I have 20 years’ experience as an independent science journalist and author with an unusual journalistic beat: I write about pollution. Carbon pollution of the atmosphere, which drives climate instability. Food-like products polluting our bodies with diabetes, heart diseases, and cancer. Plastic pollution which washes up in our arteries and brain tissue, and how it’s made its way into the deepest ocean trenches and the highest mountain peaks.

Mostly, I’m interested in who profits from being able to pollute, and who pays the price.

Through this unusual journalistic ‘beat’, I critique the limitless-growth economic model — through the lens of ‘climate’ and ‘food security’ — and how this is driving systems collapse.

I have grappled with these tough environmental and social justice issues through more than 10 books and several book collaborations, journalism, collaborations with academic and civil society organisations, podcasting, public speaking, and storytelling training. 

My most recent work has featured in National Geographic magazine, Mongabay, Nature Africa, and the Daily Maverick’s Our Burning Planet.

I’ve won multiple awards along the way, more of which are listed in my CV. Most recently, I was the researcher and narrative writer on a recent project A Perfect Storm, published in The Outlier in 2023, which has won five journalism prizes: three South African journalism awards (including the 2023 Vodacom South African Journalist of the Year in the sustainability category); an African science journalism award (the 2023 Africa Science Journalist of the Year from the Science for Africa Foundation); and an international climate reporting award (the 2024 Covering Climate Now Awards) alongside some of the biggest legacy titles in the industry, including New Yorker magazine, the LA Times, the Atlantic, the Guardian, BBC, and Al Jazeera, amongst others.

One of my opinion pieces, in which I distance myself from the 2023 Standard Bank Sikuvile Journalist of the Year Award, where A Perfect Storm won the feature category, was the Daily Maverick’s most widely read op-ed article for 2023.

All of these are empty tickets, though. Without a stable climate and a liveable planet, none of this matters. What we do in the next few years to address the social power structures driving the pollution that is wrecking the climate, will determine the outcome of life on this planet for many thousands of years to come.

That’s why I hope to use storytelling to make visible the many stories from the Global South that go untold because there are no storytellers to bear witness.

A full list of book publications. A comprehensive list of recent journalism and related writing.