Solitaire Townsend's Blog

Just before stepping on stage, the eminent climate scientist (and deeply committed Christian) Dr Katherine Hayhoe turned to me and asked, quietly, “Do I actually have to say the F-word?”

I reassured her I’d handle the swearing. And moments later, I did – with gusto – as we launched the FUCK DOOM campaign. The room was packed with climate activists, scientists, journalists and social media creators, all wearing black baseball caps stamped with the words FUCK DOOM in a yellow, riotous font. As wall-sized screens flashed images of climate solutions, the crowd began chanting the slogan back at us. It felt rebellious, joyful and electric.

That campaign was the culmination of almost 30 years I’ve spent as a committed climate optimist, fighting the rising tide of fatalism and despair, which I believe is nearly as dangerous as climate denial itself. Over the years, I’ve been called many things for that stubborn optimism: a Pollyanna, a positivity merchant, a “hope addict”.

But no one has really questioned my allegiance to hope over fear. Until now.

Because just a few weeks after the FUCK DOOM event, as many of you know, I launched my first novel, Godstorm. And Godstorm is full-throttle climate dystopia: an epic doom-soaked adventure set in an alternative history where the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius invents the combustion engine, locking humanity into 1,700 additional years of fossil-fuelled empire.

In this world, climate change arrives long before climate science, long before renewable energy, long before the language to even describe what’s happening. The planet is cooked. And the dictatorial Roman Empire has a homicidally low sense of humour about it. In climate terms, the world of Godstorm is, frankly, supremely fucked.

So am I a hypocrite? At one event, I was urging people to reject despair and bring “main character energy” to climate solutions. At another, I signed copies of a novel drenched in heat, violence and environmental collapse.

For me, both the FUCKDOOM.NET campaign and Godstorm are rooted in the same absolute conviction: storytelling is the most powerful, and most neglected, force we have to shape the future.

The science is as clear on narrative as it is on climate. We are around 22 times more likely to remember information when it’s delivered as a story. We trust anecdotes more than data. We absorb story-shaped truths before we ever learn to count, read or reason. Long before we are rational, we are built from narrative.

Even neuroscience is stacked against the Enlightenment fantasy of the purely logical human. Stories trigger oxytocin, the bonding, trust-building chemical. They don’t just inform us; they change how we feel, who we empathise with, and what we believe is possible. I call stories the programming language of the human brain, which hack into our endocrine system to make us believe them.

That’s why I wrote one. Arrow, the protagonist of Godstorm, is a gladiator turned governess: a trained killer trying, imperfectly, to become a decent mother. She doesn’t fight a giant abstract climate monster because that canvas is too vast, and too distant. Instead, she fights for one child she loves, against an energy myth designed to crush them both. Not because she’s noble or pure or perfectly informed, but because she refuses to accept that those in power get to decide who deserves to survive.

And crucially, once the danger is revealed, the story doesn’t linger there. It moves on. Because that’s how stories work.

A rule I wish every real-world climate communicator would learn.

For decades, climate messages have been stuck in Act One: the inciting incident. Repeating the same terrifying science, louder and more urgently, as if volume alone will tip humanity into action. We seem to believe that if we just shout “we’re doomed” convincingly enough, people will suddenly mobilise.

Our climate narrative keeps circling the same plot point, wondering why audiences are losing interest. They need the next beat. Because our future doesn’t have to be a dystopia. Not if we turn it into an adventure.

And crucially, an adventure for everyone.

The era of the climate superhero has curdled. Elon Musk drifted from electric cars into culture-war cosplay. Bill Gates has mused aloud that a bit of climate change might be tolerable. There is no saviour coming. No single leader to rally behind.

Which, narratively speaking, is excellent news. Because every great epic is powered not by gods, but by ordinary people forced into extraordinary choices: Dorothy, Frodo, Arthur Dent, Alice. The story works because the protagonist could be any of us.

We don’t need more tales where humanity is a helpless extra in its own extinction. We need stories that remind us we’re not background characters in the apocalypse. The scrappy weirdos. The rebels. The fellowship. The kids on bikes with slingshots. Main-character energy, distributed at scale.

So no, I didn’t abandon my anti-doom principles by writing dystopian fiction. I found another way to fight the real enemy: the belief that we are powerless.

Godstorm isn’t a prediction. In fact, it’s a reminder that we aren’t in the worst timeline. That even in a history far worse than ours, people still resist. They still imagine something better and fight like hell to make it real.

If a gladiator governess in a petrol-soaked empire can find the strength to keep going, then so can we.

And as Katherine Hayhoe answered, when I asked if we’re doomed:
“Absolutely not. As long as we choose something better.”

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Pre-order Godstorm in the USA!

I’m so excited that Godstorm is coming to the US and hope you’ll hit that pre-order button today:

Barnes & Noble

Amazon.com

Stay tuned for more info on US launch events and signings.

SPOILER ALERT! This article WILL go into great detail about the Andy Weir book and the recent movie. Read on at your own risk ;-)

You have 5 more dots until a spoiler-filled romp through the fabulous hopefest which is Project Hail Mary.

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If Don’t Look Up was the cinematic equivalent of screaming into a pillow (sometimes with laughter), then Project Hail Mary is something far more dangerous.

It’s hope.

Not the flimsy, hashtagged, slightly desperate sort of hope that gets wheeled out at the end of a depressing panel discussion. Not the ‘what gives you hope’ question that even I end debates with.

This is muscular hope (literally in the case of Dr Grace). Scientific hope. Cooperative, problem-solving, slightly chaotic and deeply human hope.

Which is precisely why it’s a perfect climate parable. It’s a rehearsal for how to face unimaginable odds.

As I’ve argued in this newsletter before, and as even the usually understated IPCC now concedes, “narratives enable people to imagine and make sense of the future.” Stories are how we practice reality before it arrives.

We must stop rehearsing the wrong ending.

Don’t Look Up is, of course, the most obvious climate allegory of the last decade. A planet-killing comet hurtles towards Earth. The scientists try to warn everyone, but the politicians dither, the media trivialise, and billionaires try to monetise the apocalypse. The public fractures into denial, despair, and OTT memes.

It’s funny because it’s true. And the humour gets darker every year that the allegory gets closer to reality.

