Nature's Last Dance: Natalie Kyriacou on Ecocide, Oiled Penguins, and Why We Need to Watch the Birds

0:00:01 Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody. It is Thursday, March 19, 2026 — and it might be nature's last dance. The Financial Times is writing about an Armageddon scenario for energy. There are serious fears that the war in the Middle East is going to not just destroy the world economy, but perhaps the world's environment too.

It's not just oil prices that are rising. One environmental group has talked about this war resulting in a kind of ecocide. My guest today is all too familiar with Nature's Last Dance — that's the title of her book. Natalie Kyriacou is an Australian-based environmentalist who, as it happens, is talking to us from Switzerland today. Her book came out last year in Australia, and it's out next week in the United States and the UK.

Natalie, I know you're not a geopolitical expert, but what do you make of these accusations of ecocide from some environmental groups in terms of what's happening now in Iran and the Gulf?

00:01:18 Natalie Kyriacou: Look, the term "ecocide" doesn't poll well — I'll say that. But I don't disagree. The impact that war has on the environment, and obviously on communities, is catastrophic, quite simply.

One of the things it's doing is drawing attention to the fact that countries don't count military emissions. When we talk about a country's stock of emissions, their tally of emissions, and how they're reducing emissions, the military is not included in that — and militaries are far and away the largest source of emissions. But not just that: the impacts on biodiversity are far-reaching. You destroy nature, you destroy communities, and you destroy the long-term viability of communities. So war isn't just harming current generations, but generations to come.

00:02:11 Andrew Keen: Yeah. Colin Powell famously said, "You break it, you own it, you fix it." One wonders what Donald Trump's bill will be after this war. The environmental aspect of the war seems almost secondary. And in a weird situation, Trump doesn't have a problem assassinating Iranian leaders, but he keeps threatening the destruction of the oil fields.

What do you make of this? Again, Natalie, I know you're not a geopolitical expert, and I don't really want to turn this into another critique of Donald Trump — there are too many of those on the internet. But this idea that somehow oil fields have more value than human life strikes me as not only odd but strange in the sense that no one seems to be picking it up.

00:03:05 Natalie Kyriacou: Well, to be honest, it doesn't strike me as odd, because this is the system we have lived in for many, many years. All we would need to do is go to Nigeria, for example, which obviously has an abundance of oil but is one of the most impoverished countries on the planet. The destruction of nature and the exploitation of communities and their natural resources has gone on for centuries.

I would see this as more of an unmasking. Donald Trump, in my view, is a symptom of a system — but this system has been in existence, particularly for vulnerable communities who are feeling it the most, for centuries.

I'm not saying that all world leaders have been like Donald Trump, but Trump is certainly more abrasive about it. I wouldn't say he represents a huge departure from the ways we have historically treated the world's most vulnerable communities, or from our relationship with oil. We have continued to show that we prioritize oil over lives.

00:04:16 Andrew Keen: Natalie, your book has, I think, a rather sad title — Nature's Last Dance. There are two types of environmental books, at least the ones that come onto this show: those who are very pessimistic, and those who have some hope — perhaps in technology or in politics — that the environment or nature can be saved. Which bucket does your book fall into?

00:04:44 Natalie Kyriacou: Neither, or both. I see the same divide you do, Andrew. There are usually optimists who are so optimistic that they seem a little bit irrational. And there are those — and I don't blame them — who are so negative. A lot of scientists who have been working in this space for decades are exhausted, and they have had so many battles that they are unable to scrape up any sense of joy.

This book charts the relationship of nature and humanity, and so it encompasses the full scope of that relationship — one of joy and hope, but also one of tragedy and outrage. This book treads a fine line between joy and tragedy and humor and outrage. It sort of has it all.

I am not completely hopeful. I understand that we are living through incredibly dark times. I know and feel the scope of the challenge. But equally, it is not over. There are stories of incredible resilience and hope.

What I hope this book leaves people with is the recognition that things are bad — sure, we know that, and I've outlined that — but there are also pockets of incredible wonder and resilience and joy and inspiration. I hope we can focus more on the full scope of our relationship to nature, which is not all bad. It's pretty bad, though.

00:06:17 Andrew Keen: Yeah. The subtitle of the book is Tales of Wonder in an Age of Extinction. In our rather apocalyptic week, what exactly is a "tale of wonder"? You've laid out your stall: we live in an age of extinction — that's the dark side. The tales of wonder are the sunlight, the Here Comes the Sun moment. Bill McKibben was actually on the show; he's more of an optimist. What exactly is a tale of wonder, and what's its value? Is it just a story, or is it something a bit more concrete?

