Rekindled: David Farrier in Conversation with Stephen Sparks
On Deep Time and the Legacy We Will Leave
Today on Rekindled, Point Reyes Books owner Stephen Sparks talks with David Farrier, author of Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils, a profound meditation on climate change and the Anthropocene and an urgent search for the fossils—industrial, chemical, geological—that humans are leaving behind. The two discuss understanding our place in time, the loss of a future we thought was waiting for us, and how we’ll be remembered. Please purchase Footprints through Point Reyes Books, your own local bookstore, or through Bookshop.
From the episode:
David Farrier: The numbers that we conjure when we’re talking about deep time—that amount of time is extraordinarily hard to compute. Even just to get a sense of the difference between one billion and one million: to count to one million, it would take around 11 days, to count to a billion would take around 31 years. So that is where stories come in, they allow us to capture something of this elasticity of time, this stretch of imagination, to put us into experiences that otherwise we couldn’t enter. The question that started this—how will we be remembered? This could be imagined as: the fossil, the trace, the object pressed into the strata. My feeling is that the future fossil we leave will be stories.
