Finding Nature

Today on the show is James O’Hanlon, an author, artist and scientist whose career includes painting building-scale murals, several kids stories and now multiple fascinating and fun adult books. His latest book Liars, Cheats and Copycats; Trickery and Deception in Nature is one mind blowing story after another of how species above and under water are able to camouflage, hide, mimic and dazzle others, including humans. From the extraordinary ways by which cephalopods can change colour at the speed of their thought to the role of tone and photoreceptors that keep tigers out of sight to their prey, to the feather legged assassin bug that dupes and consumes insects on tree trunks. This book is a story of awe, wonder and the remarkable nature of nature that is always all around us.

In this episode we chat about those and many more incredible species, but also the mechanics and dynamics that enable camouflage - from the difference in species photoreceptors and the extent of their eye sight, the evolutionary history of species to be where we are now, spiders and why our cultural fear of a species that no-one has died from in Australia since the 1970s is so persistent, as well as his experience as artist and science communicator. All of us out there are interested in creating change and telling better stories, and James’ perspective on his own approach and the way by which his artistry meets the rigours and robustness of the scientific method is unique.

Support for today's show comes from Altiorem - use code FindingNature25 for 25% off an annual plan.

Support for today's show comes from Jamberoo Mountain Tiny Home - add Finding Nature to the comments in your booking to receive the hot tub sunset package added for free. 

Thanks to Leah Mazzone for website, brand and social media assets and Rob Rogers for theme song. 

For all things Finding Nature, go to our website

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I’ve learnt the hard way over the years that I need help. And not just help in a way that lightens my to do list or makes things slightly easier on a day to day basis, but the help from those around me in being able to withstand the part terrifying part invigorating approach to re-building my life over the last three years. From holding me when I needed support to sharing insights about my behaviour I couldn’t see to being of service and supporting this enterprise in ways large and small, I know that I need help, and usually much more than I realise. And in a day to day professional context working on climate risk and the science of how the atmospheric conditions of our planet have shifted to what our species have never encountered before and all the volatility that entails, as well as being a father to a small boy and the uncertainty and fear I have as to what the future looks like, I can find it easy to slip into nihilism or cynicism.

All of that is to say today’s guest, Andrew Sloan, has written the book I needed to read - Why Things Feel Fucked; Your Practical Guide to Getting Unstuck. Andrew’s personal experience as a gay man and advocate against outdated and insane conversion practices as well as his career as a psychotherapist has left him perfectly placed to combine the best tools that all of us can use to live more calm, connected and curious lives, while explaining that many of the institutional systems in place today play a huge role in our experiences when we’re languishing or despairing or overwhelmed. It not you, it’s the systems. When it’s easy to buy into the idea that it’s up to us - and us alone - to rise above the productivity trap, to always be climbing onto the next tier on the ladder of status, to be in a perpetual pursuit of doing more to be more, it can leave many of us, me included, feeling like a rat in a maze. It’s simple, be everything to everyone, all the time, and look effortless doing it. Put a sick cell onto a Petri dish with healthy cells and it becomes healthy. Put a healthy cell onto a Petri dish with sick cells, and it too becomes diseased.

In Why Things Feel Fucked Andrew offers a different perspective on the reasons for how we end up feeling stuck, the science of how our nervous system is degraded by the chronic stress of all that doing and pursuing, and what we can all do - individually and together - to change our own and collective narratives for the types of lives we want to live.

We chat about a million things in this conversation - his own experiences in getting stuck and the progressive process of becoming unstuck, nervous system science, institutional systems, self leadership, strengths, shame, healing, connection, fear and the components of healthy relationships.

Support for today's show comes from Altiorem - use code FindingNature25 for 25% off an annual plan.

Support for today's show comes from Jamberoo Mountain Tiny Home - add Finding Nature to the comments in your booking to receive the hot tub sunset package added for free. 

Thanks to Leah Mazzone for website, brand and social media assets and Rob Rogers for theme song. 

For all things Finding Nature, go to our website. 

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As a kid I was obsessed with two things - the Balmain Tigers rugby league team and animals. When I was about seven or eight years old I was gifted a big hardcover book with a tiger on the front cover. The book was hundreds of pages in length, covering every continent and what must have been thousands of species. Nearly 35 years later I vividly remember the look and feel and weight of this book, and I’ve got no doubt that it played a significant role in everything that’s come for me since in trying to commit my working life to ecosystem and species conservation. At university I did my best to never finish my undergrad degree, but that meant I got to enjoy moving my way through degrees - first science then education then environmental management then climate science and finally environmental economics. I got to properly study landscapes and species and what feels now like the early days of climate science. Action was needed, time was still somewhat on our side.