00:06:54 Natalie Kyriacou: There are many of them. I have tales of wonder that show how we can rebuild political systems, how we can start movements, how we could rethink entire economies.

I have tales of wonder for issues big and small. One of my personal favorites, which I think is particularly inspiring because it shows the power of communities and people — and I firmly believe we need to focus on community and grassroots efforts right now — is the story of a year-2000 oil spill off the coast of South Africa.

It was endangering the largest colony of African penguins. About 90,000 penguins were impacted by oil. The oil was clumping on their wings, rendering them useless, and they weren't going to survive. What happened next was that zoos, NGOs, and politicians woke at all hours of the night calling each other from different countries. Australia, the US, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Japan, Korea — all of these countries mobilized their teams and traveled to South Africa to help rescue these oiled penguins.

Then the next day, tens of thousands of volunteers from all over the world started arriving. You had school kids riding their bikes in. You had people flying in from overseas. Australians were knitting sweaters for oiled penguins. It was the largest volunteer workforce ever assembled, all to rescue little penguins — and it worked. It shows the power of people. People can come together for a mission. There are certain things that can overcome political and social divisions. One of them is the penguin.

00:09:11 Andrew Keen: Yeah, I mean, it's a nice story. Of course, I'm sure someone will make it into a YouTube video or a Disney movie — all these people coming together to save the oiled penguins. But did it actually result in government action? We're talking in the midst of another oil war where much of the Middle East is literally being destroyed. Did this public initiative on behalf of oiled penguins result in any structural change, any political shifts?

00:09:50 Natalie Kyriacou: Well, not regarding oil. No. But these sorts of efforts do create community shifts. There are shifts in how we think about emergency response, there are learnings that allow you to improve in future — better networks, NGOs showing they can work together. And while I wouldn't say this stopped oil or put a stop to fossil fuels, among NGOs and community members it strengthened connections and the ability to respond to future emergencies. I don't think that should be discounted. Of course it sounds small against the scale of war and war over oil — yes. But this is an example of a small story of hope and wonder. And equally, there are stories of greater magnitude too.

00:10:42 Andrew Keen: There certainly are. You're based in Australia, looking up at the United States for better or worse. You talk about community shifts. We have a president here whose mantra is "drill, baby, drill," who doesn't believe there's any kind of environmental crisis, who takes apparent pleasure in undermining all kinds of international environmental initiatives. He's not the first or the last American president to do this.

In Nature's Last Dance, is America dancing? Is it the bandleader, or has it already gone off to do something else?

00:11:26 Natalie Kyriacou: This is interesting, because I finished my book and then Donald Trump got elected. After his election, I had to write the epilogue — my publisher said write something about what the future looks like. That was incredibly difficult, with Trump having just been elected.

I do think, again as I mentioned before, that this is a great revealing. It is exposing to us a broken system — Trump is a symptom of that broken system. And if we talk about how Trump is famously pulling out of environmental institutions, well, this is something of a recurring theme with the US. The US negotiated Kyoto and then didn't join it. They designed the Paris Agreement largely around their own preferences, then withdrew under the first Trump term, rejoined under Biden, and have now withdrawn again. So there has been every reason for other countries to stop taking US climate leadership seriously well before now.

Perhaps the more honest framing is that Trump is revealing the decay that was already set in: US-centric leadership, voluntary commitments without teeth, climate finance that doesn't actually benefit the world's most vulnerable nations, and a heavy reliance on US goodwill — which isn't really goodwill, but usually the US funding institutions out of self-interest.

I obviously see Trump as a very significant threat. The things he has set in motion are catastrophic. But I also think this was always going to happen. Maybe he has expedited it, but we have been relying on a broken system for a very long time.

00:13:37 Andrew Keen: And is one feature of this broken system the way in which the traditional international organizations set up after the Second World War have simply become irrelevant? You're involved with UNESCO — you're a UNESCO Green Citizens Pathfinder. You might believe UNESCO has a role, but aren't organizations like UNESCO increasingly marginal, if not irrelevant, in this great-power world? It's not just Trump — it's China and Russia too. Although of course China seems somewhat more sympathetic, and you're in Australia, so you're all too familiar with both the good and the bad in China's international policies.