The system remains the system until the moment it obliterates itself. A tragedy dressed as silly satire that we all smile wryly while watching, because this is the story we are telling ourselves.

This has become a script we seemed destined to follow.

Enter Project Hail Mary.

On the surface, this is another ‘existential threat’ story. A mysterious astrophysical phenomenon is draining the sun’s energy, and Earth faces extinction. Temperatures will fall, food stores will fail, and society will collapse. So far, so apocalyptic.

But then something extraordinary happens. Enter Eva Stratt.

No, not bumbling, loveable Dr Ryland Grace (we’ll come to him).

The most hopeful character in Project Hail Mary is the uber-administrator character. Eva Stratt is wonderfully competent in the movie, and with a great singing voice to boot. In the book - she’s terrifying.

And I LOVE her.

She isn’t the kind of character we are accustomed to celebrating in climate narratives. In the book, she’s icy cold and anti-consensus. She is not interested in anyone’s feelings - including that of lawyers, billionarres and government lackeys.

She is, however, devastatingly effective. This is catnip for climate activists, watching someone given the authority (and who has the competence to use it) that a world-threat demands.

There is only the task. And the task must be done.

Now, before anyone starts drafting an op-ed-length comment about authoritarianism, yes, I know Stratt isn’t a blueprint for governance. She makes decisions that would give any ethics committee palpitations, or hand in their notice.

What makes her so compelling isn’t (just) her power, but her certainty of purpose. Stratt doesn’t waste time debating whether the crisis is real, whether it is politically convenient to act, if the optics are favourable, or if there’s a business case for the continued existence of humanity. She operates as if the facts are settled, and the mandate is absolute.

Stratt embodies what happens when the ‘mandate gap’ disappears and society has, implicitly or explicitly, decided that survival outranks all other considerations. She is what leadership looks like on the far side of consensus.

Which is why I felt like she was more alien than the actual alien.

We aren’t used to this story. Stratt may be the most powerful person in the room, but even she is downstream of an earlier narrative. Without a shared story of urgency and possibility, her authority would be unthinkable.

So yes, she is terrifying, uncompromising and (ahem) morally ambiguous. But she is also a glimpse of something we rarely allow ourselves to imagine in climate discourse: leadership that matches the scale of the problem.

That’s a story we see far too rarely.

If Stratt is the ‘logic’ of the story, then Ryland Grace is the ‘magic’.

And what magic he is. Literally a coward (at least to begin with). Not a chosen one nor a superhero. He ends up on the mission because all the real heroes get taken out.

Eva Stratt’s coldest action is sending a warm-hearted boy out to save the world.

If Lesson One of this hopecore story is WE NEED LEADERSHIP, then Lesson Two is ANYONE CAN BE A HERO.

I don’t think I’ve watched a leading man cry so often. Hollywood’s top male actors rarely sob-snot on screen. Kudos to Ryan Gosling. If only he were a little less handsome, he’d be the perfect everyman character.

In the book, he’s even more pathetically, wonderfully, relatably, normal. At least emotionally.

But Lesson Three is my favourite: STRANGE ALLIES CHANGE EVERYTHING

Because the true heart of the story is the relationship between Grace and Rocky, the alien engineer from another threatened civilisation. Two species with two entirely different ways of perceiving the universe (including basic physics - I mean, solid xenon!).

One shared problem, which demands they must collaborate. With all the messy misunderstandings, failure, shared knowledge, fragile trust, wasted time, huge breakthroughs, inside jokes, boredom and risk that true collaboration requires

Slowly, improbably, they succeed.

The main reason I love this movie as climate parable? We don’t all die at the end.

Since the original climate blockbuster, The Day After Tomorrow, too often the ending is the end times.

That narrative is woven into most climate communications. Messengers have spent decades telling stories of collapse, guilt, and sacrifice. We have, as a movement, often behaved like the scientists in Don’t Look Up - correct, urgent, and catastrophically ineffective at sparking the global movement we need. However loud we shout our warnings.

Worse, there’s a particular kind of cynicism that masquerades as intelligence in climate discourse: that optimism is naïve. To be taken seriously, one must be perpetually serious and grim.

When working on campaigns that share real, true, scientifically valid information about the solutions, I’ve been asked ‘but, won’t telling people what’s going right reduce their motivation to act’?

This is, frankly, nonsense. Not least because the ‘we all die at the end’ story hasn’t exactly propelled climate action to effective heights. Project Hail Mary doesn’t pretend the problem is easy. The author, Andy Weir, revels in its scientific complexity and overwhelming challenge. He shows the grind of progress in granular detail. In many ways, Project Hail Mary is a litany of failures.

Until…they win.

This is the narrative we need.

If we’re going to change the climate story from tragedy to triumph, we could do far worse than to take our cues from a slightly awkward scientist and a very charming alien, floating in the dark, stubbornly and brilliantly, figuring it out.

Put there by a scarily effective administrator.

The movie trailer received 400 million global views in its first week. I hope everyone sees it, or even better, reads it.

Then wrap those hopeful fuzzies around your heart as we face our own extinction event.

From ‘Grace Rocky Save Stars’ to ‘All People Save World.’

AMAZE AMAZE AMAZE.

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Do you have your copy of Godstorm yet?

What if the Roman Empire ran on fossil fuels? Petrol-powered chariots. Oil temples. Climate collapse.

And a child who could change it all.

‘Godstorm is a vivid, ferocious adventure’- Kim Stanley-Robinson, author of Ministry for the Future

Click these pre-order links for your copy:

Amazon

Waterstones

Bookshop.org

Foyles

Thank you so much, you wonderful people, for the support.

Front gardens overrun by gnomes, huddled groups of train spotters, TV news interviews with people who keep their Christmas decorations up all year. Blokes tinkering with their inventions in the shed. Grannies cooking utterly outlandish multi-tiered cakes.

When I was a girl, mild eccentricity was simply accepted in any average British village. Every community had a handful of people who were slightly… specialised. The pigeon fancier. The amateur historian who could explain the Napoleonic Wars if you accidentally made eye contact. The woman who knitted elaborate jumpers for her dogs.

Nobody asked them to moderate their enthusiasm. Quite the opposite. Their oddness was part of the local ecology. Remove the eccentrics from a village and you’d be left with nothing but polite conversations about property prices.

