Season 2 | Ep.53 - Nature’s Last Dance: Falling Back in Love with the Natural World with Natalie Kyriacou
What does it actually take to make someone fall in love with nature? Not lecture them, not overwhelm them with data, but genuinely make them fall in love?
That’s the question driving everything Natalie Kyriacou does. Environmentalist, author, storyteller, and founder of My Green World, Natalie has spent over a decade building games, education programs, and now a sweeping new book - Nature’s Last Dance: Tales of Wonder in an Age of Extinction - all in service of one mission: helping people feel the wonder of the natural world before it’s too late.
In this conversation with Sara, Natalie brings her trademark blend of warmth, urgency, and radical honesty. She talks about the 12-year-old forest defender who made a promise to an endangered owl. She talks about the economy as the root cause of our ecological crisis - an incentive structure that “make more money off humans and nature being sick.” She talks about the alarming rise of AI as an amplifier of destruction, the need for better models of human behaviour and leadership, and why the degrowth movement just needs a better name.
But beneath all of it runs a single thread: the belief that most people are fundamentally good, that they care, and that what’s missing is not willpower but connection - to nature, to community, to each other.
This is an episode for anyone who has ever felt the weight of environmental news and wondered whether hope is still a reasonable thing to feel. Natalie’s answer is a clear, grounded, and deeply human yes.
In this episode:
• How a childhood spent camping, reading, and running around with frogs shaped a lifelong environmentalist
• Why Natalie wrote Nature’s Last Dance for people who would never pick up a nature book, and what makes it different
• The story of Gracie: the 12-year-old who made a promise to an endangered owl and is now dedicating her life to protecting them
• Why our economy is fundamentally incompatible with human and environmental health, and what changing it would look like
• Natalie’s frank take on AI: not a tool for good, but an accelerant of destruction, and why she’s deeply alarmed
• The rise of toxic masculinity and its ripple effects on people, politics, and the planet
• Why degrowth is brilliant economics with a terrible name, and needs a rebrand
• Simple first steps to reconnect with nature: go outside, look up, watch a bird
About Natalie Kyriacou:
Natalie Kyriacou is an environmentalist, author, and the founder of MyGreen World, a wildlife and environmental charity that has reached hundreds of thousands of young people through award-winning apps and education programs. She is Director at the Foundation for National Parks and Wildlife and an Ambassador for the Australian Conservation Foundation. Her debut book, Nature’s Last Dance: Tales of Wonder in an Age of Extinction, is out now in Australia and launching in the UK and Europe.
