Science writer Leo Joubert has a pretty gnarly beat. She writes about pollution: carbon pollution of the atmosphere driving climate collapse; how highly-processed food-like products pollute the nutritional landscape, causing the oil spills of hunger, wasting, diabetes and obesity in our bodies; and how plastic pollution is turning up inside our arteries, placental tissue, and breast milk, and landing on the highest mountain peaks and the deepest ocean trenches.

In short, she writes about the muck coming out the tailpipe of the fossil fuel-driven neo-liberal industrial machine.

Through this unusual journalistic beat, Leo explores the power dynamics of the system that allows this to happen: who profits from being able to pollute, and who pays the price. Who are the powerful that allow the status quo to continue, and what does that mean for those who don’t have their hand on the tiller of our politics and economics? She critiques the limitless-growth economic model through the lens of climate, food security, and plastic pollution, and how this is driving society-wide and planetary-scale systems collapse.

Leo has spent two decades grappling with these tough environmental and social justice issues, exploring these topics through books, journalism, collaborations with academics and civil society organisations, non-fiction creative writing, podcasting, and public speaking. The pinnacle has been working with National Geographic magazine on a series of assignments recently.

She’s also collected a few gongs along the way.

None of this track record matters, though. Without a stable climate and a liveable planet, these are mere trinkets, because there will be no one left to read these stories or celebrate any awards. The stories we tell in the next few years, and how they shift the public discourse as we try to slow climate collapse, will determine how life unfolds for all species on this planet in the next few thousand years and beyond. That’s all that matters now.

Previously, she’s written under her full name. For reasons that will reveal themselves later, she’s going by a more gender-ambiguous name this time, in the hope that a few more eyes will fall upon these words.