Which is what our online world is in danger of becoming.

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On LinkedIn, in articles, social posts and even here on substack weirdness is being tidied away. Replaced by a thousand AI-written posts about ‘increasing your reach’, ‘raising your value’ or various repeats of ‘Under 100 followers? Post your link below and let’s all follow each other!’

I miss the self-obsessed passion of weirdo’s who don’t care if anyone is watching.

They might even be key to changing the world.

The modern online world encourages a very specific personality type: tidy, agreeable, moderately interesting but not too interesting. People have hobbies, of course, but preferably the sort that appear reasonable in small talk. If your hobby is pretty, that helps.

You can like birds, and even post pretty pictures of them.
You must not become a person who talks about birds at length.

I miss the eccentrics, because the people who care too much about things are exactly the people who change things.

Spend ten minutes with anyone who is properly obsessed with something, and you will notice that they tell you stories.

The train enthusiast doesn’t just explain locomotives. They recount the tragic career of a particular engine that once ran the Glasgow route before an unfortunate signalling incident in 1956. The amateur astronomer will describe the first night they saw Saturn’s rings through a telescope as if recalling a childhood miracle. Gardeners talk about soil the way chefs talk about truffles.

Or me talking about Star Trek ;-)

Unleash your weird! Be brave enough to geek out, without curating your passions for others' consumption.

Be un-embarrassed about loving something. Because somewhere in all that glorious, unfiltered obsession is the thing we keep saying we need more of in sustainability - CARE

The kind of care that makes someone wake up at dawn to spot a bird. The kind that makes someone painstakingly rebuild a broken thing instead of throwing it away. The kind that notices, that pays attention, that falls a little bit in love with the world as it is, and how it could be.

People don’t care because they’ve been told to. They feel things because someone showed them why it mattered. Because someone, somewhere, couldn’t stop talking about a tree, or a river, or a species, or a machine, or a place. Because someone was a bit… much about it.

That’s how care spreads. Through slightly OTT enthusiasm.

We talk a lot in sustainability about behaviour change, systems change and culture change. But culture doesn’t shift because everyone becomes slightly more sensible. It shifts because enough people become passionately unreasonable about something they love.

It might just be to care about something, loudly and specifically, in public.

So let your weird out where others can see it.

Who are the wonderful weirdos who should read this?

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A dear scientist friend read an early draft of Godstorm and sent me a message: “You haven’t burned enough oil.”

I stared at that sentence for a long time. Then I laughed, made myself a cup of tea, and read the spreadsheet where he’d calculated how much petroleum a fictional Roman Empire would need to combust to cook the planet 1,700 years early.

The problem was brutally simple. Even with Marcus Aurelius inventing the combustion engine around 170 AD, even with an additional 1,700 years of oil-powered industry, I hadn’t generated enough carbon emissions to justify the catastrophic climate chaos my characters were experiencing.

Without coal-fired power stations. Without electricity and its exponential industrial possibilities. Without the sheer scale of fossil fuel extraction our modern world has achieved, my alternative history Romans simply couldn’t burn fast enough.

So I invented a petrol cult.

The Historical Thread

Godstorm isn’t ‘technically’ science fiction. It’s an alternative history, threaded through with real technological possibilities the Romans actually possessed but never quite connected.

Decades ago, sitting in am amphitheatre style lecture hall during my classics degree, I learnt ancient Romans knew crude oil could combust. We now believe that ‘Greek fire’ included petroleum which rained destruction upon the Empire’s enemies. Roman’s had been waterproofing boats and buildings with asphalt for thousands of years. Around 170 AD, Marcus Aurelius, that extraordinary philosopher-emperor, outlined one of the earliest definitions of scientific method: “Nothing has such power to broaden the mind as the ability to investigate systematically and truly all that comes under thy observation in life.”

This is a man who had access to oil and had likely seen Hero of Alexandria’s schematics for a steam-powered rotating ball. So I simply imagined Marcus Aurelius tinkering. Perhaps he even did, and his experiments are lost to time. For Godstorm, I let him take his tinkering seriously. By the time of his death at 58, an industrial revolution of Rome is underway.

But early starts often falter. In my invented world, the combustion engine accelerated Rome’s global reach, primarily via petrol-powered chariots, or ‘charos’, but paradoxically slowed other scientific progress. Why develop electricity when you’re drunk on oil power? Why invent the printing press when your empire controls information through physical force?

Over a millennium of development, and my Romans have only reached something akin to the early Victorian era. Godstorm’s Londinium has Victorian dress, manners, gunpowder weapons, Roman religious practices, and an oil-engine economy.

And still not enough burning.

The Petrol Cult Solution

Thankfully, there was a solution to not enough carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (not a sentence I tend to write in my day job trying to solve climate change!)

The Romans were hugely ostentatious in their displays of piety. Historical records show them sacrificing a thousand bulls in a single day to prove devotion to the gods.

So I gave my fictional Romans something even more extravagant: they pour oil onto altar fires. Burn it in sacred ceremonies. Waste it deliberately, lakes of petroleum set ablaze, thick black smoke rising as prayer. I’ve written before how much fun I have with that in the story!

When Climate Fiction Bends Climate Science

But a question haunted me throughout writing Godstorm: After years of climate science being attacked, dismissed, and distorted by deniers, do climate fiction writers have the right to invent imaginary scientific realities?

We’ve spent decades fighting misinformation. Defending peer-reviewed research against conspiracy theories and insisting that climate change is real, measurable, and scientifically documented.

Then along comes a novelist saying: “What if Rome invented oil engines 1,700 years early and blamed the resulting climate chaos on angry gods?”

At time that felt... reckless.

But I did it anyway. And went all in.

Climate deniers bend science to serve a lie: that we’re not in danger, that we don’t need to change, that everything’s fine. Doomers ignore the solutions to claim nothing can be done, it’s all over, ravaged hell is all that awaits.

Climate fiction bends science to serve a deeper truth: that our choices have consequences, that systems of power resist acknowledging harm, that change is both terrifying and possible.

Godstorm’s scientific liberties aren’t random. Every invented detail serves the story’s central argument: that climate change is a cultural crisis as much as an environmental one. That denial, when weaponised by power, becomes doctrine. That even in circumstances far worse than ours (no climate science, no renewable alternatives, just superstition and violence), resistance is still possible.

