Skip to main content

Liz Kalaugher - Five Way Interview

Liz Kalaugher is a science journalist and campaigner, based in Bristol, who has written for the New Scientist, BBC Wildlife, the Guardian, BBC News and more, as well as winning science journalism fellowships from the World Federation of Science Journalists and the European Geosciences Union. She is also the co-author of Furry Logic: The Physics of Animal Life. Her new book is The Elephant in the Room.

Why science?

I think science is fascinating as it helps us interact with the world. Once you start to understand how things work, it opens up all sorts of possibilities. You’re no longer stumbling around in the dark, hoping you’ll find the light switch by chance; instead you’re building a map of where the light switch might be, and testing that map systematically. Hopefully that means you’ll find the light switch more easily, and learn techniques that can help you find other switches. Though lots of scientific discoveries have been made by chance. And it’s crucially important that we don’t think we know more than we do - that can lead to all sorts of trouble.

Why this book?

Originally I was planning to write a book about Grevy’s zebras: I was travelling in Kenya in search of these animals just after the first cases of Covid-19 broke out in China. Like everybody’s, my mind turned to the emergence of new diseases. Concerned there might be a backlash against bats, I started investigating the other side of the coin - just how much we’ve been harming wildlife health over the centuries. I was surprised by how long and in how many ways human activities have spread diseases to wildlife. And by how much we can do about wildlife health that we haven’t yet chosen to act on.

Apart from reducing deforestation, what is the single thing we could do with the biggest impact to reduce the risk of zoonotic transmission?

According to a study from 2024, reducing biodiversity loss is one of the most crucial factors in cutting the risk of outbreaks of disease. As Neil Vora of Conservation International told me for The Elephant in the Room, 'Nature is not the solution to everything, but nature is critical, a necessary condition for a better future. We need to start investing in nature now and that will save costs down the road.' Investing in nature would also reduce climate change, another factor that boosts disease, and it would save species from extinction.

What’s next?

Next up will be another book broadly in the wildlife and environment space, again with a historical angle. I’m researching it at the moment and wrangling with almost too many fascinating stories. I’m also enjoying experimenting with fiction in the form of an eco-thriller. Watch this space.

What’s exciting you at the moment?

I’m enjoying seeing more butterflies in the UK this summer, a welcome treat after their terrible season in 2024. I’m focusing on their striking colours as they flit between flowers, and the poetry of their names – comma, skipper, silver-washed fritillary - whilst trying not to think about why it’s been so hot. I’ve also become a Merlin fan and use this app’s help to listen out for new bird species wherever I go.

These articles will always be free - but if you'd like to support my online work, consider buying a virtual coffee or taking out a membership:


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Mathematics with Love – Mary Stopes-Roe *****

Admittedly it’s early days (this review is written in January), but this, for me, is the surprise hit of the year so far! I approached this book with trepidation, but found it absolutely delightful. It is described on the cover as the “courtship correspondence of Barnes Wallis, inventor of the bouncing bomb”, and contains a series of letters between Wallis and his cousin and eventual wife Molly Bloxham, along with some useful annotation by their daughter, Mary. The courtship itself is not without difficulties, as Wallis was 18 years older than the 17-year-old Molly at the start of the correspondence, and her father, not surprisingly, wasn’t too pleased about the interest of such an elderly suitor, but that isn’t the only reason the letters are interesting – it’s also because of maths, and Wallis’s position in the UK as the engineering hero of the Second World War. (Incidentally, it seemed very strange to see letters addressed to “Barnes” – I had always assumed Barnes Wallis was a ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...
Post a Comment
Read more

On Time - Jim Al-Khalili *****

By a small margin Jim Al-Khalili's The World According to Physics is my favourite of his books, both because the 'three pillars' concept at its heart works so well - but also because it's short. On Time is somewhat heavier, but thankfully not a wrist-buster. It might seem at first sight odd that a book on a subset of physics is considerably longer than one covering the whole thing, but time is one of those subjects that inevitably involves considerable complexities and needs depth. As Al-Khalili establishes, it's hard to think of any other scientific concept where our perception of it - what he refers to as manifest time or psychological time - is so different from the view from physics. Some physicists go so far as to suggest that time doesn't exist at all. In the book, Al-Khalili sets out (to my mind quite successfully) both to explain why they think this is the case, but also why it's not the best interpretation of time. I'd certainly note that I...
Post a Comment
Read more