When Kathryn Nelson first encountered the science of microplastics, studying alongside a researcher at Jean Michel Cousteau’s Ocean Futures Society, watching microorganisms ingest plastic particles, she didn’t become paralysed. She became a mermaid. Nelson began dressing in a mermaid costume, shell bra and all, to lobby councils and government, turning an urgent scientific reality into something people could engage with.
“It makes the messaging a bit more palatable,” she says. “It’s not so dense and heavy and fear-based.”
That instinct to respond to science with creativity and optimism has defined Nelson’s fifteen-year career as an activist, author and founder of Plastic Free Mermaid. After quitting single-use plastics in 2009, Nelson built a global following through behaviour change campaigns, community education and political advocacy. As she explains on a recent appearance of There Will Be Dancing, a podcast made in collaboration by Women’s Environmental Leadership Australia (WELA) and Women’s Agenda, her approach to environmental leadership is defined by taking action and living your values.
“People feel like they can’t do anything. They want to stay small. They want to give up,” said Nelson on the podcast. “But the movement needs more voices, more marketing, more communications. The scientists are stuck in the red tape of trying to get funding and get published.”
At a moment when the global plastics treaty remains under negotiation and recycling systems continue to fall well short of their promises, and individuals are increasingly asked to carry the weight of systemic failures, Nelson is clear eyed about the limits of individual action over systemic change.
Joining the Break Free From Plastic coalition, working alongside grassroots organisations across Indonesia, California and beyond, she understands that power requires a multi-pronged response: direct engagement with corporations, local community support and narrative change.
That sophistication extends to how she holds her own public identity. “Plastic free” was always a slogan as much as a practice. Nelson traces the cost of living inside a rigid label — the online criticism when reality turned out to be more complicated than a brand. However her response wasn’t to retreat or stay small. “When we make mistakes, we don’t need to be hard on ourselves” she says, “because we’re doing all of this.”
Becoming a mother forced a reckoning — not with the importance of the work, but with the pace. “I didn’t know how to mother myself,” she says of her earlier activist years. “I was so outward, externally focused and panicked.” Slowing down, she found, made her more effective, not less. It is one of her sharpest contributions to the climate leadership conversation: that the relentless pursuit of perfection is itself a barrier — to participation, to longevity, and to joy.
The commitment to joy is all the more striking given what Nelson has carried.
Her mother died in a car accident when she was nineteen. The grief made her question what a life lived in service of something larger actually requires of a person.
Years later, travelling through South Africa, she found herself in a remote coastal village, sharing a meal with a community that had known tremendous loss. And yet there was dancing. In that circle, something shifted. “I get to choose what my story is,” she says. Whether it’s a tragedy or something else entirely — that, she realised, was always hers to decide.
Listen to the full conversation with Kathryn Nelson on There Will Be Dancing, available now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and all major podcast platforms.