My Roman Empire burns oil in worship just like we burn it in denial. They blame gods for worsening weather because it’s psychologically easier than admitting their entire civilisation is built on planetary destruction. They suppress renewable technology because accepting alternatives means admitting they were wrong.

The science might be bent. But the truth is sharp.

The Plausibility Spectrum

For Godstorm, I created a plausibility list running from “very reasonable for this era” to “lightsaber-level poetic licence.”

Most plausible: Flamethrowers (yep, they are called Vulcan machines). Oil refining. Petrol vehicles if you extrapolate from steam technology. Chain suspension railways (common since the 1820s). Climate change itself (if you burn enough, for long enough, for religious reasons).

Plus a few others that I won’t mention because: spoilers.

My least plausible tech are primarily handheld weapons used by the scrappy forces fighting the Empire. Especially a ‘lightning rod’. These aren’t practically possible or technologically viable. But are much more fun than everyone just using daggers.

The Right to Imagine

Climate deniers invent fake science to paralyse action. Climate fiction invents plausible science to inspire it.

That’s the difference.

Godstorm shows a world where climate chaos arrived before climate science. Where people experience catastrophic weather but blame it on insufficient piety rather than atmospheric chemistry. Where renewable alternatives exist but are suppressed by an empire that can’t admit its foundational technology is killing the planet.

So yes, climate fiction has the right to bend science. Not to mislead, but to illuminate. Not to deny reality, but to make it emotionally comprehensible.

We’ve tried facts. We’ve tried graphs, reports, urgent warnings from the world’s leading scientists. Now we need stories that make people feel, in their bones, what those facts mean. Stories where characters we love navigate impossible choices in worlds that echo our own.

And my climate scientist friend, after reading the final draft with its petrol cult intact, sent a different email:

“It works.”

Do you have your copy of Godstorm yet?

‘Godstorm is a vivid, ferocious adventure, as the heroine struggles against a world even more violent than our own - or so it seems until you consider matters of scale, and realize this novel is an allegory for our fight too’ - Kim Stanley-Robinson, author of Ministry for the Future

Click these pre-order links for your copy:

Amazon

Waterstones

Bookshop.org

Foyles

Thank you so much, you wonderful people, for the support.

As 2026 opened, a familiar ritual rolled out through culture. Dictionaries, commentators, and professional mood-readers declared their Words of the Year. Single terms offered up as neat explanations for why the world feels... like this.

For 2025, the official lists followed a familiar pattern: trying to capture our collective unease with forensic precision, but with very little ambition. The words are all sharp, clever, and faintly despairing.

Oxford University Press chose rage bait - content engineered to provoke outrage. Merriam-Webster went with "slop"- the AI-generated drivel that oozes across our screens. Cambridge Dictionary picked parasocial - our one-sided relationships with celebrities and chatbots who’ll never know our names. My personal favourite (as someone with two pre-teen nieces) was Dictionary.com’s choice of 67 as their word - a Gen Alpha meme that means absolutely nothing (which is perhaps the point). Although I’m not sure it works without the wiggle.

These words are all very clever and flick right on the collective cultural nose.

But none of them offer even a crumb of inspiration in these terrifying times.

They are simply all interesting linguistic ways to say everything sucks.

Overall, English is developing a vast new lexicon of anxiety. From Enshittification to Wokelash and everything in between.

But what I desperately need for 2026 is a language for agency. New ways to talk about action, about hope, and about standing up when the world wants you down.

Subscribe now

Language (and life) evolves, and so much of the vocabulary of sustainability, activism, and even justice feels a little worn and frayed. I struggled to find words to capture the feeling I have about what’s needed now, in 2026. Rather than what worked 5 years ago.

Then I remembered my mum. Unlike me, she has patience. And that patience is most obvious when she sews and embroiders. Taking tiny, weak, insubstantial strands and over time (weeks, months) using skill and attention to combine them into something beautiful. Something that lasts.

Her craft suggested a word to me:

HOPEWEAVING

Hopeweaving is a skilled and deliberate act to make the world better. However thin the thread.

It’s the practice of stitching together credible solutions, everyday actions, emotional permission and human story into something strong enough to live inside. To wrap yourself in when the world feels cold.

Hopeweaving acknowledges the frayed and broken threads. The ones that seem too delicate to bear any weight at all. Actions so small that alone they’d snap. But you refuse to leave undone.

The future doesn’t arrive fully formed via policy or technology alone. It’s assembled slowly, collectively, through millions of acts that feel small only because we’ve failed to connect them. A researcher sharing data becomes a thread. An artist making climate solutions beautiful becomes another. A politician refusing to be bought. An engineer making solar cheaper. A storyteller giving us new myths to believe in.

A tired or scared person sharing someone else’s bold social media post about current horrors because they are too anxious to share their own. That donation. Picking up litter. Smiling at the person who looks worried if they’ll be accepted.

Every strand is load-bearing.

Because while they may be fragments. Woven together, they’re a movement.

Crucially, hopeweaving rejects the lazy binary between realism and hope. Realism says the science is brutal, the timelines unforgiving, and the politics unbearable.

Subscribe now

Hopeweaving replies: yes. And people still fall in love, build institutions, shift norms, raise children and surprise history.

Why We Need It Now

The year has barely started, and already feels incredibly heavy. Perhaps by the time you read this, there will be a different outrage or horror than the ones on the day I wrote it.

The ‘official’ words of 2025 reflected our fatigue with all this. Rage bait, slop, parasocial, enshittification. These are the vocabulary of a culture that knows something’s deeply wrong but can’t quite picture what right looks like.

That’s the space hopeweaving fills.

A stubborn, careful, deliberate work of making a better future feel possible so that people can do the hard work of making it actual.

Because here’s what I’ve learned in thirty years of sustainability action: people don’t act on information. They act on identity, emotion and story.

You can show someone a thousand graphs proving the climate is collapsing. They can watch acts of terror unfold on their screens. But if we can’t picture ourselves in a liveable future, then the graphs are just noise.

Hopeweaving gives us the thread to stitch that future into being.

Start Your Weaving

So, hopeweaving is my word for 2026. I hope you use it, stitched into your own language of action.

Weave science with story, and justice with joy. Weave imagination into every action.