00:14:26 Natalie Kyriacou: Yes, look. There is a role for the United Nations, but I think they have gone beyond their scope. I say this from a position of great respect for many of the people who work at the UN, and I am genuinely fearful of a complete dismantling of the United Nations — that is not what I want.

My view is that we need to try to revive the UN, perhaps in a new form. The current United Nations and its many iterations is not quite fit for purpose. It has tried to tackle too many things, and the result, particularly on the environment, is that on paper we have world leaders and countries rallying around shared visions — protect biodiversity, reduce global emissions, reduce plastics, whatever it might be. We have all these conventions. World leaders come together, shake hands, make commitments, set targets, and then go home and fail to meet those targets. That happens year after year. Countries are very good at setting targets and talking, and less good at delivering on them. The UN has been stretched too thin across too many areas and has become too bureaucratic.

There have been success stories — the Montreal Protocol, which addressed the hole in the ozone layer, was a genuine success. But one of the problems is that nobody who supports the UN wants to criticize it, because they fear that's akin to calling for its eradication. I think we need to have really frank conversations about the limits of the United Nations and how we can improve these institutions.

00:16:46 Andrew Keen: You've written or said that we need to make nature's well-being impossible to ignore. But isn't it already impossible to ignore? You only have to open your newspaper, turn on your television, go online, or go outside. Isn't it increasingly self-evident?

00:17:05 Natalie Kyriacou: You would think. I do think what the headlines show is constant doom. We are just — I think what we're seeing is environmentalists yelling at each other that climate change is bad. What we need is to actually make the case more specifically to different groups of people. We don't always have to frame it as a negative.

Nature is the source of human ingenuity and human health and well-being. Can we frame it in ways that illuminate the health benefits of nature? I know it might sound like common sense, but truly it's not for a lot of people. When I tell people that modern chemotherapy treatments were based on the Madagascar periwinkle — a little flower from Madagascar — that we would not have treatment for childhood Hodgkin's lymphoma without a tiny flower from the red soils of Madagascar — or that roughly 80% of our pharmaceuticals are modeled on nature — it lands differently.

If I talk to my grandmother, who grew up in a tiny village in Cyprus, and I talk to her about climate change, she doesn't care. But if I talk to her about how environmental degradation is affecting wine and olive oil — oh, she cares. It's about finding different ways to communicate these issues. We can't just keep yelling about environmental disaster. We need more empathetic communication and more storytelling.

00:18:46 Andrew Keen: Yeah. We need to tell good stories. One person who's very good at that is the American environmentalist Bill McKibben. I'm sure you're familiar with his work — he was on the show a few months ago with a rather optimistic message about the role of solar energy. We've also done shows on nuclear. What's your take on new technologies like solar and nuclear in terms of addressing what some people see as our ecocidal moment?

00:19:20 Natalie Kyriacou: I have a few thoughts. We have a very different conversation happening in Australia. We've had a nuclear debate going on for seventy years. I don't think nuclear is appropriate for Australia, though I understand that it may be for some countries. Australia is the sunniest and windiest inhabited continent on the planet — renewables like solar and wind are a natural fit; nuclear, not so much. I can understand the case for it in European countries.

Now, this might be slightly unpopular: I am fully supportive of renewable energy and renewable technologies, and we need to move forward with them. But the risk is that as environmentalists, in our passion to see these technologies adopted, we are endorsing the cutting of corners. I'm not seeing enough focus on biodiversity and nature protection in conversations about the expansion of renewables. And it's really difficult to have a nuanced conversation about that, because at the same time we have certain far-right groups spreading misinformation about renewable energies killing mass numbers of whales and birds — which is simply false.

I obviously support these technologies, but there is no silver bullet when it comes to the environment. We need to ensure we are focusing on the protection of biodiversity, and unfortunately biodiversity and nature are falling second to climate and carbon. We need to be able to have nuanced conversations, especially within the environmental sector, and learn from our mistakes.

00:20:58 Andrew Keen: Natalie, what wisdom do you bring from Australia on this? As I said, you're talking to us from Switzerland, but you are based in Australia. I've been to your country a couple of times in the last few months — my daughter lives there, so I've been visiting. We've been to Melbourne, and we went up to Darwin. What are the remarkable stories in your book and in your experience that you need to tell the rest of the world?

