Smart Talk

Ali Lowrey talks about the future of winemaking in this highlight of Auckland University's Raising the Bar Home Series.

Ali Lowrey talks about the future of winemaking in this highlight of Auckland University's Raising the Bar Home Series.

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(Webinar available soon on the RTBHE website)

Edited highlights from the discussion

As we move from the soil in the vineyard to the wine in the glass with a climate change lens, it's important to note that wine is not essential for human survival. But I think it's an important product of human ingenuity. I do acknowledge there are a lot more crucial industries where the effects of climate change would be a lot more detrimental to human existence than alcohol production.

However, it is still a massive industry. A lot of people's livelihoods would be affected if it no longer existed. Worldwide, premium wine production occurs within really narrow climate ranges. So region by region, climate change is really going to shift wine production, especially in terms of grape selection. So that means what we can grow and where we can grow it will be affected.

We're going to lose ability to grow grapes in places we've been growing them for a really long time. The hotter climate is changing the wine we know and love. So what will wines look like that are grown in warmer than normal temperatures? What will climate change taste like?

First, the grapes are going to be overripe. This makes wines that are less acidic. A crisp sauvignon blanc will no longer be as fresh. Wines will have more body and be sweeter. This is because the grapes on the vine will be exposed to hotter climate, so more sugar will accumulate within the grape. When you have grapes of a higher sugar, the yeast and fermentation will churn out more ethanol. So you usually get higher alcohol content.

Wines are commonly round the 12.5% alcohol mark, but we are going to see a lot more wines in the 14+% range. Flavours may be cooked as well. Some examples: with a red wine right are going to have more flavours of cooked fruit like stewed plums, baking spices, and prunes. So there'll be a lot less of those bright fresh red cherries and raspberry flavours that I personally really like in a full New Zealand Pinot Noir.

So the chemical make-up, aroma and palate balance is going to change in the wine. What else?

Under the COP 2 degrees warming scenario Spain is forecast to lose about 65% of its wine-growing area. By 2100 the United States could lose up to 81% of its wine-growing area. Then other countries like Italy, Greece and notably France, maybe become completely inhospitable to grape production by 2050…

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Dr Helen Murray explores the relationship between repetitive head injuries, contact sport and chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) - a progressive brain disease that causes dementia.

Dr Helen Murray explores the relationship between repetitive head injuries and dementia. (A highlight from Auckland University's Raising the Bar Home Edition)

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From the discussion

During my PhD, I studied Alzheimer's disease at the University of Auckland's Centre for Brain Research. I worked with human tissue that was donated to the Neurological Foundation Human Brain Bank. And so throughout my PhD, I learnt how to preserve brain tissue and to prepare these ultra-thin slices of tissue for my studies, and how to apply very specific fluorescent labels that would bind to only one part of the tissue that I wanted to study. It could be something like a blood vessel, a certain type of brain cell, or one of the pathologies that we wanted to understand.

And throughout that process, I learnt how to study different processes within the brain tissue. I learnt how to take microscope images of the labelling that I was doing. These images enable us to look at what's happening inside the brain at a microscopic level. Throughout the course of my PhD, I was studying Alzheimer's disease and the main kind of character in the project I was looking at is this protein called Tau.

Tau's normal function is to keep brain cells structurally stable, but in Alzheimer's disease the Tau proteins become altered, and they start to clump together. And that causes them to form these dense structures called tangles.

Tangle pathology is not just a feature of Alzheimer's, and CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a brain disease associated with traumatic concussion) is one of the diseases where we see this Tau protein start to form. But the difference between these diseases is where the Tau starts to accumulate in the brain, and how it moves round the brain, as the disease progresses.

In Alzheimer's, we see these Tau tangles in the area of the brain that controls memory. That's where they start to form first. But in CTE, we see the Tau tangles forming in the deep valleys between the folds in the brain, and more specifically round blood vessels. This pathology actually makes a lot of sense. When you get any kind of knock to the head, not necessarily a serious concussion, you get the forces that are concentrated around areas where the structure of the tissue is less consistent, around blood vessels and in these folds in the brain…

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Assoc. Prof. Matheson Russell explores different models for democracy in action during an era of unprecedented polarisation. His focus? Sortition. A highlight of Raising the Bar Home Edition.