Weave until the fabric is strong enough to hold us all.

One thread at a time.

Who needs to read this? Your voice matters, so weave a thread by sharing this post.

Share

As 2026 opened, a familiar ritual rolled out through culture. Dictionaries, commentators, and professional mood-readers declared their Words of the Year. Single terms offered up as neat explanations for why the world feels... like this.

For 2025, the official lists followed a familiar pattern: trying to capture our collective unease with forensic precision, but with very little ambition. The words are all sharp, clever, and faintly despairing.

Oxford University Press chose rage bait - content engineered to provoke outrage. Merriam-Webster went with "slop"- the AI-generated drivel that oozes across our screens. Cambridge Dictionary picked parasocial - our one-sided relationships with celebrities and chatbots who’ll never know our names. My personal favourite (as someone with two pre-teen nieces) was Dictionary.com’s choice of 67 as their word - a Gen Alpha meme that means absolutely nothing (which is perhaps the point). Although I’m not sure it works without the wiggle.

These words are all very clever and flick right on the collective cultural nose.

But none of them offer even a crumb of inspiration in these terrifying times.

They are simply all interesting linguistic ways to say everything sucks.

Overall, English is developing a vast new lexicon of anxiety. From Enshittification to Wokelash and everything in between.

But what I desperately need for 2026 is a language for agency. New ways to talk about action, about hope, and about standing up when the world wants you down.

Subscribe now

Language (and life) evolves, and so much of the vocabulary of sustainability, activism, and even justice feels a little worn and frayed. I struggled to find words to capture the feeling I have about what’s needed now, in 2026. Rather than what worked 5 years ago.

Then I remembered my mum. Unlike me, she has patience. And that patience is most obvious when she sews and embroiders. Taking tiny, weak, insubstantial strands and over time (weeks, months) using skill and attention to combine them into something beautiful. Something that lasts.

Her craft suggested a word to me:

HOPEWEAVING

Hopeweaving is a skilled and deliberate act to make the world better. However thin the thread.

It’s the practice of stitching together credible solutions, everyday actions, emotional permission and human story into something strong enough to live inside. To wrap yourself in when the world feels cold.

Hopeweaving acknowledges the frayed and broken threads. The ones that seem too delicate to bear any weight at all. Actions so small that alone they’d snap. But you refuse to leave undone.

The future doesn’t arrive fully formed via policy or technology alone. It’s assembled slowly, collectively, through millions of acts that feel small only because we’ve failed to connect them. A researcher sharing data becomes a thread. An artist making climate solutions beautiful becomes another. A politician refusing to be bought. An engineer making solar cheaper. A storyteller giving us new myths to believe in.

A tired or scared person sharing someone else’s bold social media post about current horrors because they are too anxious to share their own. That donation. Picking up litter. Smiling at the person who looks worried if they’ll be accepted.

Every strand is load-bearing.

Because while they may be fragments. Woven together, they’re a movement.

Crucially, hopeweaving rejects the lazy binary between realism and hope. Realism says the science is brutal, the timelines unforgiving, and the politics unbearable.

Subscribe now

Hopeweaving replies: yes. And people still fall in love, build institutions, shift norms, raise children and surprise history.

Why We Need It Now

The year has barely started, and already feels incredibly heavy. Perhaps by the time you read this, there will be a different outrage or horror than the ones on the day I wrote it.

The ‘official’ words of 2025 reflected our fatigue with all this. Rage bait, slop, parasocial, enshittification. These are the vocabulary of a culture that knows something’s deeply wrong but can’t quite picture what right looks like.

That’s the space hopeweaving fills.

A stubborn, careful, deliberate work of making a better future feel possible so that people can do the hard work of making it actual.

Because here’s what I’ve learned in thirty years of sustainability action: people don’t act on information. They act on identity, emotion and story.

You can show someone a thousand graphs proving the climate is collapsing. They can watch acts of terror unfold on their screens. But if we can’t picture ourselves in a liveable future, then the graphs are just noise.

Hopeweaving gives us the thread to stitch that future into being.

Start Your Weaving

So, hopeweaving is my word for 2026. I hope you use it, stitched into your own language of action.

Weave science with story, and justice with joy. Weave imagination into every action.

Weave until the fabric is strong enough to hold us all.

One thread at a time.

Who needs to read this? Your voice matters, so weave a thread by sharing this post.

Share

I’m old-ish. Not very old, as in happily retired, or really old, bundled up in a care home.

But not young. My knees hurt, I have LOTS of memories, and those memories act as a buffer against the horrors of the world.

Not because today’s horrors aren’t upsetting and overwhelming. But because they aren’t the first horrors I’ve seen. They don’t have the fresh bite unfamiliarity, like when I first saw them.

I’m not sure I’m very wise, although that was the promise of getting older. ‘Old and wise’ seemed like a reasonable deal. To trade the painful innocence of youth for a touch of sagacity as the years pass. Fresh skin is always thin. The folds around my eyes aren’t just from laughing, and now it takes a lot to get tears falling from them.

But I sometimes wonder if the change movement wants what we have anymore. Not a ‘bright young thing’ anymore, but not yet a sage and frail elder.

I’m Gen X, that oft-overlooked group huddled between the Boomers and Millennials, ducking as those two throw missiles at each other.

What do you call a sturdy woman with half a decade’s experience, muscle memory for what works, a world-spanning network, and ever-decreasing patience?

As we Gen X female activists plough into menopause, what are we?

Middle-aged, mature, vintage, wise women…

I rather fancy becoming a crone. Not least because of one fictional witch who climbed under my skin when it was still bright and unlined.

Granny Weatherwax is the greatest witch in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels, though she’d never admit it. She lives alone in a cottage in the mountains, wears practical black, and has a stare that could stop a charging bull. She’s described as handsome rather than beautiful, with steel-grey hair and a face carved by decades of hard decisions.

To me, even back when I crimped my hair and wore a leather jacket, she was deeply desirable in that way that comes from absolute self-possession and zero tolerance for nonsense.

When younger witches try to impress with flashy spells and dramatic gestures, Granny Weatherwax simply says: “It’s still magic even if you know how it’s done.”

The power which most impressed me? “Headology.” Understanding people so well that you can change their minds without ever lifting a wand. As she puts it: “You can’t go around building a better world for people. Only people can build a better world for people. Otherwise it’s just a cage.”