All these years later and through this endeavour speaking to renowned scientists and environmentalists like Lesley Hughes and Macro Lambertini, I can see now that my education and everything that I’ve learnt is because of the giants who’ve come before me, before all of us. Today’s guest is one of these giants, Darryl Jones. Darryl is a behavioural ecologist - that is, someone who studies the behaviours of non human species and since the late 1970s Darryl has travelled across this continent and right around the globe to capture and record the habits and sociologies and experiences of hundreds of species. Everything that he’s seen, I can’t comprehend it. From the high Arctic to the still untouched jungles of Borneo to completing a PhD on the maligned Australian brush turkey. Darryl’s life is truly extraordinary, but very much one of the esteemed scientist - always working, always testing, always refining, almost always out of the limelight.

Beyond his scientific work, Darryl is also an author and he’s on the show today to talk about his latest - Be(Wilder); Journeys In Nature. Every chapter of this book follows a different adventure and experience he’s had over the years - from avoiding charging elephants in Asia to warring birdwatchers in the US to the efforts of conservationist farmers in Australia. It’s a beautiful book, part travelogue, part behavioural ecology journal, part personal manifesto, part a-life-well lived guide. In this chat we get into different aspects of the book and its stories, his own life changing experience of spending time surveying wildlife in Sudan in the late 1970s, how he’s seen the natural world and humanity’s relationship to it ebb and flow over time, and how, after all these years, he is still powering forward carrying a message of strength with answers to our environmental crises - but more importantly, how we relate to the rest of the world as a species - must and can be shifted.

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Today I’m joined by two film makers - Tim and Tristan Kenyon - to talk about their remarkable and emotional documentary, Changing Track. Tim and Tristan are brothers whose lives and careers to date make them unlikely track cycling Paralympic story tellers, but the film is all the better for their lack of cycling knowledge and avoidance of stereotypes of lycra men constantly checking their power output data. Changing Track follows three Paralympic athletes - Korey Boddington, Emily Petricola and Kane Perriss, plus Kane’s tandem pilot Luke Zaccaria, in their pursuit of greatness at the 2024 Paris Games.

I saw the trailer for Changing Track and knew immediately I wanted to chat about it on this show as I know personally how powerful and memorable sport and athletics can be as a platform to tell stories about the human spirit and experience. I’ve been fortunate to participate in sports teams and experience glimpses into environments where elite performers perform, and have some understanding into what it takes to create something meaningful and successful. What Tim and Tristan do with Changing Track is not only a documentary about Korey, Emily and Kane’s extraordinary lives, but highlights themes of resilience, adversity, unity, camaraderie, perseverance and the indomitability of the human psyche once the heart is clear on what it wants.

I also wanted to chat with Tim and Tristan about their craft and how that relates to the work of change makers. For many of us, our daily lives involve efforts to convince, influence, coerce, negotiate, compromise in pursuit of the change we want in the world - all of that requires the ability to communicate clearly and persuasively. Changing Track offered me and I think it will you the ability to re-think or refine how you go about speaking with others and the ways that you tell stories. As a story telling species, this is an essential skill. In this conversation we talk about the film itself, the extraordinary stories of regular people, the art and craft of story, Tim and Tristan’s relationship to hardship and suffering, and how all of us have and will again inevitability deal with our own serious challenges and the need to overcome.

Sport isn’t for everyone, I appreciate that. What Tim and Tristan have created with Changing Track is more than a story of sport and athletic pursuit though, but one of how the human spirit can soar - yours and mine. 

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Today’s guest is Abby Bloom. I first met Abby in late 2017 and we’ve stayed in close contact since. She’s a remarkable woman and this is her second time on the show, and we get into a lot of her backstory way back in episode three, like being among the first cohort of women at Yale University, and her work designing and implementing healthy systems and programs right around the world. When I met Abby for the first time she was talking then about the impending care, aging and health system failures we were sleep walking into - and as we’ve seen through recent reports and our daily lived experiences the structural and systemic failures in child care, gambling reform and environmental regulation - it feels like we are in the era of progressive degradation of a societal, economic and political operating system that has underpinned many of the reason why we are living for longer, which is core to Abby’s new book, The Cost of Not Caring.

The Cost of Not Caring is both primer and instructional on the implications of a society where people are living for longer, and the demographic, cultural, policy and economic shifts this is driving. Abby’s career has and still spans health, government, insurance and innovation, and she’s on the show today to help diagnose the challenges associated with ageing, care and health, what that means for governments, organisation and individuals. She’s also got clarity on what’s required to shift and evolve a complex problem field that requires an injection of bold leadership, new practices and a compelling narrative to galvanise a population around the value and virtue of care. And not care as a service or an experience, but something we live from and care about. In a time when the enshittification of just about everything is only matched by the forcing of de-personalised bug-filled AI into every nook and cranny, we are at risk of losing the fabric that holds and sustains the health of our society and relationships to each other.