Academic Matheson Russell explores different models for democracy in action. His focus? Sortition. (A highlight from Auckland University's Raising the Bar Home Edition)

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https://youtu.be/IXkOJZTRlqI

From the discussion

Innovations like Oregon's systems review, the Irish Citizens' Assembly and the Icelandic constitutional redrafting project really show how narrow our imagination of democracy can be. It has inspired political scientists and theorists to think again about what democracy should look like and whether the existing models of democracy are really fit for purpose.

The Yale political scientist Helene Landemore writes in her recent book Open Democracy that "the Icelandic example emboldened me to conclude that the limits of our current systems, as well as the changes brought about by globalisation and the digital revolution, call for a radically different approach to the question of the best regime, one that interrogates the very institutional principles of democracy as we practice it today"

So, let's reflect upon these examples. We need to think about them critically. What do we learn from these experiments in citizen-led policy development?

The first thing is that ordinary people are perfectly competent to make complex decisions if they're given the opportunity, the context and the resources to do it. There's now quite a large body of empirical evidence that when participants are presented with information, with arguments on all sides, and they have the to discuss this with each other, they're perfectly capable of making competent decisions on very complex issues.

And in fact, there has been some scholarly analysis of the arguments made in some of these mini-publics, and they often contain more depth and nuance than you typically find in parliament or even parliamentary committees.

People are able to judge trade-offs, weighing up competing goals. On some issues where there are quite polarised views, you find actually quite strong bipartisan consensus. The longer that people have a chance to think and learn together, the stronger that consensus can become.

And another observation made by the scholars of these experiments is that often the values of participants overlap more than you might think.

So that's the first thing that we learned, that ordinary citizens like you and me are perfectly competent to make complex political decisions…

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Prof. Andrew Shelling sorts fact from fiction when it comes to 'blaming your genes,' and discusses the role of genetic testing in controlling common diseases. From Raising the Bar Home Edition.

The ability of genetics to predict both human disease and behaviour is an exciting and constantly evolving field, however, it's important to sort fact from fiction when it comes to 'blaming your genes'.

In this talk, medical researcher Andrew Shelling covers the red herrings of genetic research and explains where advances are really being made.

From Raising the Bar - Home edition 2022

Listen to Professor Andrew Shelling's talk

https://youtu.be/Aa54SVR5zxU

Edited highlights from the discussion

The world of lifestyle genetics is a very murky one.

There are a whole lot of things that are not diseases but traits, like baldness, food preference, freckles, or addiction, which now have genes associated with them.

Companies have been going direct to consumers asking them to spit into a tube and get information about these genes. Often these types of genetic tests target the worried well, especially through social media.

One of the controversial ones that's popped up over the last few years is the gay gene. People have gone looking for it. A recent study that came out just a few years ago, published in a really good journal, studying large numbers of people found only five hits. So there's no gay gene. Instead, there are some weak associations. One of them was related to the sense of smell. And one of the other associations was with male pattern baldness, which again speaks to some sort of hormone interaction.

Some lifestyle genetics have been exploited by different companies that are going direct to consumers. I refer to these as genetic horoscopes: they may be interesting, they may be real, but they are not always based on robust science.

So, we'll move now to the claim that genetics could predict the age that you lose your virginity. At face value, this seems sensational. But if you really were to think about it, the age at puberty is very well-defined event in people's lives.

If you go back 200 years people went through puberty aged 18 or 19, now aged 12 or 13. There are clearly some factors that are at play there, probably related to good health and body weight that'll allow puberty to happen earlier. By contrast, the age at which menopause begins is fixed; it hasn't changed for thousands of years.

So what this study was really doing in asking nearly 400,000 people about what age they lost their virginity, -which is probably a marker for puberty - was establishing a few hundred gene variants that seemed to be clearly associated…

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What does it mean to be Pākehā today? Prof. Alison Jones from the University of Auckland talks to the University of Canterbury's Jeanette King in this highlight of WORD Christchurch 2021.

Listen to Alison Jones in conversation with Jeanette King at Word Christchurch 2021

Highlights of the discussion

Jeanette King:

When colleagues say, "I want to involve Māori more or co-design research with them, how do I start?" I find it's a really hard question to answer.

