This month sees the release of Life Story, a new book by Tenby author Valerie Teal celebrating life’s evolutionary resilience.

Life Story is an account of the never-ending battle life wages against competing organisms, the great accidents of existence in the solar system, and the meteorological and geothermic events of a young planet.

Valerie Teal was born in Leeds in 1949; she is a painter, sculptor, and writer. She has lived in Pembrokeshire in South West Wales for the last 50 years, raising her family, training riders and their horses, and as an artist, professional forager, and environmentalist. She has watched the biodiversity of Britain collapse, and stood for the Green Party in the 2016 Welsh Government elections.

“So far, life has endured five mass extinctions and a global warming event,” she writes. “You carry a survival kit that has protected you from fire, flood, famine, and poisoning. You are made of stardust that is 13.8 billion years old. You are a home, a partner, and a life support system to billions of organisms, surrounded by your fellow survivors.

“This is a story of big numbers: billions of stars, neurons, genes, cells, eggs, spores, and connections. Life has taken an unfathomable amount of time to reach this point… Every living thing around you and within you is both a refugee from countless disasters and a testament to resilience and adaptation.

“The gift of evolution has bestowed humanity with great intelligence, and with great intelligence comes great responsibility.” Published by Austin Macauley, Life Story is being released as a paperback (ISBN:9781035878871) and eBook (ISBN:9781035878888) on Friday, July 18.

The mid-20s of the 21st century feel like the tipping point for many world events,” Valerie adds, “and as science reveals, life will go on with or without us.”