Q&A
Rob and Tom, authors of The Biggest Footprint, began their creative partnership in the 1980s when Tom (the younger brother) was born. Now, Rob is a bestselling writer and Tom is an illustrator. They’ve created everything from zoo exhibitions and ice cream van designs to sitcoms, newspaper cartoons and movie scripts. The Biggest Footprint is the first book they’ve co-authored.
What’s The Biggest Footprint all about?
It’s an illustrated book about our gigantic, mixed-up human species and what it means to be part of a population of eight billion people living in the way we do.
We started out with a weird thought experiment: what if, instead of 8 billion humans, there was just one, colossal mega human, smooshed together from all of our mass? How big would we be? What would we be like, and what sort of mischief would we get up to?
At first it was a fun thing to think about. But we soon realised the character of the mega human was a way to tell the story of how people’s combined actions are affecting the planet.
The mega human stands for all of us making a mess of our environment – but also for the potential of us coming together and looking after it.
Just how big is this mega human?
We calculated that the mega human would stand at about three kilometres tall. For comparison, that’s seventy times taller than the tallest ever version of King Kong (from the movie Godzilla vs King Kong).
The mega human’s nostrils would be so big that Nelson’s Column would fit inside
It’s hard for anyone, kids and adults alike, to get their heads around a planet of eight billion people. The zeroes blur together.
We figured that if we could turn the big confounding stats of our age into arresting or bizarre scenes, we might be able to help readers get more of a feel for the state of things.
This is the mega human’s footprint superimposed on Finsbury Park in London, where the book was written. The destruction would be too awful to contemplate.
Where did you get the idea for the book?
The concept of the mega human first came about when Tom was working for the Zoological Society of London and wanted to come up with new ways to show information about animal populations. How do you go beyond numbers and show something that will intrigue a family on a day out?
At the same time, Rob was coming off the back of a series of books (very different to this one) that treated worrying subjects in an irreverent way. He wanted to do something about the environment next – maybe the most worrying subject of all and one that is usually written about in a foreboding style, rather than a fun or comedic one.
So the stars aligned for us to start work together on what became a consuming two-year project.
The dawn of smooshing: an early 2019 concept sketch of the mega human holding a mega whale
Tell us about the story of the mega human.
The story of the mega human is a story about the entirety of the human race at this precarious moment in history, so it definitely felt like a big story for us to take on!
We tried to be led by the data about what human beings do collectively, from how much land we use and how much food we throw away to how much stuff we’re continually digging out of the ground and burning.
But we didn’t want to portray humanity as an eco-villain. We felt a more fitting characterisation would be to show us as confused, clumsy and prone to bad habits. We didn’t want to ignore our good intentions either, which humans have a lot of and sometimes act on (see for instance the steady rise of renewable energy).
So the story of the book is one of a clumsy and sometimes oafish giant waking up to what a mess we make.
The book also suggests that the Covid-19 pandemic might be the trigger for us to open our eyes to our species’ bad behaviour and start really changing our ways. The jury is still out on whether this will happen!
An early draft making its way from Rob and Tom’s heads into their shed
The book’s 96 pages are crammed with information. Where does it all come from?
A lot of research! We consulted hundreds of sources, most of which are available freely online. (If you’ve read the book and are curious, you might be interested in the Very Big Data section of this website.)
Most environmental research is bleak reading but one thing that made us hopeful was the huge volume of informed estimates and projections out there today. Anyone with an internet connection can access the findings of scientists and statisticians around the world on every subject under the sun.
Information bubbles aside, it’s easier than it’s ever been to see the state of the planet in its totality, based on data.
A mini human on the rampage as the book takes shape in its final form.
What do you hope readers will take away from The Biggest Footprint?
Ultimately we would love to think that people will finish the book feeling galvanised about what humans can achieve! Together we are a giant, for better as well as for worse.
But if that is too idealistic for your tastes, we would settle for helping readers get a slightly more proportionate picture of humanity’s place in nature.
When we were researching The Biggest Footprint we read some of the books of Vaclav Smil, an expert in… well, a lot of different things. He’s an old-fashioned polymath who, after a lifetime of studying things like energy, population change and food production, has developed a sixth sense for global systems and big numbers. In the way that some people know instinctively whether their car will fit in a particular space at the supermarket, for Professor Smil giant numbers have become intuitive.
If more people developed a Smil-like understanding of the workings of our planet, the easier it would be us to agree on our shared problems (and figure out what to do about them).
Perhaps our book can start a few young readers off on the path to developing more accurate, Smil-style instincts.
Is there anything I can do to help us be a better mega human?
Whoever you are, the answer is yes!
If you’re a world leader or CEO-type, fantastic. A crisis like this is exactly why we need leaders like you, to steer the world through the rapid changes required to bring our planet into better balance. You’ve got the opportunity to fire new instructions directly into our mega brain. In fact, you have to do it or the mega human’s future won’t be so bright. Visit Project Drawdown for some great ideas you could implement for your country or industry.
If you’re an ordinary person (which on the balance of probability you are), you also have the power to determine who the mega human will be. There are lots of things you can do to contribute to us being a good giant – like organising politically and forcing the aforementioned head honchos to do more than just talk. Simply voting, if you can, is utterly crucial.
And of course the lifestyle choices and purchasing decisions of ordinary people can combine to relieve pressure on the planet (these pages from Friends of the Earth, Extinction Rebellion and the World Wildlife Fund have a few more detailed ideas on what you can do).
It is easy to feel hopeless. We tend to reason that the individual changes we can make are tiny compared to the scale of the crisis. Well, that may be true! But the lesson of the mega human is that when we act together we do have immense power, power to do both harm and good.
As 21st century individualists, it can be hard for us to accept the idea that being a small part of something powerful ‘counts’ as real power. We’re fixated on how much individual control we can exert and we ask ourselves, “Why make a change when the world may crash and burn anyway? Or why vote when my one puny ballot paper almost certainly won’t change the result?”
This isn’t the way to think. The truth is you are part of something powerful whether you like it or not – whether you act or not. The question is which larger force you are going to be a part of.