stock from from that fact that, you know, we're operating on a planetary scale. And of course, when I say we, you know, there's a great deal presumed by that and that is, you know, a flattening of the true picture in a way that obviously needs to be thought about very carefully. But nonetheless, we certainly in the West, living in energy intensive hungry regimes are having a kind of deep time impact that is unprecedented. And that's, you know, we need to think about what stories we're telling ourselves about that.

Speaker1: [00:29:54] The importance of storytelling is so critical. I think also for for creating a sense of of something, you know, that this is not, you know, as much as we're thinking about extinction today, for example, that the story does go on. And if you're somebody who reads, I don't know, you know, climate news and happens to scroll down to the comments, which is a pretty masochistic exercise, usually inevitably, you're going to find at least one person expressing the feeling of like, you know, the earth is better off without us. We're doomed, you know? And but this is not the sentiment that I think is animating your project is that sense of, well, we're doomed. And now let's talk about the remnants because what I get from the book itself is this quite marvelous sense of wonder about the ability of playing with perspectives like, you know, you have a chapter in which a plastic bottle is kind of a hero and its voyage is quite epic. And you learn things about where this plastic bottle goes and even how it will go back to its own hydrocarbon source at some point in the future. That's kind of wonderful. Elsewhere, we learn about cyanobacteria, which are the other species who, you know, justly have a claim to having transformed the world for everyone else. And they become sort of a heroic, not heroic, but, you know, characters in this play. And and so I want to maybe you could talk a little bit about that. I mean, how do you dissenter the human in the way you have without kind of giving yourself over to this kind of extinction list fantasies?

Speaker5: [00:31:21] Yeah, thanks. I'm really glad that you you felt that about the book. That's very much what I wanted to get across. This is not a hopeless story. It's I certainly didn't set out to write something that was just elegy for, you know, for our imminent vanishing. You know, I think that the greater part of hope lies in the fact that so many of these stories are yet to be told or fully told. And there is no getting away from the fact that that many of our traces will be very long lasting on almost every front in terms of biodiversity, in terms of marine chemistry, in terms of atmospheric chemistry and in terms of materials. But it's not to say that that think it ends there. You know, we need to take hold of the fact that we're still telling this story and there's a lot we can do still to, you know, to change the terms on which it's toll change the narrative, you know, make it a narrative where global heating is is capped at, you know, two degrees rather than three or four, for example, or even one and a half, if that's even possible still. So, yeah, very much a kind of. I really wanted to help people to find that sense of hope and the fact that these are, you know, there's a sense of continuity there that, you know, we are still, you know, these are stories that are still unfolding. And I suppose that's where a sense of other agencies comes in because, you know, the more that, the more that we realize that we're only we're only telling part of the story ourselves. I think the better, you know, our story is bound up in the story of plastic and in the story of microbes and bacteria and many other stories as well.

Speaker4: [00:33:04] Yeah. And I think that comes across. Very glad you brought up the microbes, too, because that was a real moment of epiphany for me, too in the book to realize the scale of that microbial world and contrast. And also, you know, the weight of of the human corpus collectively, as well as our livestock animals, the creatures we eat and cohabitate with in terms of their relative weight, which far out, you know, out exceeds that of of other terrestrial animals. So there's there's much to be learned in the book, too in terms of, you know, the real quantification and impacts that we've been talking about. I wanted to to talk a little bit about nuclear semiotics because there is a wonderful chapter, I think is Chapter six that that looks at nuclear waste and the kind of questions of how to signpost dangers of the future to the future. And I think that this is a really fascinating question. I mean, I've heard this discussion before about about the site in the WIPP and Nevada, but this question about how to sort of signal and sign to future generations the day. Danger of this place, and you talk about the final design that was announced back in 2004 for these granite markers and this controlled area engravings with with messages in seven languages that human languages we have right now prohibiting digging and drilling.

