Nothing exists in isolation

Words by Jamie Crocker

Science writer Sophie Pavelle reveals nature’s tangled symbioses.

It begins, weirdly enough, with a worm no longer than a grain of rice. Few people would pick such a creature as the starting point for a conversation about climate change, biodiversity or the future of the natural world. Yet this tiny marine animal, capable of stealing the machinery of photosynthesis from the algae it consumes, embodies exactly the kind of story that fascinates Sophie Pavelle. She is building a position by persuading people to look beyond the obvious, discovering that the greatest surprises often lie beneath a rockpool, inside a fungus or hidden within relationships between species that have unfolded over millions of years.

She has become one of Britain’s most distinctive science communicators, one of a growing cohort of young people who understand that facts alone are not enough to change minds and knock people out of their complacency. Scientific evidence remains the foundation of everything she writes, yet it is the stories and the way they are told and wrap around those facts that will lead to lasting impact. Her books and articles invite readers into a living world that is intricate, unpredictable, sometimes cruel, replacing familiar wildlife stereotypes with encounters that feel fresh and real.

Born in the United States before moving with her family to Devon as a child, she grew up beside the Exe Estuary. The change from suburban America to a landscape shaped by tides proved formative. Crabs, mudflats and salt marshes became her playground along with her brother’s, although she laughs at how little she understood about the extraordinary micro-dramas unfolding around her. Years later, researching one of her books, she discovered the astonishing life cycle of a parasitic barnacle that invades a crab’s body, altering its behaviour for its own survival. Revelations such as these did not diminish childhood memories; they enriched them, marking a necessary evolution in the way she perceived the natural world.

The idea that nature collaborates at all, Sophie points out, fell out of fashion for reasons that had little to do with evidence. Mutualism and parasitism sat awkwardly alongside the mid-century language of competition and survival of the fittest to adapt, while a scientific culture invested in neat, binary explanations found cooperative relationships – especially those that were unequal or brutal – harder to accommodate. That thinking is beginning to shift, and it shaped her approach to To Have or to Hold. Rather than following the chapter-by-chapter structure she had used for individual species in Forget Me Not, she spent her research period reading novelists and poets, searching for the language used to describe complex human relationships on the basis that nature’s own entanglements deserved the same nuance. The result is a book with greater emotional and intellectual weight than its predecessor, while retaining the warmth and accessibility that made her debut so engaging.

She is just as wary of nostalgia when the conversation turns to rewilding. Her years at Beaver Trust left her sceptical of any project framed as restoring Britain to a prior state, since beavers have been absent from the landscape for roughly four hundred years, long enough that the country they return to bears little resemblance to the one they left. Population, agriculture and infrastructure have all changed beyond recognition in the interval, so Sophie treats the present landscape as a constraint to work within, choosing interventions with caution and judging each on its own merits. Small, well-targeted local projects matter more to her than grand national gestures.

Sophie’s path to this point has run mostly through conservation, with literature arriving second. She studied zoology, completed a master’s in science communication, and spent years working for Beaver Trust, helping lead communications around one of British rewilding’s genuine successes and presenting the documentary Beavers Without Borders. She has sat on the RSPB’s England Advisory Committee and served as an ambassador for the Wildlife Trusts, for whom she still works part time. Her journalism has appeared in The Guardian, National Geographic Traveller, New Scientist and The Independent, which puts her in an odd position: inside the conservation sector and tasked with explaining it to everyone outside it. She also works a weekly shift at a friend’s bakery, hands in flour instead of at a keyboard, taken on after she realised a solitary writing schedule had emptied her week of other people.

That position has sharpened her view of how nature gets talked about, and she is unsentimental about the sector’s habits. Conservation messaging, she argues, leans too readily on charisma. The beaver had everything going for it: rare, native, and almost absurdly endearing, which made her old job easier than most. Other species are not so fortunate. In the new book, she devotes attention to the ocean sunfish, an animal she describes as looking like an evolutionary afterthought, oddly proportioned and faintly ridiculous, and argues that its strangeness deserves celebration ahead of an apology. Parasites fare worse still in the public imagination, weighed down by a word that pop culture has turned almost wholly negative, even though humans carry them constantly and would not survive without them. Sophie wants science writing to make room for the unlovely alongside the loveable.

She is equally direct about the dangers of her own trade. Asked whether science communication risks becoming performance before it becomes communication, she says she has seen research suggesting that a majority of online content creators publish without checking their facts thoroughly enough, which she finds genuinely alarming when the subject is something as consequential as climate. Her own discipline runs the other way. She fact-checks with meticulous care, drawing on the expertise of more than seventy scientists and academics across her two books, and describes her own role as a wonky bridge between research and the public. The phrase she returns to most often is quality over quantity: fewer claims, better sourced, more likely to land.

Much of To Have or to Hold was written on the move, mostly by bicycle, because she believes that travelling slowly changes what a writer notices. Trains were unreliable, journeys ran long, and almost every research trip coincided with a named storm, a pattern she found impossible to ignore given how central extreme weather had become to her subject. Cycling into headwinds and freak rainfall gave her, she says, a sliver of the punishment that wild species absorb constantly and let her write about their resilience as something earned and physical, not romantic.

That same discipline carries into how she manages the rest of her working life. She trains seriously, racing competitively over long distances by bike and treating fitness as close to a professional requirement, because researching and writing two books in close succession is easier to sustain with a body that can absorb the stresses that this entails. Her underlying approach is slightly heretical in its simplicity: looking after the natural world starts with looking after yourself so that what you put out there is informed by sharp and clear observation and presentation.

What Sophie returns to, both in conversation and on the page, is the idea that nature has always been collaborating, in ways far stranger, messier and more morally ambiguous than we often care to admit. Her gift lies in persuading readers to sit with that complexity rather than reaching for a more comforting interpretation. In that sense, she belongs to a tradition of literary writers such as George Eliot and E. M. Forster, whose work carried an unmistakable didactic purpose. Sophie’s writing does the same, inviting us not simply to admire the natural world, but to rethink our place and relationship within it.

To Have or to Hold is published in paperback  on the 30th July by Bloomsbury, RRP £10.99.

 @sophiepavs