She doesn’t wield a sword, ride a white charger or command armies. She isn’t a ninja, a dragon slayer or even much of a community leader. Most people irritate her.

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But she saves them anyway. With an eye roll and deep sigh, she’ll convince the dragon to slay itself if it’s besieging the village. Even if the villagers are unbearably annoying.

Granny Weatherwax isn’t filled with righteous passion, that’s for young girls with long hair wafting behind them as they hold their innocence as shield against the horrors.

Instead, she’s tired, harried, with bad knees and a desperate need for a cup of tea.

But she changes the world.

Because that’s what crones do.

As I head into menopause (aka cronedom), I can’t help wondering why this is happening. Is it supposed to help?

From a purely biological perspective, menopause has puzzled evolutionary theorists since science began. Why would a species “stop” female fertility while keeping women alive for decades afterward?

In most species, females can still breed into advanced old age.

The most interesting (and accepted) explanation is the Grandmother Hypothesis, proposed and refined by evolutionary anthropologists like Kristen Hawkes. This theory argues that post-menopausal women increase the survival of the group by reallocating energy away from childbirth and toward knowledge transmission, resource management, and social cohesion. In short, menopause is a societal necessity because older women know stuff, which is more valuable than making more babies.

This pattern is not entirely unique to humans. Female orcas also experience menopause, and post-reproductive females guide their pods through periods of scarcity, using memory and experience to locate food and reduce risk. When elder females die, overall group survival drops sharply. Knowledge, it turns out, is as valuable as reproduction.

Human societies once understood this intuitively.

Across Indigenous cultures, older women traditionally held authority precisely because they are no longer bound by fertility or male approval. In many First Nations communities, menopausal women became elders with decision-making power over land, conflict resolution, and ritual life. In parts of West Africa, post-menopausal women historically held exclusive rights to adjudicate disputes or speak in councils where younger women could not.

In East Asian philosophy, ageing women were often associated with yin wisdom: depth, stillness, and perceptive power. Even in medieval Europe, before the witch hunts catastrophically inverted the narrative, older women were healers, midwives, and keepers of ecological and medical knowledge. The persecution of “witches” was not only misogynistic; it was a systematic removal of female authority at a moment when centralised power felt threatened.

The crone has always been dangerous to unstable systems.

Sound familiar?

The climate and justice movements have an abundance of passionate youth, brilliant scientists, and well-meaning corporate executives. What it lacks is crones.

Crones. The archetype of the woman who has lived long enough to know what matters, who has zero patience for performance, and who wields her power with precision rather than spectacle.

The crone speaks uncomfortable truths because she’s done caring whether you like her. She sees through greenwashing, political doublespeak, and performative activism with a single raised eyebrow. She doesn’t wait for permission or apologise for taking up space.

But nor will she accept injustice, exploitation or wanton destruction.

For too long, we Gen X women have been told to stay young, soften our edges, and perform our competence ‘with grace’. We’ve watched younger generations celebrated (and patronised) while our decades of experience are dismissed. We’ve been marketed anti-aging creams and dodgy menopause supplements while our wisdom has battled to break through.

We sit at a rare historical intersection. Gen X are the bridge generation between analogue and digital, between institutional trust and institutional collapse, between optimism-as-default and realism-as-survival skill.

Meanwhile, the planet burns and the people in charge keep making the same mistakes we’ve been warning about for thirty years.

And we’re tired and annoyed enough to try and change everything.

Granny Weatherwax rarely uses flashy magic. She could, but she won’t. “It ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it,” she says.

We need headology. The deep understanding of human psychology that lets you shift how people see themselves and their choices. The patience to work with people where they are, not where you wish they were. The moral clarity to know what’s right without needing to prove you’re righteous.

Granny Weatherwax never tells people what to do. She arranges circumstances so they choose rightly themselves. Because she understands that lasting change comes from within, not from being lectured or shamed or dazzled.

She also knows when a little pain needs to be mixed into the patience.

If you’re a Gen X woman reading this, you already have crone powers. You’ve been developing them for decades, probably without realising it.

You know how to read a room in seconds. Spot bullshit from across a conference hall. We’ve all watched enough trends and fads and false promises to recognise what actually works. And we’ve all been dismissed enough times that we’ve stopped needing external validation.

You’re also gorgeous. Not despite your age, but because of everything you’ve lived through and learned. Like Granny Weatherwax, your power makes you magnetic.

Will you use it?

Here’s the thing about crone powers: they’re not actually about gender or age. They’re about wisdom, autonomy, and the courage to speak truth. So yes, men can embrace their inner Granny Weatherwax too. Anyone can choose to stop performing and start getting things done.

Gen X women just have a head start. We’ve been practising these skills in hostile territory for our entire careers.

The climate crisis needs Granny Weatherwaxes. Plural. An entire coven of us, scattered across industries and communities, using our powers of headology to shift minds, change systems, and build a better world with people, not for them.

So trust your decades of experience. Use your power with precision.

And when someone tries to dismiss you, just give them the Weatherwax stare and get back to work.

Because we aten’t dead. And there’s a world to save.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

For a touch more magic, read my new novel, Godstorm.

My new novel, Godstorm is (supposedly) a fantasy. A world where the Roman Empire never fell, its gods evolved with its machines, and the divine spirit of petroleum, Gaea, is worshipped as the mother of civilisation.

Oil is called ‘Gaeas Blood’, a thick black blessing from the body of a goddess, gifted to the Roman Empire as divine anointment of its right to rule.

I didn’t write this by accident. Because if climate storytelling is going to be truly effective, it must reflect the entirety of the human experience - including the divine.

My Godstorm world boasts petrol altars, holy refineries, and sacred chariots burning her blood in reverence:

“They passed a statue of Gaea herself: a generous and motherly naked body with sad countenance, her hands reaching down from the pedestal as if to lift a supplicant. The statue had oil rivulets running from her eyes, her breasts, and from between her legs. It was supposed to represent her great gift and sacrifice for the Roman people.

Arrow thought it looked painful.

They stopped under the large silver model of an oil rig that dominated the centre of the room, glinting in the lamplight. Arrow’s nose stung with the evaporated chemicals rising from the huge bowl of crude oil the rig stood within.

