Anika Sweetland
'I went to university because I wanted to help save the planet. I certainly didn’t expect to end up questioning whether it needed saving in the first place.'Anika SweetlandFor most of her life, Anika Sweetland believed she knew how the world would end. She was ten when she first read that climate change threatened the Great Barrier Reef. The warnings followed her into adolescence: rising seas, drought, famine, climate refugees, collapsing ecosystems and a future growing steadily more dangerous.At nineteen, fear became purpose. Anika enrolled in a Climate Science degree determined to help solve what she believed was humanity’s greatest crisis. She studied the models, embraced the policies and worked in government writing energy policy. Climate change was not politics to her. It shaped where she imagined living, the career she pursued and even how she felt about bringing children into the world.But years later, while researching the policies intended to deliver Net Zero, she began finding things that disturbed her. One question became another. Then another. Eventually she returned to the predictions that had frightened her as a child, pulled out her old university notes and began examining the foundations of the worldview she had carried for nearly three decades.What she found forced her to confront not only climate science and policy, but her own past. A Load of Bollocks? is a provocative, funny and unexpectedly moving memoir about fear, authority and what happens when certainty begins to unravel. And when the next terrifying headline tells us the end is nigh, perhaps we should all have the courage to ask: what if it’s all a load of bollocks? Anika never expected to ask that question. This is the story of what happened when she did.