Speaker4: [00:34:29] And then these faces of disgust and repulsion that are that are modeled on Edvard Munch's The Scream and the kind of dramatic signposting semiotic work that goes on around indicating and creating warning signs to future generations about these footprints, about these future fossils that we're now creating. And I wanted to compare that, as you do in the chapter with the case that you see in Okello, Finland, where they have a very different approach in terms of signposting. But rather than creating these overt, symbolic and linguistic signs, they offer another alternative, which is a kind of a silence and opacity, a kind of backfilling and quietude about the place, rather than creating a kind of elaborate structure of semiotics about these future dangers. And I just I wanted to ask you what you thought about those two fairly different approaches to dealing with the metabolic problem of nuclear waste and its dangers far into the deep future. If you see similarities, differences or kind of what your thinking was about, why why these two things might come out so differently in terms of the way they're they're created, crafted and constructed.

Speaker5: [00:35:50] It's really it's a really interesting conundrum. Do you try to communicate the danger or to just try to bury it and leave it to be forgotten such that no one will ever really encounter it? I mean, I think we all, you know, we've all heard the story of the pyramids, which you know, carried, you know, warnings against incursion against, you know, breaking in the curses would follow. And that only served to provoke curiosity. Greater curiosity, you know, because if there's a warning against intrusion, then there must be something valuable with it. And of course, there was, but not not necessarily in terms of the golden treasure that that lit up, you know, people's imagination. So there are dangers that come with, you know, actively warning people to stay away. And you know, that's setting aside, you know, the difficulty of, you know, constructing a system that will remain effective, that will be legible and whether the message will be stable over 10000 years or or longer. And so I have some sympathy with the Finnish approach. It seems to be one that, you know, there's a bit less hubris involved, but there's a recognition as well as a kind of geological reality as well, because they take a much longer perspective into, you know, hundreds of thousands of years. And that takes us into a kind of glacial time, takes us into the provenance of a new Ice Age.

Speaker5: [00:37:22] You know, anything that's at the surface, if the ice sheets form again will be wiped away, that that text would be erased. So if you take that kind of deep time perspective, any effort to communicate the dangers of a particular site is futile. I'd said while I was there in in oncology, I was fortunate to visit, you know, to go into the very bottom of this repository that is, you know, half a kilometer deep and in the ancient bedrock of Finland and to visit one of the test deposition tunnels that they were constructing. It felt, I mean, it was an astonishing experience, but it felt stepping into that tunnel almost like I talk about this in the book almost like a kind of mythic or sacred moment. Hmm. It was a very strange moment of where I honestly felt like that possible. Future visitor was standing right next to me, and I could feel something of what they felt or they would feel might feel on discovering this, you know, these immense copper canisters buried so deep and so in the dark. So I do wonder if, you know, maybe rather than engineering, we need to look at myth. We need to look at what story can do to, you know, to protect those who come after us.

Speaker4: [00:38:42] Yeah, yeah. I mean, that was that's I think what was really striking. I said thinking about these, the messaging and the myth, the semiotics, the language that's used in these, these deep future contexts must be fascinating, especially for someone who works in literature and myth and narrative and storytelling. It's just it's such a rich space. So. And I think I remember too, as you ventured into that that tunnel into the future, you found some signs of life. Was there like a yes, a moss or a algae or some some kind of creature? Rel. was there

Speaker5: [00:39:14] Present, yeah, yeah, there was some mosses growing. This wasn't that this was one of the other repositories. It wasn't quite as low down, but the combination of artificial light and I guess leakage from groundwater created these little kind of gardens growing on the walls. It was quite astonishing to see how tenacious life was in and that far down.

Speaker4: [00:39:39] Yeah. Life finds a way.

Speaker5: [00:39:40] Absolutely.

Speaker1: [00:39:41] About that same chapter, David, you know, there are so many wonderful moments here that are both edifying, but also just incredibly beautiful. And just I think of them as being paradigm shifting for me. I've read a lot about uranium, but I've never read a paragraph like this one, which I want to read just to give our listeners a little taste of the text here. And you write, uranium is immensely old, older even than the Earth itself. It's thought that all uranium on the planet originated in the furnaces of supernovas more than six billion years ago. It is also the heaviest natural element so large its strains against the limits of itself, like ball bearings shaken in a paper bag, it's 92 protons perpetually threatened to tear the atom into pieces. The kiss of a single alien neutron can be enough to set off a chain reaction of astonishing power as the isotope strus its particles in all directions with destructive force. That's amazing. That's an amazing paragraph, and it's amazing because it actually gives you a sense of uranium as an actor, right? This whole story not as just an element to be manipulated by humans, but is this kind of this slightly raging element that just needs one neutron to set itself

Speaker4: [00:40:48] Out of it itself, like the Incredible Hulk or something?

