An environmentalist and writer, Natalie Kyriacou is on a mission to inspire everyone to care about the natural world, regardless of where they sit on the political spectrum.
Her first book, Nature’s Last Dance: Tales of Wonder in an Age of Extinction, has just been released and already is garnering massive local and international attention.
She’s also a presenter, board director, climate and nature advisor, Forbes 30 under 30 honouree and one of LinkedIn’s “top green voices”.
“I’ve always cared about the world”, Kyriacou tells the Women’s Agenda podcast. “I’m a sensitive person that cares about the world.”
As an environmentalist in 2025, when the world faces an extinction crisis, it’s not always the easiest task to stay positive and hopeful, but Kyriacou says she does so by “staying aware”.
“I’m trying to balance making sure I’m staying aware and engaged and finding new ways to engage others, with my desire to just switch off and give up,” she says.
“I’m in a really fortunate position because every day I’m talking to people who are doing incredible things for the world. People that are working on the ground to protect species or working to start movements within communities, or just going about their days living kindly and with compassion.”
Describing herself as an idealist, Kyriacou sees change happening on the ground, at a community level, and she sees the power in those efforts.
It’s this insight and the many positive climate action stories Kyriacou is hearing that led her to throw her all into writing a book on the subject, and it’s a dream she’s always held.
“This book, it’s my whole heart and my whole brain,” she says about what went into writing Nature’s Last Dance: Tales of Wonder in an Age of Extinction.
“I was just finding that some of the communications around climate change and around nature were actually doing the opposite of what they intended to. They were disengaging people,” says Kyriacou, adding that she wanted to change this narrative.
Over the years, she’s spoken with many people and heard all sorts of stories related to wildlife, the environment and communities working for change.
“I’ve been collecting these stories for my whole career, these incredible stories about communities and quirky spaces and politics and economics,” she says, adding that she wanted the book to draw this altogether.
In the end, Kyriacou says she wanted the book to do a few things, including “help people fall in love with nature, so that perhaps they can protect it” and “change the way we think about nature”.
Rather than seeing nature as animals and plants that are separate from humans, she wanted readers to view the environment through a lens of something that can decline if we aren’t careful.
“We are the only species that actually argue over whether we should maintain the conditions necessary for our own survival. And to me, that’s mad,” says Kyriacou, noting that climate action shouldn’t be politically divisive.
“It’s not a left or right thing,” she says. “It’s a [thing where we say] ‘okay, we understand the science and we’re going to take action’. When we perceive a threat to our populations or our citizens, we will take action.”
While fighting climate change is often painted as a leftist agenda, the reality is that the benefits of climate action extend across political and ideological lines.
“In many cases, I look at what’s going on with the right, and actually, [they] could find a lot of benefit in thinking about these climate policies, and what we could do economically as well,” says Kyriacou.
“That was a big part of the book. I wanted to be able to cross social or political divides, because nature is for everyone.”
“The biggest responsibility we need to focus on is our communities and acts of kindness and changing our system of value and what we prioritize in the world.”
To listen to the entire conversation with environmentalist Natalie Kyriacou, check out the Women’s Agenda podcast here.