Rare Air with Meri Fatin

"Overshoot means we consciously and willingly allow to go above 1.5 while waiting for the right technology...to then rapidly bring down the overshoot.  It would fulfill the goal laid out in the Paris Agreement however the damage done on the way is tremendous.

The obligation of scientists is to lay out different ( plausible) scenarios.  Its governments and industries who then take these plausible scenarios and insist that we have the luxury to wait because technical solutions will save us in the end. The reason why this interpretation is so flawed (and I think this is when I cracked on the IPCC 1.5 Special Report) was the realisation that an overshoot...could mean an eight degree warming for the Arctic."

Petra Tschakert is Professor of Geography and Global Futures at Curtin University where she has recently begun her tenure.

She is a human-environment geographer, motivated to use her research to strengthen resilience in communities experiencing disadvantage. She does this working at the intersection of a number of elements: climate change adaptation, sustainability, livelihood security, and climate, mobility, energy, and multispecies justice.

And the inter-disciplinary approach Petra has taken to her education will give you a good idea of how she can function in all these spaces.  Geography and French in Austria led to working in community development in Senegal and then to a dissertation on soil carbon sequestration, also in Senegal, a PhD in arid lands resource sciences and applied anthropology in Arizona …the list goes on.

Petra was a Coordinating Lead Author in Working Group 2 of the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report (AR5), and contributed to its Summary for Policy Makers and the Synthesis Report, all of which fed into COP21 and the Paris Agreement. Then she worked on the IPCC Special Report on 1.5 degrees global warming post-Paris.

Petra now co-chairs the National Strategy on Just Adaptation, led by the Australian Academy of Science and Future Earth Australia, and leads the Energy Humanities Initiative at Curtin. 

"We changed the world to start to see that automobile dependence was not a good thing...we were much hated by the automobile associations, the vehicle companies, the oil companies.  They used to run people who would follow us everywhere. And they were given money to write papers attacking us."

Professor Peter Newman reflecting on his work in the US with colleague Professor Jeff Kenworthy 

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WA Scientist of the Year in 2018, Peter Newman AO is Professor of Sustainability at Curtin University where he established CUSP, the Curtin Sustainability Policy Institute.

He’s one of those people it’s hard to introduce because of the sheer volume of his achievements.

As well as being a renowned authority on sustainability in WA, and an adviser at a Federal level, Peter’s international work includes being co-ordinating lead author on a number of reports with the IPCC – the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

He’s authored hundreds of publications including over 20 books, some of which are used as texts in the USA. His primary focus is transport and the solutions that would vastly improve the liveability of our cities.

Peter began his career as a foundation lecturer in Environmental Sciences at Murdoch University in 1974 and consequently is a senior knowledge holder and champion in the overarching story of environmentalism in WA.  

Recorded at RTRFM, Beaufort Street Mount Lawley Western Australia on August 23, 2022

Mastered by Adrian Sardi at Sugarland 

Theme music by Blue Dot Sessions

If you follow thought leaders on the energy transition, you’ll be familiar with the hashtag Electrify Everything.

The argument is that a huge proportion of ‘global energy needs’ can be met with electricity sourced from renewables – and to use it we simply need to – electrify everything.

This is the message of Australian inventor and engineer Saul Griffith – recently returned from two decades in the US where he’s advised, among others, NASA and the Biden Administration. Saul Griffith's book, “The Big Switch – Australia’s Electric Future” details some very clear thinking that could drive Australia's energy transition pathway.

"I think it’s a scandal in this country that so much wealth is being extracted and Aboriginal people are no better off."

Paul Cleary is author of "Title Fight: How the Yindjibarndi Battled and Defeated a Mining Giant".  For over a decade he followed this story as a journalist, before finally sitting down to the task of recording the complex and troubling detail of this tale in a book.

If ever a story was worth telling, it's this one.  It highlights an organisational culture in FMG that on one hand revered and respected Aboriginal people, but on the other used the courts and a vast array of unconscionable tactics to secure below par compensation native title agreement with traditional owners. And it reveals the tenacity and vision of Yindjibarndi people and their leader Michael Woodley who in 2020,  after a thirteen year dispute, secured exclusive native title over the land FMG has been mining.

The power of great storytelling has never been more evident than in the fight to change hearts and minds around sustainability, environmental care and climate action.

 The people who can sweep us along in their enthusiasm and can-do attitude offer solid foundations for optimism as we witness the earth struggling …and the solutions seem too much for us as individuals to contemplate.

 Matthew Evans is one of those people.  Matthew is a chef, food critic, TV host and farmer, and increasingly across his career he has spoken and written the truth about our food and its journey to our tables, always leaving us with the tools to choose better.

 A couple of years ( but just a few episodes) ago Matthew joined me on Rare Air to discuss his book On Eating Meat. It was great to be getting together again to chat about his new book “Soil:  The Incredible story of what keeps the Earth, and us, healthy”

It began with a deep sea cod.

