David Farrier's books include Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils (2020) and Anthropocene Poetics (2019). Footprints won the Royal Society of Literature’s Giles St. Aubyn award and has been translated into nine languages. He is Professor of Literature and the Environment at the University of Edinburgh. 

DAVID FARRIER

Just thinking about how our actions play out over multiple generations who will have to live with the consequences of these decisions. I think we need to stretch our sense of time, and within that stretch our sense of empathy. The philosopher Roman Krznaric talks about that in his book The Good Ancestor, that we need a more elastic sense of empathy that can encompass not just those close to us or living alongside us, but those who have yet to be born will have to inherit the world that we passed down to them. But I think in stretching that sense of empathy and stretching that sense of the times that we touch, if you like, because all of us are engaged in activities that will lead long legacies, long tails, in terms of the fossil fuels we're consuming. And so, alongside that, I think we need to accept that the time we live in is a strange one, and time itself is doing strange things in the anthropocene.

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I think we have to recognize that we're having other impacts on biodiversity, not just eliminating it but also altering it - what it looks like, what constitutes it. I think recognizing that is vital, really. We've created a human planet, a planet that is increasingly organized to serve one particular species. And the rest of life has to work around that, but I feel that there are lessons to be learned in observing how the rest of life is doing that kind of work of adapting and learning to live on a human planet. Learning, I'd say, better than we are currently, to live sustainably on a human planet. Where we're going at the moment, the future does not look very good, and we need to adjust our course.

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I think a poem is a wonderful device for challenging our sense of the world around us and how things are connected in particular. Whether it's through the patterning of sounds or the arrangement of line breaks, poems are always suggesting to us new and perhaps unconsidered ways in which seemingly unlike things can be drawn into a relationship with one another, perhaps have always been in a relationship that we haven't understood. In Anthropocene Poetics, I talk about the thick time of lyric poetry, how a poem can bring many different times and time scales together. A poem can help us to think about the planetary time alongside the time of a passing moment or time on a human scale, as if these things are totally at home together - which of course they are.

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I think the most important thing is to try to stay open to be influenced by my students. For me, teaching is not a one way street. It's not simply a case of me saying and them learning, but it's a case of kind of all of us together working things out and building an understanding together. What we get from the course is something that we all put in. It's a collaboration. And I certainly feel that I learn a great deal from my students. I hope they learn as much from me as I learn from them. And I think that, if I have anything that I would hope is that young people, that students would take away, is that learning is a collaboration. That we make knowledge together.

That's true in every sense. That's true in a classroom. That's true in general life, and I think it's true for all species. I think animals learn about their world through their interaction with co-species as well. No animal lives in isolation, really.

This interview was conducted by Mia Funk and Lila Muscosky with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producer on this podcast was Lila Muscosky. Digital Media Coordinators are Jacob A. Preisler and Megan Hegenbarth. 

Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast (Conversations about Climate Change & Environmental Solutions).