In The Epic of Gilgamesh, Enkidu, the wild man covered in hair, is seduced away from his innocent fellowship with a herd of deer and taken to live in the city. ‘You are beautiful, Enkidu,’ the temple priestess tells him. ‘You look like a god/why do you roam the wild with the beasts?’ And there it is, right at the beginning of human literature – the idea that we are like gods, that we deserve something better than ‘the beasts’. 

‘We pollute,’ David Farrier writes, ‘because we see ourselves as separate from the rest of the living world.’ This notion is both tenacious and deep-rooted. In Nature’s Genius, Farrier, who teaches English literature at Edinburgh University, explores how nature has adapted itself to human supremacy and examines what we could learn. 

His title is shrewdly chosen. ‘Genius’ is the word we humans use to assert our mental superiority. Nature’s genius is its ability to evolve in order to survive. ‘All living forms’, Farrier says, ‘are in some way a product of the combination of pressure and time.’ His argument is that