Zion Lights

Zion Lights (born 1984) is a British author and activist known for her environmental work and science communication. She is UK director of Environmental Progress. She has been a spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion (XR) UK on TV and radio, and founded and edited XR's Hourglass newspaper. She has written for The Huffington Post, authored the evidence-based nonfiction book The Ultimate Guide to Green Parenting, and given a TEDx talk.

Zion Lights
Zion Lights
Born1984 (age 36–37)
West Midlands, England
Alma materUniversity of Reading
University of the West of England, Bristol (MSc)
Websitezionlights.co.uk

Early life

Lights was born in 1984 in the West Midlands, UK. As a child she showed proficiency for English, which led to an appearance on Junior Mastermind and her first poem being published in an anthology at the age of 12. She attended the University of Reading, graduating in 2005, and completed an MSc in Science Communication at the University of the West of England in 2019.

Writing and activism

Lights is an environmental activist and writer with a focus on ethical parenting and climate change.

She was a columnist for the Express & Echo newspaper for six months in 2014. She was co-editor of Juno magazine for 7 years and wrote for The Huffington Post.[1] Lights left Juno in 2019 to work full-time at Extinction Rebellion where she was part of XR UK’s Media & Messaging team. She founded and edited the XR newspaper The Hourglass, which launched in September 2019 and ran until May 2020. In June 2020 she became director of the UK branch of Environmental Progress, the organisation founded and directed by Michael Shellenberger to advocate for nuclear energy.[2]

She has written one nonfiction book titled The Ultimate Guide to Green Parenting (2015).[3] and is due to release another, Zero waste kids, co-authored with Rob Greenfield. In 2018 she released her first poetry collection, Only a Moment. Lights' poetry has appeared in the Tolpuddle Special of Citizen 32 magazine, in Musings, a poetry collection collated to raise funds for La Leche League GB,[4] and most recently in the collection A Nightingale Sang, a limited poetry magazine created for New Networks for Nature.[5]

Lights is an outspoken science advocate and skeptic: in 2015 the Western Morning News newspaper reported that she is against pseudoscience.[6] In 2018 she gave a TEDx talk on astronomy, entitled "Don't forget to look up", at the University of Bristol. In August 2015, Lights was dubbed 'Britain's greenest mother' by The Daily Telegraph newspaper.[7] In September 2015 Lucy Siegle, writing in The Observer, described Lights as "an eco pragmatist, happily heavy on evidence. She has no truck with hippy myths – she does believe you should vaccinate your child."[8]

In her role as a spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion UK she made several appearances on radio and television talking about the climate and ecological emergency. These appearances have included BBC Television's Politics Live,[9] BBC World News, Good Morning Britain and The Andrew Neil Show.

In September 2020, Ms Lights stated in articles published in The Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph that she had left Extinction Rebellion to campaign in favour of building nuclear power stations to replace fossil fuel-burning ones, saying it was a "logical next step" in looking for solutions rather than "shouting ever more loudly about the problem."[10]

Personal life

Lights lives in Devon with her family.

Publications
  • More Things Should Be Thought Out Thus: A Story of Many Stories, and Many Stories About One Story. Self-published, 2010. ISBN 978-1445239125.
  • The Ultimate Guide to Green Parenting. New Internationalist, 2015.[3] ISBN 978-1780262482.
  • Only a Moment. Self-published, 2018. ISBN 978-0244723903.

References
  1. "Zion Lights". huffingtonpost.co.uk.
  2. "Leadership & Staff". Environmental Progress. Retrieved 23 June 2020.
  3. The New Internationalist Team. "The Ultimate Guide to Green Parenting -- New Internationalist". newint.org.
  4. "Mother's Milk Books". mothersmilkbooks.com.
  5. "New Networks for nature".
  6. "'Greenest' Mum warns against internet scare-mongers". Western Morning News.
  7. "Meet Britain's Greenest Mother". telegraph.co.uk.
  8. "The eco guide to green parenting". The Observer.
  9. "BBC Two - Politics Live, 16/07/2019". BBC. Retrieved 19 July 2019.
  10. "Why I left Extinction Rebellion to campaign for nuclear power". The Daily Telegraph. Retrieved 11 October 2020.
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