"SHORTLISTED FOR THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE FOR WRITING ON GLOBAL CONSERVATION 'Pilcher is both very funny and very, very clever.' Gillian Burke 'Richly entertaining throughout.' Sunday Times For the last three billion years or so, life on Earth was shaped by natural forces. Evolution tended to happen slowly, with species crafted across millennia. Then, a few hundred thousand years ago, along came a bolshie, big-brained, bipedal primate we now call Homo sapiens, and with that, the Earth's natural history came to an abrupt end. We are now living through the post-natural phase, where humans have become the leading force shaping evolution. This thought-provoking book considers the many ways that we've altered the DNA of living things and changed the fate of life on earth.…
"Yes, our impact on this world, the way we have changed the world. This is really interesting. She talks about her genetically-modified wolf, her domesticated wolf – which is her dog. And you think: ‘oh yeah!’ Get the weekly Five Books newsletter She goes right back to the invention of farming, and how that changed everything. I learned almost an embarrassing amount from this book, given what I do for a living. Pilcher has a really light touch as well. It could be boring, this kind of book, but it’s actually really funny. It has really wry comments that just make you laugh, while discussing the huge impact of what she describes as “a bolshy bi-pedal primate.” Exactly. The law of unintended consequences runs through this book, in that I’m sure when people started doing whatever they started doing, they didn’t think about the knock-on effects. That’s a theme running through it. But, again, it doesn’t say, ‘abandon hope.’ We’ve been clever enough to do all of this; we should be clever enough to sort out some of the problems we’ve created. She’s optimistic that this bolshy primate will be able to find a way out."