Alison Jones:

It is. It's impossible to answer because when people just want to say "I'm doing some really interesting research on Māori, so I need a Māori person to work with," what's unspoken is the underlying belief that "they should be really pleased because I'm doing this exciting work."

Well it just doesn't work like that, because it is all about relationships. I've spent years in relationships with Māori people I work with. Being their friend, teaching, whatever what I'm doing, engaging, turning up, doing dishes - whatever! - it doesn't matter. It's just being present that matters.

Māori will always notice if you turn up to things, to hui, to tangi, or other Māori events. They'll notice you, they'll know who you are. And so if you're going to be then saying to your friend "Hey, I'm thinking of doing some research what do you reckon?" they might say OK, because they know you're there. You're not just diving in for the goodies and then are going to dive out again. They know you're permanently there in a committed engagement. Your heart's in the right place, you've got the right politics, all that kind of thing.

You can't just leap into a relationship.

It's quite interesting though, Jeanette, that I quite often get emails from people overseas, whether it's Germany or Chile or United States, saying "I've read about Maori education, or I've read about kohanga reo, kaupapa Māori philosophy, or something indigenous in New Zealand, and I really want to come and find out about it. Can you help me work in a school/learn from Maori people/learn the culture/et cetera?"

I've got to write back as though I'm writing to anthropologists of old.

You can't just pop up and say, "Hey Māori people I want to know about you. Sit down with me and tell me all about yourself." That ain't gonna happen.

I mean just imagine if it was you? If someone popped into your house and said "Hey Alison, I'm really interested in you, you know will you just let me ask you a whole lot of questions about your culture and what you had for dinner and whatever."…

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Mark Solomon, the former kaiwhakahaere (Chair) of Ngāi Tahu's governing council, speaks with Nic Lowe about leadership in this highlight of WORD Christchurch 2021.

Listen to Tā (Sir) Mark Solomon in conversation with Nic Lowe at Word Christchurch 2021

In 1998, on the eve of Ngāi Tahu reaching settlement with the Crown, former foundryman Mark Solomon stepped into the role of kaiwhakahaere (Chair) of the iwi's governing council, Te Rūnanga o Ngāi Tahu. Taking the place of Sir Tipene O'Regan, he had taken up a high-profile position as one of the most visible Māori leaders in the country. His memoir Mana Whakatipu (co-authored with Mark Revington), details his years at the helm of the tribe.

Mark Solomon:

I'd gone out to Tuahiwi bitterly cold, and got there before the home people arrived for a mihi whakatau. It's freezing, so when I responded I just stood up and gave the response. Came to the hongi and the haruru and I get to one of the elders, Jono Cross. And he goes "Are you in a hurry, boy?" My response was "No, why?" to which he replied, "You've got your coat on."

I said, "Yeah, 'cause its freezing, man." All he said was, "No. It looks like you're ready to run."

That November we had a hui down at Ōraka Aparima, at Colac Bay. Anyway it was freezing. My turn to speak on the paepae so I stood up and I took my coat off. I could hear a young girl behind us say to her grandmother, "What's he taking his coat off for? It's freezing." She said, "He's showing respect to the people."

So Jono's little question - "You in a hurry boy?" - was a lesson that when you stand up in front of people, you take your coat off. It's a traditional thing, a bit like Asians when they handle business cards. It's always with two hands with the name facing you and they present it. And if they ever present it from a single hand it's always from the right. There's a simple rationale: all traditional Asian swordspeople were right-handed, To hand something with your left leaves your right hand - your weapon hand - free, so it's taken as an insult. You stand up in a paepae, you take your coat off 'cause you say "I'm here to talk, I'm not here for war."

Nic Lowe:

When you actually took on the role of kaiwhakahaere were you ready for it?

Mark Solomon:…

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Two crime writers - Jacqueline Bublitz and Paul Cleave - discuss how they create memorable stories in this highlight of 2021's Word Christchurch festival.

Listen to Jacqueline Bublitz and Paul Cleave in conversation with Jo Malcolm at Word Christchurch 2021

Highlights of the discussion

Jo Malcolm:

I've read that you can write 7000 words a day which seems like an extraordinary number.

Paul Cleave:

Yeah but I've got nothing else to do.

Jo Malcolm:

Are you actually making it up as you go along?

