Nature's reckoning

From radical hope to cautionary tales

Author

Perspective Media
October 12, 2025

AUTHOR INTERVIEW
Sarah Hall’s radical optimism for the climate
BY HELEN BROWN

Author Sarah Hall – Photo by Kat Green

Novelist Sarah Hall discusses her Goldsmiths Prize-shortlisted novel "Helm," a hybrid biography of Britain's only named wind that faces climate collapse with "radical optimism." From childhood wind-watching in Cumbria to crafting a shapeshifting narrative featuring fart jokes alongside environmental apocalypse, she explores why imaginative storytelling – not just science – is essential for driving climate action and why female sorority holds the key to consolidating power shifts.

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“The next trick for women is sorority, from the local to the global. It’s the way to consolidate power shifts and effect positive change”

SARAH HALL
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WE are the storm

Keggie Carew argues that women are the natural vanguard of environmental defence, from economist Kate Raworth challenging endless growth to Polly Higgins campaigning to make ecocide a crime. Tracing a lineage from Victorian feather-trade fighter Etta Lemon to Mexican biologist Yuliana Bedolla's all-female seabird protection team, she makes the case that ecological wellbeing depends on women's instinctive understanding that you can't wreck the house you live in.

www.perspectivemedia.com/we-are-the-storm

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Women have long been the gatherers, the gardeners, the nurturers, and natural guardians of the world we live in

The Place of No Return

Nick Hunt travels to the site of one of history's greatest ecocides, the Aral Sea, which shrank to a tenth of its former size after Soviet irrigation projects. But this youngest desert on Earth has spawned the strangest myths: UFO sightings, time distortions and pterosaurs hatching from eggs. Against the backdrop of biological weapons testing and environmental catastrophe, he explores how impossibly grim reality gives birth to paranormal folklore as a coping mechanism.

www.perspectivemedia.com/the-place-of-no-return

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Against the enormity of the ecocide that happened here, paranormal activities – blended with the real-life horrors of the site at Aralsk-7 – seem less like fantasies than a cultural coping mechanism

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