Speaker5: [00:40:52] I wish I thought of that. Yeah, that makes it more like the Hulk.

Speaker1: [00:40:57] But I mean, you know, to speaking of metaphor, I mean, how much, you know, in terms of how you're thinking about this as a writer, how much is that kind of personification or of these figures, these non-human figures, how significant is that for you in terms of being able to convey to what, as far as we know, is mostly a human audience that you have about what's happening in the world around them?

Speaker5: [00:41:21] Yeah, I think metaphor is a really useful tool for thinking we're talking a vehicle for thinking with in that metaphor asks us to think about the distance between entities. You know, whenever we're confronted with a metaphor or a simile, you know where our attention is directed to that, that point of convergence, that point where one thing resembles another such that, you know, kind of new understanding comes from it. But that new understanding is is only possible because that point of overlap, that similarity is counterbalanced by difference by all the ways in which these two entities differ. And that's what creates the tension in the metaphor, what allows that new understanding to come up. So it matters, always asking us to think about the relationship between entities, not just to see a kind of total transposition of one thing on top of another, but to understand relationships in in living space. And so that, I think has, you know, is enormously helpful for thinking about what is our relationship with deep time, because again, it's about taking that which might seem very remote and bringing it up close, you know, bringing the distant descendant who will have to live in the world. We're making right up close and thinking, Well, what kind of decisions do I want to make now on their behalf, for example? So, yeah, that project of writing, I felt, was one where I also needed to find a way to explore these kind of ethical questions. It's also a very basic question of storytelling as well. You know, my hope for this book was to reach people who wouldn't necessarily pick up an academic text but might want, you know, might be open to being told a series of interesting and wondering stories about the world we're making. And to do that, you have to you have to find a more. Yeah, I guess a more welcoming register might be one way to put it.

Speaker4: [00:43:25] Mm hmm. I think that's good for us to recall for all of us as we're doing our writing that kind of welcoming register and gesture and making the work a pleasure to read. And you've certainly accomplished that in this book, too. You know, I think one of the other things that I found really striking about the shape of the book is the way you're able to move from these material sources and resources in case studies like like uranium that Dominique was just mentioning or cyanobacteria and the kind of temporal movement and accelerations we see both forward and backward that is captured in in comments like the deep past arriving and the present, as though on a. Train or on a gust of air. And the question of will future generations feel the past rushing toward them, our future fossils as it becomes manifest and even more generally, this this idea of future fossil is the idea of the deep future versus the deep past, which is so common in these sort of academic Anthropocene discussions, I think, is really, really important. One of the things I was struck by as I was reading the book is I teach a course called Speculative Futures, and in that course I asked the students to find a souvenir from the future and to bring it to class and to talk about it and why it would be a souvenir from the future.

Speaker4: [00:44:58] What are its constitutive properties, what kind of symbolism does it hold, et cetera, et cetera. Really, it's very creative. They can do whatever they want with it. And this last semester, when we did this souvenir from the future, it morphed kind of organically in, I guess, a misconstrue all of that one word among some of the students where they heard souvenir for the future. So something that they found in the present that they would preserve, you know, to put on the shop the shop shelf for these future tourists. And it was a really interesting slippage. But in reading your book, I began thinking about the difference between fossils and souvenirs and the kind of touristic metaphor, of course, that souvenir and, you know, sort of feckless traveling that none of us have been able to do for the last year and a half. But the difference between that and fossils. And so I wonder if you could speak a bit about the importance of culling these future fossils and what that means.