Paul Cleave:

Oh yeah, I don't plot. I wish I could. The only time I've ever plotted a book was I was never able to write it.

So that initial idea - it's normally a character or a big chapter, but never really a concept. I just kind of go for it. I can see the chapter I'm working on and maybe what's going to come after it, maybe one or two chapters ahead, especially in the beginning.

I'm in my office all day long so when I'm there it's whatever happens on the day. It's kind of cool because I'm entertaining myself.

I really don't know what's going to happen and when you get those "A-ha!" moments it's brilliant. I do know a lot of authors who plot  and I would say it's probably a 50 50 mix. I've spoken to people who spend six months just making notes and having a pin board in their office and just putting it all up there. They can write it pretty quickly because they can pull it all together. I just have a notebook with whatever's going on but I really have no idea where things are going.

Jo Malcolm:

So, in terms of actually taking your reader along with it you're almost going through that journey yourself?

Paul Cleave:

Absolutely. And then you fix it up with rewrites. Because you don't know what's coming up, you realise you don't have the foundation, so you've got to go back and put those pieces in. It can then be tricky because every little change you make will make a ripple effect that can go right through the book. Sometimes it will get picked up by a copy editor and sometimes it won't get picked up at all, and you'll have a reader who will email and say "Well actually you've said this," and you're like "OMG that's right." So that can be very tricky.

Jo Malcolm:

Paul, your novels are based in Christchurch. How important is that location? It's obviously it's very familiar to you, but you could set them anywhere.

Paul Cleave:…

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At the time of the COP26 summit held in Glasgow, Kim Hill speaks with journalist Tom Doig and veteran scientist Dave Lowe about the climate crisis. A highlight of 2021 Word Christchurch.

Kim Hill speaks with journalist Tom Doig and scientist Dave Lowe about the climate crisis. (A highlight of the 2021 WORD Christchurch Festival)

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During the course of a wide-ranging conversation, Tom Doig and Dave Lowe read from their recent books about their own experience of climate change in action.

Tom Doig reads from Hazelwood:

They told us it was going to be bad, and it was bad.

We got up early in the morning, soaked all the tea towels and some spare sheets and strung them up over Johnny's vege garden. Then we sat in the kitchen and waited for the sun to rise. It got hot, then hotter, then impossibly hot. We watched as Johnny's tomato and kale and snowpeas drooped, shrivelled and died. It was over C40˚. It was ten in the morning.

It was 2009. It was one more Saturday in Melbourne.

As Johnny's garden cooked, I stayed inside and tried to watch DVDs, but it was too hot to concentrate. If I opened the front door, the air was a searing full-body punch. A friend texted me. I walked down the road to the shops, and my thongs melted off my feet.

By 3:04pm on 7th February 2009, it had reached C46.4˚. That was ten degrees hotter than the human body. That was unliveable.

I went to a barbecue that night. It was too hot to cook, so on the ride over I bought a couple of big bags of salt and vinegar chips. When I got there, everyone else had done the same. We sat around drinking beer, eating a fine range of salted snacks, and asking each other if everyone had heard from our friend Jenneke. She was in rural Victoria, and no-one could get through to her. Jenneke was a volunteer firefighter along with her Dad Vica.

That night she escaped death, just, when Vica drove their fire engine off the road, up over a kerb, through a chain-link fence into the middle of a cricket oval moments before the Maryville fire engulfed the town. As they hid in the fire truck with blankets over their heads, adrenaline buzzing in her ears, Jenneke watched houses and gas tanks exploding on all sides. She watched a car driving round slowly, trying to find a safe place. She doesn't know what happened to that car.

"I had the strong feeling of being very, very isolated," she said. "We could listen to the truck's radio, but couldn't radio out ourselves as all the radio towers had burnt down. The radio described all the fires round the state, but said nothing about Marysville. It was this strange feeling that the whole town was burning up, and no-one outside even knew."…

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Dr Hinemoa Elder, Kyle Mewburn, Anjum Rahman, Julie Zarifeh and Emily Writes explore very different aspects of courage and adventure in their lives. They talk with Jo Malcolm.

Five women explore diverse perspectives on what it means to be adventurous.