David Carter and Jeff Hansen are people who have the courage of their convictions. What’s surprising about their alliance is that at first glance one might struggle to see HOW their convictions are aligned. David Carter is CEO of Austral Fisheries. He’s spent 42 years with the company, working from the ground up as a graduate and thriving under inspiring mentorship. His commitment to sustainable fishing practices has defined his career. This year David was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Marine Stewardship Council and Austral Fisheries has been carbon neutral for four years. Jeff Hansen joined Sea Shepherd Australia in 2006 and was instrumental in the success of two anti- whaling expeditions in the Antarctic before being offered Australian directorship by Sea Shepherd founder Captain Paul Watson. It’s Jeff’s passion and regard for the ocean and it’s inhabitants that has focussed his efforts into eradicating illegal fishing, plastic pollution and mitigating climate change. It was an appearance at a Senate inquiry about Australia’s future activities in the Southern Ocean, that led to his auspicious meeting with David… because of a shared concern for a deep sea cod - the Patagonian toothfish.

There’s a whiff of hope out there. 

Sounds like a strange thing to say as Australia comes to grips with the early days of the corona virus pandemic as this episode is recorded.  We are a nation that has literally NO IDEA what 2020 will be like.

Yet, there’s still hope and author Andrew Wear has tapped into it. Andrew is a very experienced public policy expert from Melbourne.  He’s worked for Government across a vast array of different policy areas from Planning and Community, Economic Development, Jobs, Transport and Resources. But his view is global. And that came in handy when he decided to write a book that looked at how some of the world’s biggest problems were being solved.  The Book is called SOLVED  - and it details how ten countries solved ten big problems from climate change to multiculturalism. 

Can meditation really save the world? Tom Cronin thinks so.

Big ideas and the people who chase them are captivating. Tom Cronin’s big idea is to bring an ancient practice, meditation, and sweep the message of it's benefits across the globe using the even more ancient art of storytelling.

 The practice of meditation is tens of thousands of years old and of everyone who takes it up, relatively few become teachers.  For many, personal enjoyment of the multitude of benefits is enough.

 And of those who become meditation teachers, no matter the strength of their personal practice, or conviction that meditation improves wellbeing, even fewer feel compelled to reach a global audience.

 At 29, as a stressed-out bond and swap broker, Tom Cronin took up meditation.  As he developed his practice, he’d work days on the trading floor, and over time, nights as a meditation teacher. The transformation for Tom was extraordinary, but can be illustrated like this. At 29 his biological age was measured as 37.  With the help of meditation, by the time he was 42, his biological age was just 34.

 Tom became so passionate about the profound change meditation could effect, that he built a new career taking this information to the world, hosting retreats, mentoring, speaking publicly, and in 2019, releasing a book and a film, both entitled “The Portal : how meditation can save the world”. The book and film use the stories of a wide range of people whose lives have been utterly transformed by their meditation practice.

In this episode of Rare Air, Tom explains how meditation changes a human being, and how it has the power to defuse the tensions affecting humanity today.

The idea of an artificial womb – a place where a prematurely born baby could continue to safely gestate closer to full term, is one scientists have worked on intermittently since the late 1950’s. Until recently it’s been considered a wild card, a fairly unorthodox angle on dealing with pre-term birth.

Currently there are a handful of teams around the world working at various stages of development, including here in Perth, through the Women and Infant’s Research Foundation (WIRF).  The Western Australian team, based at the University of Western Australia is headed up by New Zealander Assoc Professor Matthew Kemp and collaborates closely with researchers at the Tohoku University Hospital in Japan among others.

It’s hard to conceptualise but Assoc Prof Matthew Kemp describes it this way: “At it’s core. Our equipment is essentially a high-tech amniotic fluid bath combined with an artificial placenta.  Put those together and with careful maintenance what you’ve got is an artificial womb."

The implications for the successful development of an artificial womb cannot be overstated. Being born too soon is the single largest cause of death and disability in children up to five years old in the developed world. It’s also a major burden not only on the child, with ongoing health issues, but also on their families, the health system, schools…the list goes on. And imagine the hope it offers to terrified parents knowing their baby will be born on the very cusp of viability. 

In this conversation, Assoc Professor Matthew Kemp discusses the determination, dedication and serendipity that has gained the artificial womb project significant recognition.

Dominic Smith’s fourth novel, the New York Times best seller "The Last Painting of Sara de Vos" won both Indie Book of the Year AND the Australian Book Industry awards Literary Fiction Book of the Year in 2017. 

For Rare Air, he joins me to discuss his most recent novel, The Electric Hotel. Set around the birth of cinema, as the Lumière Brothers sent commission agents around the world to demonstrate their cinematographe, The Electric Hotel introduces us to French filmmaker Claude Ballard.

One of the original Lumière commission agents, then silent film heavyweight, now in his eighties, a dedicated mushroom forager and long-term resident of the Knickerbocker Hotel in Hollywood. It's a truly captivating story, beautifully researched, where even the most staggering human experience feels entirely plausible.

Smith says his goal was to fall in love with silent film.  He watched over one hundred of them for research.  Preservation of these films has been an issue.  It was reported by the US Library of Congress in 2013, that 75 percent of silent films made in the US between 1912 and 1929 had been lost. This formed part of Smith's motive to write a book set in the era as he tried to imagine a comparable situation in the world of literature. 

In this conversation Dominic Smith also speaks about the formation of his writing discipline and muses about being an American, born and bred in Australia. He spoke to me from his home in Seattle, WA.