I write about life, nature and technology. I recently completed The Empathy Hack, my third novel after twenty years of journalism, academic writing, and several nonfiction books. It describes how wildlife webcams feed our longing to get close to nature, and follows what happens when Robin, coming to the end of her professional life and feeling somewhat lost, becomes the victim of a webcam hack which goes viral and triggers a surge of global activism. The story draws on the power of the umwelt – a unique sensory bubble we all inhabit as described in Ed Yong’s bestseller An Immense World, and the compelling pull to empathy between different species. Could empathy save us?