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. 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. She has written one nonfiction book titled The Ultimate Guide to Green Parenting. 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, and most recently in the collection A Nightingale Sang, a limited poetry magazine created for New Networks for Nature. Lights is an outspoken science advocate and skeptic: in 2015 the Western Morning News newspaper reported that she is against pseudoscience. 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. In September 2015Lucy 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." 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, BBC World News, Good Morning Britain and The Andrew Neil Show.