Dr Hinemoa Elder, Kyle Mewburn, Anjum Rahman, Julie Zarifeh and Emily Writes speak about very different aspects of courage and adventure in a conversation chaired by Jo Malcolm. (A highlight of the 2021 WORD Christchurch Festival)

Listen to the conversation

Dr Hinemoa Elder's book Aroha was the top-selling New Zealand non-fiction title of 2021.

In it, she explains the meaning of Maori 52 whakatauki - traditional Maori sayings - drawing out their messages for today, as well as the philosophical context within which they were created. In her conversation, the respected psychiatrist focuses on how we can live better lives, in harmony with the planet and each other.

Kyle Mewburn's memoir Faking It is an account of growing up, and the process of outwardly becoming the woman she always felt herself to be inside. She speaks of her remarkable journey sustained by a long-term relationship.

Anjum Rahman talks about how her role as one of the significant voices of Muslim women in Aotearoa became supercharged by the terrible events of the terror attacks on the Christchurch mosques.

Clinical psychologist Julie Zarifeh experienced tragedy in her own life with not one, but two, unexpected deaths in her immediate family. Her way of coping was to take time off for travel and fulfilling personal challenges.

Emily Writes makes a powerful case for the idea that adventure and courage can be found in the most ordinary details of home life for parents of young children.

About the speakers

Dr Hinemoa Elder

Dr Elder is a child and adolescent psychiatrist and has worked in a number of mental health settings including the Child and Family Unit/ Mother Baby Unit at Starship Hospital, in Auckland. She is also a Maori Strategic Leader for the Centre of Research Excellence (CoRE) for the Ageing Brain. Her book Aroha is a Penguin Books publication.

Instagram: @drhinemoa

Kyle Mewburn

Kyle Mewburn is one of New Zealand's most eclectic and prolific writers. Her titles have been translated into eighteen languages and won numerous awards including Children's Book of the Year. Her memoir Faking It is published by Penguin.

kylemewburn.com

Twitter: @kylemewburn

Anjum Rahman…

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In 2001, the Norwegian freighter Tampa - crammed with more than 400 asylum-seekers rescued from a sinking fishing boat - was turned away from Australia. Abbas Nazari, aged seven, was onboard.

In 2001, the Norwegian freighter Tampa - crammed with more than 400 asylum-seekers who'd been rescued from a sinking fishing boat - was turned away from Australia.

A seven-year-old boy Afghan boy named Abbas Nazari, who was on board with his family, eventually found a home in Christchurch.

In 2019, Abbas went to Georgetown University in Washington DC on a Fulbright scholarship and eventually graduated with a Masters in Security Studies.

He tells his story in the book After the Tampa.

Listen to Abbas Nazari in conversation with Helen Clark (NZ prime minister at the time of 'the Tampa affair') and the University of Canterbury's Ekant Veer at WORD Christchurch 2021:

Abbas Nazari: 'Caught between the endless ocean and an unseeing earth, we chose life'

Abbas Nazari:

When it comes to telling the refugee story, it's usually involving a statistic or maybe a country of origin. Lost in that discussion is the enormity of having to make a decision to board up your house, to jump in the back of a truck or on a boat, or to walk across continents. What's lost is the human struggle, the personal journey, the names, the faces and the conversations that take place.

That's why After the Tampa is not about me.

In fact, you could copy and paste Afghanistan with the name of another conflict zone that's experiencing upheaval.

One of my favourite passages in the book talks about that, beginning with the time when my family got on the boat:

When we see a trail of desperate people fleeing conflict, perhaps on the tv news, we miss the points in time when a parent has to make a life-altering decision on behalf of a whole family. To stay or to go, to endure known misery or to march towards an unknown future.

Caught between the endless ocean and an uncertain earth, we chose life. Some kind of future beckoned and desperation powdered us to climb aboard. It seemed everyone was coming to that same conclusion and a mild scramble erupted. Luggage was tossed onboard in a swarm of activity, noise, chaos, crying children. Adults waded out nervously, most touching sea water for the first time in their lives.

Today my mother recalls the curtain of fear that hung before her as she walked towards the boat. She battled with the voice in her head that insistently urged her to stay on dry land, to cling to certainty however bleak. With every step she felt she was dragging a heavy chain. Through teary eyes she could hardly see the ladder as her feet one by one left solid ground. There was no turning back now. …

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