Marianne Brown and Alice Mah talk to Patrick Barkham

Two environmental researchers find themselves confronting the same nexus of grief for beloved ancestors and grief at climate breakdown. They discuss their books with natural history writer Patrick Barkham.

Marianne Brown’s The Shetland Way tells how travelling to her father’s funeral leads her to investigate a huge wind farm project in a tight-knit Shetland community, and how her questioning is tied up with grief. Alice Mah’s Red Pockets recounts how she returns to her ancestors’ village in China only to find she has debts to pay because their graves haven’t been swept for decades. She starts seeing a deep connection with her research on pollution, which intensifies her own experience of climate grief.

Raised in Edinburgh, Brown spent many years working as a journalist in Southeast Asia and later in Britain as the editor of an environmental magazine. Alice Mah is a Chinese Canadian-British writer and Professor of Urban and Environmental Studies at the University of Glasgow.