Finding Nature

Imagine if there was a way to improve your quality of living and wellbeing - from your sense of creativity to feelings of clarity, boost the performance of your immune system and reduce stress, enhance your sleep and gain insights into your subconscious, and it was all available right now to you, free of cost? It’s too to be true isn’t it? Well, today’s conversation with hypnobreath practitioner D...

So imagine swimming with humpback whales in the tropical waters of Tonga. Now imagine spending enough time swimming with them over five years to end up with 11,000 portrait photographs of them. Not wide angle shots from afar, but up close and personally, feelings their fins, watching the movement of an eye, hearing the sound and power of their voice and song. Imagine swimming with tiger sharks, wh...

This best of anthology is about showcasing the year that was on this show, as well as offering snippets from some of the brilliant people I had the pleasure of speaking with this year - either to be reminded of their wisdom or to discover who you may not have heard. Today’s best of captures insights and wisdom from ten truly great professionals and people who do this work. From a new era of fire a...

I’ve had 50 incredible guests in 2025, and you guys, the audience, have been there throughout, I’m grateful for that and for your support and for everything that I've had the good fortune of experiencing as a result of going on this podcast journey. Over the year, we covered a wide variety of topics and subject matters. And as a sustainability podcast, I pride myself on trying to embrace and...

Now today’s guest has experienced the despairing lows of being an exile from his home country, and the terrifying traumas of torture, being disappeared and the murder of his family and closest friends. When the daily going’s on seem overwhelming, the story of the life of Hector Aristizabal is remarkable in what he has endured, what he has evolved through and how he shows up in service and with com...

This week’s guest is an icon of Australia’s environmental movement and someone I was both thrilled and daunted getting to spend some time with recently. Bob Brown is on the show and he is someone who needs little introduction. Politician, environmentalist, doctor, activist - few in this country have done as much to protect and preserve wild places, to advocate for same sex rights and challenge pol...

Welcome to or welcome back to the Finding Nature podcast. My name is Nathan Robertson-Ball and this is my show where each week I go longer form with the people who are on the vanguard of driving and delivering work that matters in pursuit of safer, healthier and more just futures. This show is about examining and exploring our inner nature, our relationships to others and our place in the world as...

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 othe...

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 behavio...

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, an...

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 o...

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 A...

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 incr...

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...

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 refuge...

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 u...

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 c...

This week on the show I have the sister and brother duo Emily and Jack Rowland. Individually Emily and Jack are up to vital work across ocean conservation, plastics eradication, food system revitalisation and equitable health care outcomes, but together they create a dynamic and diverse way of being and doing in the world that I wanted to bring onto the show. One thing I’m conscious of with this s...

Today on the show I have Elaine Johnson - a leading landowner advocate and environment and climate lawyer who’s led some of the most consequential cases against fossil fuel expansion in this state. Her work in and with communities who are opposing the deleterious local impacts of more pollution and being able to frame that within a larger climate change debate is truly remarkable and vital work. I...

Today’s episode is a different one and coincides wth the beginning of Spring here in the Southern Hemisphere. Spring is a time of renewal, rebirth and new beginnings. From ecosystems and landscapes bursting with new life to warmer days and longer daylight hours, the potential of spring rings eternal. I wanted to do this as so many guests have spoken about pivotal moments in their lives that repres...

I’m joined on the show today by Surya Deva. He’s a Professor at the Macquarie Law School, where he’s also the Director of the Environmental Law Research Centre and Business & Human Rights Justice Lab. Surya is also part way through his first term period as the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Development . He’s served as a member of the UN’s Working Group on Business and Human Rights, he’...

John Vaillant is today’s guest, and this was a very special conversation that sat within a few days of spending a lot of time together and riffing on everything from new types of fires to debating the merits and qualities of RM Williams or Blundstone boots. John is a renowned author and writer, who for over thirty years has plied his trade in book writing and journalism. His narrative non fiction...

Speaking of the best in the business, today’s guest is Kenneth Roth, a global icon of the human rights movement who perhaps more than just anybody else on this planet has shaped and influenced the defence and promotion of human rights everywhere. Ken was the Executive Director of Human Rights Watch from 1993 when the organisation had around 50 staff until he stepped down from this post thirty year...

Jimmy Stanton-Cooke is on the show this week, and I am so pleased to be bringing you this chat. Already Jimmy has lived the life of a vagabond, a ratbag and a pioneer as well as an agricultural science high school teacher. Few are like him, and to have him on the show today was a long held aspiration and a chance to get beyond the high energy public persona who lived without half of his beard for...

Andy Marlow is on the show today. He’s one of Australia’s most credentialed and awarded architects and passivhaus designers, and has built a career on the forefront of imagining, designing and creating better places for people who breathe. Andy’s career has spanned custom design and built projects on single homes to large commercial projects to civic centre and entire urban renewal projects. There...