Grand as the Temple rig was, it was merely a symbol for the colossal metal pyramids that dominated across leagues of the fire plains in the East. It was said you could walk for a month across the plains and see nothing but rigs, slaves and the giant charnot convoys transporting millions of barrels of oil to ports for trade. During the Festiva of Gaea, the rig bosses would burn up entire lakes of oil, releasing thick black clouds a hundred leagues high, proving their piety and guaranteeing the gods would keep the liquid gold pumping for another season.”

My story wouldn’t be nearly as compelling if it weren’t just a single breath away from reality. Our world already worships oil (in all incarnations as petrol, gas, benzine, propane, etc.). We already defend the sacred oil sites with armies, build temples in offshore rigs and petrochemical towers, and measure our worth by how much of the celestial essence we can burn. We dress in this god's plastics, eat from its packaging, and whisper prayers to the mystic markets whenever the price per barrel rises.

If this is not worship, it is at least devotion.

The Divine Made Crude

In Godstorm, the people pray to Gaea for strength and prosperity. Her symbol is the oil rig; her scent is the petrol bloom that rises from sacred engines. They bless their children by dipping their little hands in wide bowls of crude, and praying as the drips of brown-black slip off their fingers.

Their faith is sincere because oil has been miraculous. In just a few generations, it gave the Roman Empire godlike powers: to fly in airships, to travel at speed, to light the night, to move mountains. Oil raised cities and granted dominion over time and distance. It is the nectar that fuelled their myth of progress. Every age has its gods, and theirs came from a well.

Or perhaps I should say ours.

Anthropologists call this resource mythologising: the way humans elevate what feeds or frees us into something sacred. The Egyptians had the Nile, the Norse had Yggdrasil, and the Mayans had maize. Each was more than sustenance; it was meaning. Had the Romans truly invented the internal combustion engine, I have no doubt they would have mythologised it.

Just as we have. In the twentieth century, we replaced the harvest festival with the oil boom. The pumpjack bowed and rose like a mechanical priest, worshipping itself. We have killed more in the name of our oil gods as any frenzied cult has managed.

Yet our god is jealous. Like all powerful deities, it demands sacrifice: forests, coral reefs, stable climates, even the lives of those who live closest to her wells. The oil god’s gifts are rich, but the price is ruin.

Faith, Fact & Fossils

Humans rarely abandon their gods for logical reasons. We stop believing only when a more powerful myth comes along. You can’t replace mythos with measured empiricism. Only a better story can replace a story.

Today, I feel the early stirrings of that new myth struggling to emerge from beneath the oil slick.

We still chant the oil gods' mantras of growth, comfort, and convenience, but they sound increasingly hollow. Floods, fires and storms have become the wrathful angels of a collapsing pantheon. Yet the priests of this old religion still hold power: investors, lobbyists and fanatic politicians who make pilgrimage to Houston instead of Delphi.

We invade nations in the name of The Oil.

The modern world treats oil not as a resource but as a right. Our financial systems are built on it, our politics revolve around it, and our wars are fought for it. We subsidise it at the rate of seven trillion dollars a year according to the International Monetary Fund, as if paying indulgences to a dying god. We trade futures in it, insure it, and pray to it for stable markets. Even the term fossil fuel carries the faint odor of holiness, a relic of ancient life compressed into divine energy.

We speak of energy independence as if it were spiritual liberation, yet we remain bound to the same altar. The extraction continues, the worship deepens, and the smoke of our devotion fills the sky.

And like all fading religions, this one lashes out at heretics. Speak of renewable energy or degrowth, and you are accused of blasphemy against jobs or prosperity. But revolutions often begin with an act of apostasy.

A New Creation Myth

What we need now is not only new energy sources but a story so compelling it converts. As the report Stories to Save the World points out, humans are homo narrans, the storytelling ape, and our myths guide our morals more than our facts do. Even the IPCC has called for new narratives to help people ‘imagine and make sense of the future.’ The climate crisis is the story of our age, and oil is its old god.

It is time for a reformation.

The renewable revolution must not remain stuck as merely an engineering project; it must become a spiritual one. Solar, wind and tidal power represent a return to living gods, the ones we can feel on our skin and see on the horizon. They do not demand sacrifice; they invite partnership. In mythic terms, we are moving from a religion of extraction to a religion of relationship.

Imagine if we told that story. Imagine if our children grew up blessing the wind, not fearing its stillness. Imagine if engineers were priests of light, if architects built cathedrals of efficiency, if every solar panel were a prayer. That is what storytellers are for: to write new scriptures before the old ones destroy us.

From Oil To Awe

This week, Godstorm has finally become real in the world – and people I’ve never met are buying and reading it.

I hope they realise that Gaea’s Blood represents the human impulse to take what is miraculous and make it monstrous through greed. Every civilisation has done it, worshipping its own creations until they devoured their creators.

But we are also capable of re-enchantment. As I wrote in It’s All Going To Be Ok, joy is a connecting force. We can replace the fear of loss with the awe of possibility. Climate action, taken in that spirit, becomes a love story between humanity and the planet, between science and spirit, between us and the future.

The end of oil will not feel like an apocalypse once we understand it as the closing chapter of an old mythology. Every great story must end before the next begins.

If we can make the next one divine.

Please Look At Godstorm!

‘Godstorm is a vivid, ferocious adventure, as the heroine struggles against a world even more violent than our own - or so it seems until you consider matters of scale, and realize this novel is an allegory for our fight too’ - Kim Stanley-Robinson, author of Ministry for the Future

Click these pre-order links to read more:

Amazon

Waterstones

Bookshop.org

Foyles

For all my friends in markets where Godstorm isn’t yet published (such as the USA), hopefully it will be next year, and I’ll keep running the bookplates then.

Thank you so much, wonderful people, for the support.

If there’s one thing becoming a novelist has taught me: stories are all about people. And if there’s one thing I’ve learnt from my decades of sustainability: people need each other.

The story of 2026 has started, and it’s started hard. Many friends are already looking hollow-eyed and burned out, and we’re not even a fortnight into the year.

Reality is sharp-edged. Which is when I turn to storytelling to remind me how to navigate the cuts.

