What we've been learning from: March 2026

Photo: ADVA Photography

Here's our regular round-up of some of the most interesting and thought-provoking things our team have been reading, watching and listening to over the past month.

1) Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils

Lucy Gavaghan, our brilliant Operations Manager, recommends two books that she’s been getting a lot out of recently. The first is Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils by David Farrier. “David Farrier’s idea in this book is to try and imagine our present moment of climate and ecological crisis from a far-distant future,” writes Tessa Hadley in The Guardian. “What fossil traces will post-industrial human civilisation leave behind for the future to find? Roads and vast cities, long abandoned and forgotten, will show up as layers in the geological strata; our buried radioactive waste will still be deadly; our throwaway plastic will persist until eventually “over the coming millennia, hydrocarbons leach from the fossil plastic, accumulating in small deposits and setting in motion a slow chemical return” to its origins as oil.”

2) Strandings: Confessions of a Whale Scavenger

The second is Strandings: Confessions of a Whale Scavenger by Peter Riley. “Riley is fascinated by beached whales and the people who move in their orbit,” writes Clare Saxby in the TLS. “Each year an estimated 800 cetaceans are stranded on British shores, and the number worldwide is rising owing to chemical pollution, warming seas, overfishing and marine noise. Yet Strandings is only obliquely concerned with the threats to living whales; more immediately it’s about their afterlives, what happens to them and to us when they breach the boundaries of the human world.