Rare Air with Meri Fatin

Meri Fatin

Fascinating lives, deep convictions, dedication to self-mastery...these are the stories within Rare Air. Meri Fatin's curiosity and light touch as an interviewer allows the teller to guide the narrative. Prepare to be enlightened. read less
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Petra Tschakert: Geologist, Anthropologist, IPCC Scientist
03-12-2022
Petra Tschakert: Geologist, Anthropologist, IPCC Scientist
"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.
Peter Newman: Environmental Scientist and Sustainable Transport expert
19-11-2022
Peter Newman: Environmental Scientist and Sustainable Transport expert
"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  _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 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
Tom Cronin: The Portal
22-10-2019
Tom Cronin: The Portal
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.
Matthew Kemp: Inventing the Artificial Womb
21-09-2019
Matthew Kemp: Inventing the Artificial Womb
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: Writing The Electric Hotel
26-08-2019
Dominic Smith: Writing The Electric Hotel
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.
Chris Bedding: Piratical Priest
17-12-2018
Chris Bedding: Piratical Priest
The word is "repartee". Anglican priest Father Chris Bedding has it by the truckload, yet he's extremely careful to make sure that his significant comedic and improvisational talents are kept out of the Church context. Called to the priesthood while still at school, there's no doubt Chris takes the complex and demanding role as parish priest very seriously. But in the eight years since he arrived in Perth from NSW he has also found a supportive artistic community in which he's been able to develop his other passion - improvisation, comedy and acting. In response to Chris voicing his guilt about making time for this passion, one of his parishioners said " Honestly if we were getting one hundred percent of your creative energy we wouldn't be able to cope! It's good that you have another outlet." With fellow comedian and trainee Uniting Church minister Paul "Werzel" Montague, Chris has developed a comedy act called Pirate Church, which has toured nationally, melding the "inherently hysterical" comedic potential of religion and piracy where nothing is sacred and "progressive leftie hipsters like us" are the first to be pilloried. In this interview Father Chris also reflects on the responsibilities of his role, his commitment to issues of social justice including marriage equality and the current challenges of being a member of the clergy. This interview was recorded in 2016.  Much has happened in Fr Chris's career since then. Recorded at the studios or RTRFM in Perth, Western Australia
Cat Hope: New Music Superstar
17-12-2018
Cat Hope: New Music Superstar
Composer Cat Hope has been described as “a superstar of Australian new music” best known for her graphic scores and new score-reading technologies.   It’s fascinating to wonder how the daughter of a military family with no especial leaning towards the arts has ended up being an internationally recognised authority on experimental music. Despite the bass guitar being her first love (instrumentally speaking), Cat Hope began as a flautist - it was the main instrument through which she achieved her undergraduate degree at the University of Western Australia. She has always been a political animal, and described herself in her university days as being, to all intents and purposes -  “a punk”  - studying classical music by day and attending thrash gigs and engaging in active anarchic action by night.   Yet it was at UWA that Cat's ears were first tuned to new (experimental) music, where she realised that classical and new music are not completely separate…that new classical music is often an outcome of new political happenings and that some of it sounded a lot like the punk music she was already listening to. A long time spent in Europe, particularly in the heady days of post Wall Berlin, Cat refined her bass playing, learned how to write a solid pop tune and finally settled back in Perth in 1997, continuing to play and compose in her groundbreaking style here despite the creative brain drain and cultural cringe of the time, forming bands including Gata Negra, Lux Mammoth and Decibel. Two decades later, as an established member of the local, national and international arts community, one (as she says) with “the privilege of a full time job”, Cat Hope has visibly returned to her political roots, taking a stand against the Federal Government’s severe funding cuts to the arts and actively promoting women in the new music arena. In 2017 Cat takes up a brilliant new appointment as Head of the Sir Zelman Cowan School of Music at Monash University in Melbourne. Find examples of Cat Hope's music here on her BandCamp page.  Three Gates Media thanks Cat immensely for this conversation. This episode of Rare Air was recorded in 2016 at the studios of RTRFM 92.1 in Mount Lawley, WA Mixed by Adrian Sardi of Sugarland Studios Music "The Summit" by Blue Dot Sessions from freemusicarchive.org