We think we know stories of the lone saviour, the singular visionary, the one superhuman who saves the world single-handed. But when we revisit those stories, even the superhero ones, we always discover the hero was never alone. There were always allies, friends, sidekicks, deep friendships and even ‘passerby on the street’ helpers.

We all need help, even if we can leap tall building or shoot lasers from our eyes.

In the Japanese legend of Momotarō the hero could cut down a tree with a rusty knife, at just five years old. But he still needed his dog, monkey and pheasant friends to defeat the troll army. Frodo needs Sam, and Batman needs Alfred.

The most powerful stories show us that transformation comes not from solitary strength but from a shared purpose in community. Whether it’s a child gathering animal allies to reclaim his homeland or a revolutionary learning to trust her comrades, stories across cultures remind us: the journey only works when we walk it together.

In 2026 we need this story more than any other.

In Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali, the hero cannot defeat the sorcerer-king Soumaoro alone. He must learn to listen to his sister’s advice and rely on his community.

Scratch the surface of tales about individual triumph, and you’ll find a moral about collective resilience.

Why does that matter for sustainability in 2026? Because stories shape our subconscious understanding of what change looks like. And when we absorb the belief that it’s the “one visionary” who will fix things, we subtly teach people to wait for heroes rather than become part of the movement.

There’s solid science behind why we love stories of togetherness. Studies in neuropsychology have shown that stories involving groups or cooperation increase emotional resonance and oxytocin levels (the bonding hormone). Mirror neuron research has revealed that movie audiences simulate the reciprocal relationships we see on screen, making us more socially responsive.

In short, stories about trust and teamwork make us more trusting and team-oriented.

This is our story for what will be a difficult year.

Yet we still tend to spotlight lone heroes, lone activists, lone consumers doing their best in a broken system. That story might be noble and admirable. But boy, it’s lonely.

If we want a new destiny, we need new story arcs. Stories that move from:

Lone hero ➝ Interdependent allies

Brilliant individual ➝ Beautiful coalition

Personal change ➝ Mutual transformation

When you tell a story of a neighbourhood installing solar together, or women in Senegal replanting mangroves side by side, or young people in India building citizen science networks to track pollution, you flick that story switch to model a world where we win by linking arms.

Because what stories teach us is that the emotional climax comes not when the protagonist triumphs alone, but when they finally accept help.

The moment when the heroine realises she doesn’t have to carry the burden by herself. When the leader stops trying to save the village for the people, and starts working with them.

That’s the real turning point.

So if you’re a storyteller, a campaigner, or a leader doggedly trying to drive sustainability action in 2026, look around you. Where are your allies, friends, mentors or anyone who feels the same way? Prioritise connecting with them right now, as the year starts.

We need collective resolutions this year!

If we keep telling tales of isolated effort, we’ll keep getting isolated results.But if we tell stories of teams, tribes, coalitions, crews, and communities, then we might just rewrite the ending.

Together.

My Ask For Help :-)

I’m taking my own medicine and asking for your help! Later this week (Thursday 15th Jan), my debut novel Godstorm will launch in the UK, Ireland, Canada and Australia (not yet the USA). You are invited to the launch event - sign up here.

More pre-orders of Godstorm over the next few days will make the biggest difference to whether it launches with a bang or whimper! Bookshops, media and publishers take pre-order numbers as the most important indicator of a book’s likely success. And right now, climate fiction isn’t expected to fly! I’d love to prove that a great adventure story with climate themes (and swords) can buck that trend. THANK YOU!

Your copy of Godstorm can be pre-ordered from:

Waterstones

Amazon

Bookshop.org

This is it, my novel is almost out of the bag! And I need YOU to help celebrate.

I’ve been fingers-to-keyboard writing the sequel to Godstorm (title is still under wraps). But now that manuscript is off to the publishers, my hungry little brain is back thinking about Godstorm and what it’s taught me about climate storytelling.

Sign up to join the launch!

On January 15th at 5pm UK time, I’ll open the floodgates to your questions! If you’re interested in climate storytelling, you won’t want to miss it.

I’ve decided on an online/virtual launch because I want ALL of you to be able to join. This is a book launch that will become a summit on climate storytelling.

Sign up here to register interest in joining (it’s a Microsoft Teams webinar link - with privacy settings).

When you sign up, you’ll be asked if you’ve preordered Godstorm. WHY? Well, firstly, because we want to prove there’s a market for climate fiction. The publishing industry is wobbling on climate content right now - so let’s show them that people still want to read great storytelling with climate themes!

Secondly, because I’ll send you a beautiful and FREE bookplate, dedicated to you (or a friend) and hand-signed by me.

These are available to everyone who pre-orders from today (if you’re based in the UK).

You can pre-order in hardback, audiobook or ebook and I will send the bookplate!

I recommend these direct links to Waterstones or Bookshop.org - although I’m happy with pre-orders on the ‘zon or anywhere!

IMPORTANT: Use this Google Form to tell me your dedication name and address. If you use the form, then I’ll post your signed bookplate before your books arrive. There might even be a little extra gift in your envelope.

I’m so immensely grateful for every pre-order. The number of pre-orders literally decides if a book will be successful for years to come.

So, if you order five or more copies of Godstorm as gifts for friends, family or colleagues, then of course you’ll get separate bookplates for each one. But also, you’ll be invited to the very exclusive in-person book launch drinks in London on 16th January. Remember to add your email to the Google form, so I know where to send your invite!

Will You Enjoy The Story?

Everyone has different literary tastes. Sometimes my reading palette changes depending on the day or what tea I’m drinking!

The wonderful Kim Stanley-Robinson, author of Ministry for the Future, sent me this review after reading Godstorm:

‘This startling alternative history takes us to a newly-imagined world in which fossil fuels extended the Romans’ conquest of the world through space and time; because energy is power. The result is a vivid, ferocious adventure, as the heroine struggles against a world even more violent than our own - or so it seems until you consider matters of scale, and realize this novel is an allegory for our fight too”

Once you’ve read it, I’d love to know what YOU think :-)

Reminder of the pre-order links:

Waterstones

Bookshop.org

Foyles

Amazon

For all my friends in markets where Godstorm isn’t yet published (such as the USA), hopefully it will be next year and I’ll keep running the bookplates then.

Thank you so much, wonderful people, for the support. And don’t worry, my usual content about sustainability will resume shortly.