Editor’s Note: In light of recent book launch cancellations, we are happy to offer a space for authors to highlight their new books in environmental history, humanities, historical geography, and related disciplines. If interested, please send us your book details, synopses, and any excerpts we can publish to nichecanadawebsite@gmail.com.
Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils
David Farrier
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, March 2020
PURCHASE HERE
Read an Excerpt HERE

‘What will the world look like in ten thousand years—or ten million? What kinds of stories will be told about us?
In Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils, the award-winning author David Farrier explores the traces we will leave for the very distant future. Modern civilization has created objects and landscapes with the potential to endure through deep time, whether it is plastic polluting the oceans and nuclear waste sealed within the earth or the 30 million miles of roads spanning the planet. Our carbon could linger in the atmosphere for 100,000 years, and the remains of our cities will still exist millions of years from now as a layer in the rock. These future fossils have the potential to reveal much about how we lived in the twenty-first century.
Crossing the boundaries of literature, art, and science, Footprints invites us to think about how we will be remembered in the myths and stories of our distant descendants. Traveling from the Baltic Sea to the Great Barrier Reef, and from an ice-core laboratory in Tasmania to Shanghai, one of the world’s biggest cities, Farrier describes a world that is changing rapidly, with consequences beyond the scope of human understanding. As much a message of hope as a warning, Footprints will not only alter how you think about the future; it will change how you see the world today.’
David Farrier teaches at the University of Edinburgh. In 2017, Footprints won the Royal Society of Literature’s Giles St Aubyn Award for Non-Fiction. He lives in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Latest posts by NiCHE Administrators (see all)
- CFC – The Routledge Handbook of Health and Environmental Humanities - February 22, 2023
- WEBINAR: Supporting Modern Environmental Research with Digital Primary Sources - February 2, 2023
- Call for Papers – Transitions, Transformations and Transdisciplinarity: Histories beyond History, WCEH4 2024 - January 23, 2023
- Top Five Posts of 2022 - January 4, 2023
- Open Call for Authors “Future Directions in Environmental History” - December 13, 2022
- Welcome the New NiCHE Executive and Editorial Board Members! - December 1, 2022
- Double Your Contribution! Matching Funds for the Next $1500 - November 22, 2022
- What Has NiCHE Done for You Lately? - November 14, 2022
- The Annual Great NiCHE November Fundraising Campaign! - November 1, 2022
- Call for 2023 NiCHE Editors and Executive Committee Members - October 19, 2022