Conservation for Kyriacou began not with policy papers or grant proposals, but with a tent in the backyard and an instinct to notice what was living around her. The founder of My Green World, a nonprofit that uses education and technology to promote environmental conservation, she arrived at the work through persistence, improvisation, and a fascination with the natural world.
As a child in Australia, her weekends alternated between camping trips and backyard expeditions. She trailed frogs and insects with equal parts curiosity and concern, an early attentiveness to nonhuman life that has endured.
University studies in journalism and international relations were punctuated by work in Borneo and Sri Lanka, alongside orangutans, sun bears, and veterinary aid teams. These experiences deepened her frustration at the marginal role of nature in political debate, education, and public life.
Rather than enter a newsroom, Kyriacou turned to game design. She created World of the Wild, a mobile app allowing children to manage virtual wildlife sanctuaries and learn about endangered species, with in-game actions reflecting real interventions by partner charities. It grew into online education resources and eventually into My Green World, aimed at making conservation accessible, inclusive, and engaging.
Her retelling is unvarnished: selling her car and clothes, moving back in with her parents, and running garage sales to fund the work. But it also taught her about the systems shaping environmental destruction—the policies, incentives, and power structures that determine whether forests are cut or conserved, species survive or vanish.
Her new book, Nature’s Last Dance: Tales of Wonder in an Age of Extinction, draws on this perspective. Using humor to temper the gravity of loss, she opens with the kākāpō, a critically endangered, flightless parrot whose improbable survival embodies the absurdity and fragility of the human–nature relationship. The stories she tells—from vultures whose decline reshaped India’s public health to Pacific Island leaders championing environmental justice—are chosen for their human and ecological weight.
For Kyriacou, nature is not a backdrop but the foundation of economies, societies, and identities. The challenge, she says, is to replace the myth of nature as ornamental with the reality that its protection is inseparable from human well-being.
