I’m sitting with Hattie Phillips in the OWLS community garden in Maldon during one of the summer heatwaves. She was one of the first WWF Youth Ambassadors, and is currently studying at Black Mountains College in Wales. She is a very fine communicator, and already has great experience of speaking in public, performing in theatre, engaging with community action and national climate events. She says, “We can’t solve the climate crisis without nature,” and notes that “Everyone can make a difference, but not everyone has a voice.” She also says, engagement with activism was so exciting: “I went from being one person to being a community.”

Hattie was at COP26, speaking early one morning to a group of CEOs who ate their croissants and drank their coffee and completely ignored the two young people ready to talk. “We said,” says Hattie, “We don’t care how much money you have. If you have children or grandchildren, they will be exposed to the effects of your actions for decades.”

She wrote and performed a one-person play in 2026 called “Letters of Land and Loss.”

Her heroes are the activists making so many sacrifices.

Her book recommendation is Robin Wall Kimmerer’s “The Service Berry.”

Her recommendation: “Go outside, connect with the land.”

My new book will be supporting this podcast, and will be published in March 2027 by Unbreaking/5m. It’s called "Bamboo and Butterfly: Transformation and Story for Climate and Nature Recovery."

In this online chat, award winning actress, director, producer and writer Aria Mckenna talks from her north Florida home on building bridges between climate scientists, policy makers and the media. She talks of efforts to get positive climate and nature narratives inside TV and films, and how to go beyond the tendency to think drama can only be created around apocalypses. “Climate disinformation,” she says, “is so successful, we’re at a breaking point.” The annual Climate Summit in Hollywood brings together a wide variety of writers, actors, producers, all personally concerned about the climate crisis. This is already moving the sense of what is possible.

She says, “I see a lot of movement in Hollywood.” Using the power of storytelling is a way to “put the medicine in the candy” – to wrap the bad inside a compelling story that leads to the good. She says, use words like pollution instead of carbon emissions. Pollution is clear to everyone as a bad; carbon emissions are an abstract term that needs explanation.

Aria founded Global Cooling Productions (media for planet earth), Saving Planet Us, and helped found the Healthy Planet Action Coalition (HPAC).

Aria is proud of her daughter and her generation. Her hero is Erin Brokovich, subject and title of a popular film, and mapper of environmental illnesses across the US. Aria recommends the book “Drawdown” by Paul Hawken – who says we need to heal not steal the Earth. Aria says, “advocate for political change, so that we can achieve systemic change.”

See HPAC at https://healthyplanetaction.org/

The Hollywood Climate Summit: https://www.hollywoodclimatesummit.com/

My new book will be supporting this podcast, and will be published in March 2027 by Unbreaking/5m. It’s called "Bamboo and Butterfly: Transformation and Story for Climate and Nature Recovery."

In his wildlife-friendly garden in East Sussex, I’m chatting with author and scientist Dave Goulson about insects, and especially bees. “They’re clinging on in little fragments of habitat.” Across the world, there are one million species of insect, and perhaps another 4 million awaiting identification. But they’re in severe decline. The land has become hostile to insects, particularly from the use of insecticides and herbicides by farmers, gardeners and urban authorities. “It mystifies me,” he says, “why we allow the sale of poisons for our gardens.” We talk of the dreaded neonics – and how the poison spreads from fields into wild plants and thence to insects. Dave observes, “The system of pesticide regulation is fatally-flawed.”

He also talks of nearby Knepp estate, the great wilding transformation, and how it’s become fabulous for nightingales and purple emperor butterflies. Surprises happen, when nature becomes abundant.

Dave is proud of having established the Bumblebee Conservation Trust, and of the role his research group played in getting neonics banned.

He has written many books. The most recent is “Eat the Planet Well.” Others include “Silent Earth”, “Insectarium” and “The Garden Jungle.”

He says, “There are simple things that people can do in their gardens, a gentle steer, don’t be over-tidy.”

Dave’s fine “ramblings on the wonderful, vital world of insects” are on his YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/@davegoulson6831.

His science website is at https://profiles.sussex.ac.uk/p126217-dave-goulson.

My new book will be supporting this podcast, and will be published in March 2027 by Unbreaking/5m. It’s called "Bamboo and Butterfly: Transformation and Story for Climate and Nature Recovery."