00:21:35 Natalie Kyriacou: I think there is so much more to our world story than loss, and I think it is a huge disservice to the countless people who are dedicating their lives to protecting the environment to talk about this as if it's over. It is a disservice to young people to talk about this in a defeatist way. We need to be able to recognize the challenges, but we can't give up on young people and future generations and the environmentalists who are working so hard.

In Australia — and this is something I would like to see embedded more deeply there, but equally something the US could learn from — there is this sense of nationalism for wildlife. Nationalism, but the good kind. In Australia and New Zealand, we have this shared, irreverent humor and we have genuinely, wonderfully quirky species. As Australians, we feel a real, deep sense of pride over our strange animals — whether it's an echidna, a wombat, a kangaroo, or our venomous species. How can we harness that pride to protect these species? I wonder if the US is the same. There is a sense of pride for certain species — the bald eagle is one — but can we harness a sense of personality and nationalism around positive things, like nature protection?

And one more thing. In Australia, I had the great privilege of interviewing the most incredible people. I interviewed twelve-year-old Gracie, who made a promise to protect an owl and now defends forests and teaches people about the ways of the forest. I interviewed a woman, Lisa Palmer, who spent Christmas Eve dangling upside down from inside a stormwater drain to protect a tiny lorikeet. I interviewed people who are dedicating their lives to protecting species — doing the most extraordinary things for nature: ensuring we pass new environmental laws, discovering new species, erecting predator-proof fencing to conserve habitat, buying up degraded land and restoring it.

There are so many success stories, and yes, the challenges are immense. But there are so many people doing the most amazing things, and we don't hear their stories enough. We really should.

00:24:14 Andrew Keen: You've written about birdwatching as an act of private, quiet rebellion. But in all the things you're talking about, it all sounds a little symbolic. It all sounds as if we're dancing on our way to the cemetery.

00:24:35 Natalie Kyriacou: I'm not sure I know how to answer that. No — I don't think we're dancing on our way to the cemetery. I don't want to shy away from the destruction of the world. I fully comprehend how bad things are, and I don't shy away from that in my book.

But what I am trying to do is show that there is a path where this is our last dance — where we essentially extinct ourselves and in the process destroy much of life on earth. That is certainly one avenue we can take. But it is not yet the only choice available to us. I am trying to make it clear that it is a choice — but a choice we need to make very quickly.

I made a decision to finish my book on a chapter about birdwatchers, because there is a lot in the book that is complex and heavy — political systems, economic systems, colonial structures, and so on. The last chapter is one of humor and joy. It is showing us that at the root of all of this could simply be our connection to nature, our individual relationship to nature. What we can learn from birdwatchers is the simple act of going outside and looking up and appreciating the world around you and falling in love — because once people fall in love with nature, they fight to protect it.

We see it with surfers. Many surfers, even those who have been attacked by sharks, will fight to protect sharks — they fight to protect nature because they spend so much time in it. The same goes for farmers who have a deep connection to land, and indigenous peoples with their connection to land. It's about finding ways to fall in love with nature. Yes, it might sound pretty, but there is something real in the simple act of looking up and finding a connection with the natural world.

00:26:44 Andrew Keen: You talk about making ourselves extinct — that it's not just birds or other creatures, it's humans. Do you think it's any more than coincidental that we seem to be confronting two crises as a species simultaneously: the one you write about in Nature's Last Dance, and the one happening in Silicon Valley, where we're creating intelligent machines that increasingly — to some people at least — appear to be making us redundant? Some people describe AI as our final invention. Some argue we're going to be at best servants or serfs of these new machines. Is there a connection between AI and nature's last dance?

I'm also assuming that you don't think AI can be particularly helpful in ensuring that what's happening now isn't nature's last dance.

00:27:40 Natalie Kyriacou: People talk about AI in terms of its impacts on water and resources, and so on. I actually don't think that's the biggest problem. I think the biggest problem with AI is that it puts humanity's current relationship with the world on steroids — every facet of it. If we are already this destructive a force, if we are already impoverishing much of our own human population, if we are already this divided — AI just makes all of that a million times more extreme.

That's what I see as the primary problem. But I absolutely see this all as connected. In my book, I argue that to address these problems you have to think systemically. The destruction of nature goes hand in hand with the destruction of community, and it is not accidental. It is embedded in our dominant economies, institutions, laws, politics, technologies, our information ecosystem, our cultural psyche. These are the systems we live by, guided by rules that we made up — and all of these systems are made up to benefit, usually, the privileged few.