Speaker5: [00:45:58] Yeah, that's a really interesting question. I suppose one immediate difference is that, you know, a fossil is, you know, it's an accident of environment and weather and geology and biology. And some places as well, where, you know, as a souvenir is very intentional object. It's something that you know, has been made to appeal to a certain market and you buy intending to bid for it to be a gift or to be a kind of spur to memory. So I mean, that's one interesting, I think, distinction, although of course, you know, we're forced to think about, you know, to what extent are the traces were leaving intentional or not? I mean, in many cases they aren't. But we can't really claim ignorance any longer about what happens to our carbon or how long it will remain in the atmosphere, for example, or what it's doing to the oceans. So really, these, you know, our fossils are more and more becoming, at least by default, intentional. But the reasoning behind calling future fossils was to, I think, reinforced that sense of relationship with the planet and planetary time, you know, to give that sense that we are part of this long planetary narrative arc.

Speaker5: [00:47:16] And, you know, our traces are contributing to that particular story. You know, a future fossil in the way I use it can be anything from the impression of an everyday object to, you know, traces of a synthetic material to a kind of absence. I talk in the book about how the, you know, the the loss of ice is is a kind of future fossil, you know, at least in a figurative sense, because you know what? It's what that loss is doing is having an effect on other landscapes and creating other kinds of change in terms of sea level rise and so on. And of course, the loss of ICE. And you know that any delay in a future Ice Age, you know, will is a shift in terms of what kind of shape the Earth will have, what kind of new valleys and kind of glacial carved regions will or won't emerge and when. So a future fossil is quite for the purposes of this book refers to any kind of trace that we're leaving. But the idea was to give that perspective of our place in in planetary time.

Speaker1: [00:48:29] And you know what's interesting about that, David, and I'm sure I'm not telling you anything you don't know. But but some of our listeners may not have looked too much into the etymology of Fossil, but it's this interesting word that is kind of an early modern neologism that both refers to kind of the discovery of mineral resources. I would say that's its dominant and that kind of goes through to the contemporary in thinking about fossil fuels, for example. But also one of the early meetings was, you know, the fish that were sort of discovered in deep, out-of-the-way places where fossils. And so there's there's somewhat of a kind of a hidden meaning in there that is like the little bits of life that you can find out of sight in deep and distant caverns. And I kind of like that in terms of what you're just saying. About, you know, the way in which humanity can be seen within a much larger story about the Earth and about planetary processes that we are impacting. Although they are more than not impacting us to a greater degree. Yeah, yeah. You know, so the way in which Fossil is quite is actually quite an apt metaphor, I think, for what you're talking about.

Speaker5: [00:49:33] Yeah, thanks a lot. I think you're right. I mean, even in the time that the book has come out, it feels like, you know, where we're seeing a totally different world in a rapidly taking shape. It's been quite terrifying to see how, you know, weather patterns are changing with, you know, wildfires and floods and, you know, different parts of the world, including in the UK and in London only the past several days. Yeah, that sense of rapid changes is really alarming, I think. But you know, there also it's also a sign of what future generations will have to contend with. It is also that sense of of a new world rushing into place. I think that is what makes it such an uncanny moment really, as well as an alarming one.

Speaker4: [00:50:20] I wanted to kind of circle back to to something that that we were talking about earlier. And that is the the interplay between the universal and the particular. As you mentioned earlier, there are truly different impacts and effects, and catastrophe is being faced by different populations around the world. And much of the climate emergency and crisis right now is being enacted upon those parts of the world that have been socioeconomically marginalized in all sorts of colonial and neocolonial ways. But as you just mentioned, you know, the wealthy north is is also beginning to feel the pains of the climate crisis as well. So it is becoming a more universal condition and yet still particularly felt and experienced with particular ways of recovering or not recovering from these various iterative disasters. So I wanted to ask how how you work with that or how you recommend working with that. And you know, this is sort of a challenge for for me as an anthropologist, you know, always trying to toggle between the global universal and the more the particular in localised conditions. And of course, it's a big question within discussions of the climate crisis. How do you sort of create those equivalences? But also, how do you create a focus and attention to local conditions while also trying to keep it in this universal and global context? So do you have any words of wisdom or thoughts about how to how to manage that gap, which is, you know, it's significant and complicated?