We cover heaps of ground in this chat - from her own moment of insight at her mother’s 104th birthday in New York, to the strains and stresses of care, the obligation and privilege of caring for those we love, the creaking institutional systems we all rely upon, the four requirements to age well and what we can do as individuals to support our caring efforts and look after ourselves too.

Get $500 off your solar battery installation with Reposit Power. 

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Find everything Finding Nature at findingnature.com.au and get in contact via [email protected] 

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All of us want to make better decisions, and lots of us wish the people around us would make decisions that we thought were better. Imagine being able to do this just by understanding the mechanics and mechanisms of our cognition, by re-organinising how information is presented or communicated to improve engagement or action. Cognitive science and behavioural economics has gone through a huge increase in popularity over the last decade, and while it’s been used to tremendous success in contexts like social media and across broader digital experiences, today’s guest - Ben Newell - has been seeking to take his decades of experience as one f the country’s most credential cognitive psychologists and apply it to support meaningful and effective action on climate change.

Ben Newell is Professor of Behavioural Science in the School of Psychology at the University of New South Wales, and is also the Director of the UNSW Institute for Climate Risk & Response (ICRR). His research focuses on the cognitive processes underlying judgment, choice and decision-making and the application of this knowledge to environmental, medical, financial and forensic contexts. I’ve wanted to get Ben on for a while so that I could also understand the secrets to mind reading, idea inception and cutting through the seemingly interminable effort of trying to convince people to play a role in creating a safer, healthier and more just world.

This was a fascinating conversation - getting into the details of how we make decisions, how our brains make sense of cues and create perceptions that determine judgements, and how variable the process of making and presenting choices is on an everyday basis. We also talk about the ICRR, the vital work this institute is doing as a model we can all learn from, his lessons from working on climate change over the last decade as well as clear advice on how to think about and aim for convincing and influencing others.

Check out the UNSW Institute for Climate Risk and Response and Ben's work.

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Today on the show is Tammi Miller, who was previously a guest in episode 38 after she released her terrific and first book, Paperback Therapy. She’s back today for a different type of episode - a take on the AMA format, but instead of me it’s Ask Tammi Anything. Tammi is a certified practising counsellor, a mental health therapist and as I mentioned, an author.

Having been doing Finding Nature for 18 months, something that has been absolutely apparent for those of us working in the field of sustainability and social impact, is the sense of collective struggle and individual strain to make a positive difference, that too often seems overwhelming. Across a spectrum of ‘what’s the point of carrying on’ to restrained rage at inaction and ongoing approvals of pollution, the individual actor perspective can feel daunting and insurmountable. Yet, we keep showing up. Digging deep, finding stores of resilience and capacity to try again. I’ve learnt - usually the hard way - that I need help, especially with my thinking and cognitive patterns that have a tendency towards binary options, a sensitivity to rejection and a seemingly always on radar for validation and acceptance. None of these help me to live and work anywhere close to my potential, and getting help with professionals has been and remains vital for me.

So knowing all of this from so many doing this work, I wanted to collect up questions from the audience and have a real professional offer insights, suggestions and healthy action to deal with the problems you’re experiencing - from challenging management to negotiating information acquisition and avoiding doom scrolling, to the role and value of therapy as a tool for any and all of us. Tammi is an expert, and as someone who straddles the worlds of counselling and corporates, offers valuable knowledge as both an expert and a practitioner dealing with the daily goings on of workplaces and colleagues and families and all of our other obligations as responsible adults.

Tammi is easy to find online. Check her out on Instagram and LinkedIn, her website, plus go and get a copy of her book, Paperback Therapy. I know professional help with counsellors has helped me enormously, so if you think anything we’ve discussed here you’d benefit from - or your whole team - get in contact with Tammi.

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Today’s guest is Professor David Kinley, someone who has deeply influenced and inspired my personal approach to a corporate’s responsibility to respect human rights. David holds the chair of human rights law at the university of Sydney, is an academic expert of doughty street chamber in London, a founding member of Australian lawyers for human rights and a board member of Cisarua, an Afghan refugee-led education centre based in Indonesia. I first came across David’s work through his book Necessary Evil; How to fix finance by saving human rights which was seminal in advancing my appreciation and the practical application of human rights in a corporate context. David’s work - beyond his scholarly and teaching duties, means he’s written over ten books on topics as broad as international human rights, law, politics, philosophy, economics and the relationship between freedom and responsibility.