And so I think we are seeing this play out: these dominant systems that prioritize endless production, extraction, and consumption, with the leaders sitting at the helm — as you know well from Silicon Valley. I see these things as deeply connected. I don't think we can just restore pockets of nature and do a little bit of community volunteering. I think we need an upheaval of the underlying systems. The same underlying system that destroys nature is the same system that destroys communities, and it is the same system that is seeing tech billionaires essentially trying to wipe out humanity and nature at the same time. It is a systems failure.

00:29:48 Andrew Keen: So we need more than PR campaigns for oiled penguins. Are there leaders in Australia or elsewhere, Natalie, who you think are beginning to address this systemic crisis connecting technology and greed and, of course, our environmental crisis?

00:30:15 Natalie Kyriacou: I have to say, our leaders in Australia are very uninspiring. There are individual exceptions — David Pocock in Australia is really worth following; he's incredible. But at the country level, we had Costa Rica, from basically 1948 until around 2020, undertaking genuinely revolutionary and pioneering environmental work — though more recently they've moved a little to the right. Bhutan experimented with Gross National Happiness. Ecuador became the first country in the world to embed the rights of nature into their constitution. There are pockets of experimentation. There's the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund; there are models we can draw on from Scandinavian countries.

I don't think we're going to find one country we can hold up as the pillar of everything good in the world. But we can draw on examples from all over. It is worth noting, though, that there is no country in the world right now that is on track to meet its climate targets or nature targets. Not one. Nobody is on track — possibly Iceland, but that's about it.

00:31:50 Andrew Keen: I'm not sure that's going to do much good. Your nonprofit is called My Green World. What do you make of the Green parties, then, Natalie? There's a rise in the popularity of the Greens in the UK, though they don't always strike me as being very green. Greens in Europe have always played a role. Do you have any faith in them? Do you have a Green Party in Australia?

00:32:14 Natalie Kyriacou: We do have a Green Party in Australia. They didn't do so well in the last election, largely because there was a pretty concerted campaign against them after a period when they had been doing quite well. One of the biggest problems is that Australia has a very concentrated media ecosystem — tightly owned, and our media companies often have investments in big fossil fuels, so anything coming up against that gets stamped down pretty quickly. What we are seeing in response is a resurgence of independent media.

One issue we're seeing in Australia is a myth going around that environmentalism and climate action are waning, when actually the majority of the Australian population supports climate action. Our last government — nominally left-leaning but really more centre-right — got elected in a landslide, and that was largely on the back of environmental action, which they have not delivered on.

So yes, we do have a Green Party. We have environmentalism in Australia. But we are facing the same crisis the rest of the world faces: the vast spread of misinformation and really concerted campaigns against anything that promotes human rights or environmentalism.

00:33:48 Andrew Keen: Final question, Natalie. Your book is called Nature's Last Dance. What happens if it is indeed nature's last dance? What happens if people go outside and they want to watch birds, but there aren't any birds left?

00:34:04 Natalie Kyriacou: I think it would be a very sanitized view of the world. And it's worth noting that we do not exist without nature — unless Silicon Valley figures something out in their bunkers, I suppose.

00:34:16 Andrew Keen: Well, Zuckerberg might say we can have virtual reality — he renamed his company Meta, though he seems to have moved on from that. We could just watch birds online in 3D, and they'd be relatively convincing.

00:34:33 Natalie Kyriacou: I'd prefer not to do that, and I think the majority of the world would agree. I hope something changes before we get to that stage. That vision is so divorced from reality — I don't think Silicon Valley is offering a realistic glimpse into the future.

It is worth noting that we do not exist without nature. We need it to breathe. So nature will exist and continue on in one way or another. What could potentially happen is that we see a very sanitized, diminished version of nature, and we will see our own diminishment with it. You might see more generalist species. In Australia, for example, we have the ibis — what we call the "bin chicken" — a bird that has adapted to urban environments and you see them everywhere. So you might have more pigeons, more rats, more species that can adapt to multiple environments, but we lose our diversity. The world could end up in grayscale. That is an incredibly sad thing, and I hope we don't get there. I do not share Silicon Valley's vision for the future.

00:36:03 Andrew Keen: Well, there you have it. Nature's last dance: lots of pigeons, lots of rats, not many birds. A very chilling vision from Natalie Kyriacou, author of Nature's Last Dance. Thank you so much, Natalie.

00:36:17 Natalie Kyriacou: Thank you for having me.