Speaker5: [00:52:01] Yeah. I mean, give me a moment to gather my thoughts about that. The first thing that sprang to mind there was, you know, a phrase that Roman Kreuznach has in his book The Good Ancestor, where he says that we've colonized the future. And I think this, you know, there's something really important there that, you know, the future has become a frontier just like any other commodity frontier. And you know, our approach to it doesn't differ radically in some senses from the way that colonial powers have always viewed distant lands. And I think understanding that understanding the continuity between, you know, colonial pasts and our own approach to the current crisis and to its future is really important for, you know, understanding what's driving it and understanding how we can perhaps find a way out of that. Because of course, this, you know, this is all really a story of colonialism and its legacy. Fundamentally, I think that's right at the core of it. I think in terms of, you know, finding that negotiation between the planetary and the local, now it's a really challenging thing to offer a kind of short and pithy response to. I think I mean, I think that the nature of the local is is precisely that. You know, look local will always set its own terms and that's what needs to be calibrated in relation to a sense of the planet. For me in writing footprints, it was in terms of trying to find the most resonant examples, not just in material terms, but also in literary and artistic terms, the images that would connect across these contexts. So for me that it was always relying upon the power of art or the power of literature to, you know, to create that sense of emotion or that sense of something that might translate across contexts that I think I was relying upon. Mm hmm. Sorry. I don't think that was a very good answer at all. And you might want to cut all of that.

Speaker4: [00:54:06] Yeah, no, I no, I think I think it was an excellent answer, and I think it's a very difficult, maybe impossible question to. Answer in some ways, but it's it's hard because, you know, in terms of the intentions and as you said, the emotion, so much of that connects to local conditions or local experiences and what happens, you know, in my home, to my family, to my neighbors, and we see this again and again with these disasters that are brought by extreme weather, for example. And yeah, and yet there's something very compelling about a truly global condition where we're living in these repositories of waste and, you know, fossils of our own consumption to be future burdens for generations and the planetary processes into the future. So that's also an important site to to to manage and to illustrate. So it's I just think it's a it's it's a it's a road that we all are trying to navigate. Or maybe a maybe a path is better since I learned about the the nefarious ness of roads in your book.

Speaker3: [00:55:11] So let's call it a path.

Speaker5: [00:55:14] I mean, what I would say is that, you know, I think when I was writing footprints, I was very aware that the kind of traces that I was discovering, you know, were much more a part of my life as somebody who lives in, you know, in relative affluence in the West than it is in, you know, somebody who, you know, for many people who live in the global south and you know, the kind of story the material story of the future fossil story is, it will reflect that disparity encoded within our future. Fossils will be, I think, quite a detailed account of the kind of inequalities that we have tolerated that we have, that we have allowed to grow up and to declare alongside, you know, the affluence that those of us in the West enjoy, you know? You know, very simply, you know, if if you take a modern megacity and you know, one megacity city anywhere in the world, it doesn't necessarily have to be something like New York. It could be Shanghai, it could be Jakarta. You know, that's an immense sum of materials that have all come from elsewhere. And you know, that in itself will tell a story of global connectivity, but also inequality, because, you know, throughout history and it's it's been the case that those who built the, you know, the edifices were not necessarily those who who got to enjoy them. So I think there's a, you know, there's a there's a story of inequality encoded through our our future fossils, and that was something I was very conscious of in. In writing the book

Speaker1: [00:56:46] Just on Footprints, I wanted to mention that the title reminded me of this essay that Tim Ingold, who teaches Not Far Away From You in Aberdeen, once wrote about the difference between walking was it was I can't remember the exact title, but it was essentially footprints versus boot prints. And he had a whole theory that that we sort of live in a two booted way, you know, removing that tactile interface with the Earth. It sort of transformed how people thought about nature and also perhaps led to eventually to the insatiable road and the sort of thirst for mobility that doesn't really pay attention to the ground underneath itself just to motion and distance and accumulation and all the other tendencies that we we see. And so there's something about, you know, that sense of footprints that also, you know, I thought was so nice that you take your students, your literature students out into the woods. I thought, you know, that's a great practice that maybe more of us should try to do because it gives you appreciation for, you know, the routes that are around us. And it's, you know, as well as, you know, the ruins and the future ruins that are there too, but that that kind of sense of being able to have a connection to one's immediate locality. As somebody who's participating in this more global academic sphere, somehow or literary sphere, it seems to me to be exactly the kind of ethical practice you're talking about. It's a kind of pedagogy that not just is about what you can get on the page, but what you have to get by, you know, walking in the forest.