I first came across David’s work in late 2021 and was immediately captured by both the practicality of his wisdom and the robustness of his expertise. His work was so influential it landed me in a lot of hot water, which to me indicates he is clearly onto the awkward and uncomfortable reality human rights responsibilities ask of corporates. Since then though David has published two really terrific books, The Liberty Paradox and in recent weeks has released In a Rain of Dust; Death, Deceit and the lawyer who busted big asbestos. I was captured by both and for different reasons, but like Necessary Evil, David’s prose and style blends technical complexity with relatable everyday circumstance.

This chat covers a lot of ground across those three books, but comes to identify and reflect the challenge organisations and individuals face in needing to account for affected and harmed people through the power of their decisions making. In a rain of dust is a story about malpractice and negligence that caused the deaths of thousands of vulnerable and impoverished people across continents, but it reflects the bankruptcy of corporate leadership fixated on profiteering, on the legacy of injustice, but also how crime never pays - in this case how powerful corporate elites and their business were shamed and now portrayed as merchants of death and destruction because of their dismissal of other humans ‘over there.’

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Today on the show is the first and second most popular guest to date - Cameron Tonkinwise. Making his third appearance, Cameron’s previous episodes - number 9 and 40 - equated to a gigantic jump in listenership as well as the number of places the show was getting picked up in. That I think says everything about Cameron - his career and work to date across design, academia and in practice is both unique and special. I’ve had the great pleasure and privilege to work a lot with Cameron over the last eight year since I first accosted him in a laneway at a conference, and few have been as influential on the way I think about the world and approach my work.

Cameron is a design professor at the University of Technology in Sydney, and is an international expert in design studies and transition design. He writes and speaks extensively on the power of design to drive systems-level change to achieve more sustainable and equitable futures. I’ve seen firsthand how influential and impactful he is in workplaces as well as when he’s speaking and presenting at different events and conferences.

I wanted to get Cameron back on the show as recently we held a Finding Nature supper club event exploring the issues and challenges of broad calls for systems change. So much in our society and economy requires substantial change - from our caring economy to decarbonisation and climate risk-driven adaptation to demeaning attitudes to women and a political economy dependent on destruction-inducing consumption of all things, all the time. This event explored how to even approach that topic - what does systems change even mean, how do you start, how do you try to do it. We chat about what came up that night, as well getting into case studies of work he and we have done seeking to be these system change influencers and advocates, the pitfalls and perils, as well as the surprising insights and glimpses of what really is possible.

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Licia Heath is the CEO of Women for Election and she’s on the show today to talk many things politics, women in politics and the future of women in politics. Despite being in a context where slowly slowly incrementalism at best seems to be the political program at the moment - from a middling 2035 emissions target to housing to gender violence to tax reform to indicating support for the theft of creative intellectual property, it can be difficult to remember that just six years ago the federal political landscape was radically different to what we see today. Licia’s theory of change for our political system lies in changing the individual faces of the people who sit at all three levels of government, and she’s here today to share much more about this.

When I first came across Women for Election and Licia, I was reminded about one of my favourite documentaries - Knock Down the House. That documentary, set in the now-utopian-level times of 2018 follows four women seeking Democratic Party pre-selection for their congressional district elections at the US midterms. The documentary goes behind the scenes in how grassroots campaigning and the creation of new power in communities is possible, away from the vested interests of existing politicians and a two party system that offered little to no chance of delivering much needed structural reform in many areas of our society and economy. I love the potential that new power is possible just by showing up, by getting involved and being active in and with others nearby - not the inaccessible over there toxicity politicians is easily portrayed and perceived as. With that in mind, I wanted to get Licia on, and this didn’t disappoint.

We cover the origins and evolution of Women for Election, the particular barriers and challenges different groups of women face in pursuing representation, the importance of civility and custodianship as virtues to help drive change, and Licia’s own remarkable transformation from 20 year finance professional to the ups and downs of re-making her career, future and identity. This episode has something for everyone, but what has stayed with me since is the vital role of just showing up, being involved and having the willingness to put your hand up and take on a role you never thought was possible, and what’s possible once you do accept that role.

Events are live and more are coming - follow on Humanitix.

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Today's show is delivered with Reposit Power. UHead to repositpower.com/findingnature to get $500 off your No Bill system installation.

Today's show is delivered with Regenerate Talent. Reference Finding Nature for 10% off their career advisory support program.

Today's show is delivered with Econome. Reference Finding Nature for 10% off their climate stream and seed programs.

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