Speaker5: [00:58:15] Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And over in the city, on the on the coast, I think, you know these these potential future legacies are all around us. That the thing I hope the book does for anyone who reads it is it opens their eyes a little bit to what those legacies might be and gives it shines a new light on things that they might be objects and the materials around them that they might take for granted. But they're actually a point of connection to a much bigger story.

Speaker4: [00:58:44] Well, I was just going to ask David, if you're willing to share and you don't have to, if it's a surprise. But we wanted to ask about what new project you're working on and what the what the next, what the next edition will be.

Speaker5: [00:58:58] Well, I mean, it's very early, so I hope I'm not making myself a hostage to fortune, but I've been thinking a lot about the relationship between human creativity and animal ingenuity. Where? Where? We have sort of wonders in terms of art or literature or technology or even kind of ideas of religion and spirituality have have looked to the animal world for inspiration. And you know, we can look at the very earliest cave art and the representation of human animal figures mediating between groups of hunters and groups of animals or, you know, examples of current day biomimicry, where in all different ways, you know, animal bodies and behaviors are inspiring designers and scientists to make a better world for for humanity. And the flip side of that, of course, is not just the extinction crisis, but the fact that those animals that are learning to, you know, to live and survive, to cope in in a world that increasingly looks like us are having to adapt their bodies and behaviors and having to, you know, push at the limits of their plasticity, perhaps even in some cases engaging in in in in speciation, you know, forming whole new branches in that evolutionary line. So I'm really interested in the way that that animal and human creativity mixes what that tells us about our relationship with with animals through history, but also thinking about the future. And what does it tell us about the world now, the way in which, you know, we're putting pressure on animal creativity, but there's also so much that we can learn from other creatures to, you know, to to actually do better as it were, you know, to live more sustainably. So but it's all very we have to really put pen to paper on that. It's still just lots of thought.

Speaker4: [01:01:00] But it's that will be an endlessly fascinating topic, I have no doubt. I mean, what? That's going to be some really interesting exploration, and I love it too, because so often human beings claim that creativity is what sets us apart from animals. And yet maybe the outcome here will be that in fact, it's our animal ness that inspires and cultivates our creativity in the end, bringing us closer still. So we'll look forward to reading it.

Speaker1: [01:01:29] Well, and I think there's a lot of moments in footprints that that kind of create great bridges to that, too. You know, the plasticity of the plastic eating microbes, bacteria, you know? Yeah. The the utter resilience of the jellyfish or just like this is like jellyfish are loving the Anthropocene. And there's like, we're we're doing better than ever. Thank you humans for depleting mid-range food fish stocks now. You know, ancient species are having the time of their life. Algae are having a great time. You know,

Speaker3: [01:01:58] So

Speaker4: [01:01:59] Tasteless jellyfish, bread or cake or.

Speaker1: [01:02:01] Yeah, this connects to so many other projects that we've been thinking about to remind folks we've talked to in the podcast. So this is, I think it's great. It sounds like it's very much part of our our moments to be thinking with that and human exceptionalism. When I was growing up in grad school, they taught us still that language was what separated us and that now that's fallen by the wayside.

Speaker2: [01:02:22] So, yeah,

Speaker5: [01:02:24] Yeah, there's not much left, really. But thanks to the encouragement, that's really good to hear. Like I said, it's very new project.

Speaker4: [01:02:30] Yeah. Oh, absolutely. It sounds fantastic.

Speaker1: [01:02:32] David, we're at our hour. It has been wonderful chatting and just want to say thank you again for joining us and hopefully we weren't too out of practice.

Speaker5: [01:02:42] Thank you very much for the opportunity. I really enjoyed it.

Speaker4: [01:02:45] Yeah, we did. I look forward to staying in touch.

Speaker5: [01:02:48] Thank.