It's easy to criticise governments, but hard to be one. How do you solve the pressing problems facing our world, in the face of powerful forces that don't want them solved and a population fed on distraction and disinformation? This dilemma means, as I have been saying in various ways on this blog for some years now, that our problems won't be solved by electing the right government, they will only be solved by each of us working hard to change course and take our governments along with us.
Sometimes this appears a forlorn hope but plenty of activists encourage us not to give in to this sort of despair. Recently I reviewed Rebecca Solnit's lovely book, Hope in the Dark, in which she shows that despite what we might think, the activists of the late 20th and early 21st centuries have had a surprising amount of success. We should celebrate this success, and keep working to achieve more.
The book is likewise ambitious in the same crazy-brave way. Hollo uses the term 'ecology' to point literally to the way living systems work, and figuratively to the idea that human systems (since humans are also living beings) can and should also be ecological. Yet our current systems are ecological in neither sense. In the literal sense, we base our society on the idea that the biosphere is an unlimited resource, there for us to use as we wish. This illusion leads us to do irreparable harm. Similarly, in our political systems we try to operate in a top-down, 'command and control' paradigm which expects that society and the natural world will change as a result of laws imposed from without.
Against this, he presents us with the way ecological systems work. Here, everything is interlinked. Living systems are complex sets of interactions between multiple creatures, each with its own niche and role. Remove one organism, or introduce something new, and you risk harming the whole system with the effects flowing through in complex and unpredictable ways. This is not to say these systems are necessarily stable or constant - natural systems fluctuate over time, and change as a result of external forces like floods, storms or earthquakes. But systems will be more or less resilient to these shocks depending on their health and diversity. Attempts by humans to 'manage' these systems need to understand and work with this diversity and the relationships between parts of the system, rather than focusing on one isolated aspect of it such as saving a single iconic species.
Human systems are, in this sense, just another sort of ecological system. Paul Keating likes to say 'when you change the government, you change the country', but actually it's not that simple. The formal system of government, and the parties which vie for control of it, are just one part of complex social systems which include individuals, local communities, civil society groups, corporations and so forth. All of these are sites for transformation or resisters of transformation and we need to work across these systems if we want to bring about real, lasting change.
This understanding has led Tim himself gradually away from electoral politics (although not completely so) and into a more holistic understanding of change-making. To present this picture politically he draws on various sources - anarchist theorists Peter Kropotkin and Murray Bookchin, modern-day thinkers and activists like Naomi Klein and Indigenous thinkers alike Tyson Yunkaporta and Bruce Pascoe. He also discusses various movements for change - Amanda Cahill's Next Economy which works with stakeholders in fossil-fuel dependent communities in Australia to help them think through their future options in a decarbonised world; the radical Green Anarchists of Barcelona en Comu (Barcelona in Common), London's Participatory City and the bottom-up governance of the Rojava region in disputed Kurdistan which has bypassed armed nationalist revolution in favour of simply building an autonomous, essentially anarchist state starting at the community and city level.
What all these movements have in common is that they are focused on working from the bottom up. Although some have government funding or support, and others have taken over at least some of the levers of government themselves, they are focused on building relationships between people in communities and supporting them to take control of their own destiny. Hence Rojava has no real central government (which would simply be crushed by one or other of the military powers which lay claim to Kurdistan) but works through local and regional assemblies. Barcelona en Comu has taken over the local government of Barcelona via a democratic election and has proceeded to re-orient its decision-making processes towards local control and decision-making. The Australian and British examples are less all-encompassing - the Participatory City approach is based around founding cooperatives in poor communities, while Next Economy works within existing structures to make plans which can be shared and supported across communities.
With this way of thinking about politics, Hollo tells us that his proudest achievement in public life is not his part in the passing of the Clean Energy Act in 2011 but his role in creating a network of Buy Nothing groups in Canberra. These grassroots networks are informal community swap groups - if you have something you don't want or need any more you can offer it in the group for free, if you need something you ask the group if anyone has one that they don't need any more. This is a classic, and very simple, piece of grass-roots community work - no-one is particularly in charge, people build supportive and friendly relationships with their neighbours, we save resources and money and we reduce the extent to which we contribute to the ongoing plundering and pollution of the biosphere.
Hollo applies this framework to each of the four pillars of the global Green movement - 'ecological sustainability, grassroots democracy, social and economic justice, and peace and nonviolence' to quote from the Green Institute website. In each case, an ecological approach enables activists and ordinary people to build the kind of world we need. It's change from the bottom up, not from the top down.
It seems to me that Tim Hollo is onto something. His understanding is hard-won, like any important learning. The sequel to the heady success of negotiating a genuinely progressive climate policy in Australia took place just too years later as Hollo sat in the public gallery watching while the Abbot Government repealed the carbon price and then danced on the floor of parliament for joy at returning to screwing up the planet for profit. Hollo and his friends made good policy, but it didn't last.
Why did this policy fail? You could argue, as the Labor Party loves to, that it was all the Greens fault - that they pushed the Gillard Government into a policy that lacked popular support after sabotaging the Rudd Governments more 'realistic' policy two years earlier. Personally, I don't buy it. You could also argue that it only partly failed - the carbon price was repealed but other parts of the policy continued including the Renewable Energy Target, the Clean Energy Finance Corporation and the Australian Renewable Energy Agency. Still, it's beyond dispute that the Labor/Greens alliance did not succeed in making long term emissions reductions.
A good part of this is that in 2011, and in 2013, there was not a powerful enough groundswell of people demanding change. Certainly if you asked Australians if they wanted stronger climate action, as the Climate of the Nation survey has done year after year, a substantial majority would say 'yes'. But when it came down to it, this did not weigh in the balance as strongly as their fears of job loss or inflation, or their dismay at the chaos in the Labor Party. The power of the corporate media did not succeed in convincing people that climate change was a hoax, but it did succeed in downgrading it in people's imaginations, while upgrading their own sense of insecurity.
You can't overcome this sort of counter-force through top-down politics, because top-down politics is part of the problem. It isolates us and makes us passive. This is why the Buy Nothing groups are arguably a greater achievement than the Climate Change bill. They build community and trust. They help people to see that there is a better way, that they are not alone, that they don't need to spend as much money or buy as much stuff as the advertisers tell them. It's this that creates the space for lasting change, not just in the way we buy and sell at the margins but in the way we think about our communities and our futures. It creates a base from which we can imagine bigger changes.
And this same type of local, grass-roots work is what has driven the most notable phenomenon of the 2022 election - the rise of the Teal Independents and the election of more Greens in the lower house. Although the Teals in particular had access to a good donor base, and the Greens have an established national infrastructure, their campaigns were built on strong local connections. Here in Brisbane, where Teals are not really a thing yet, the Greens got three people elected to Brisbane seats by having a strong, energetic group of volunteers out door-knocking and a deep awareness of the issues that mattered to their local communities. Electors in those communities felt that these members would be representing them.
This contrasts really strongly with my contact with my local Labor member in the lead-up to the election. I went along for a coffee meeting he set up in my local cafe, and local residents raised various issues they were concerned about. For each one, he listened for a moment, and then told us with great enthusiasm about Labor's policy on this issue. When I thought about the meeting afterwards it was quite clear to me what was going on. He didn't really view himself as our representative in Parliament, and wasn't that interested in what we had to say. He saw himself as the Labor Party's representative in our community, as a kind of sales rep whose job was to sell us a set of policies that had been developed elsewhere. We could take it or leave it. Ultimately, we took it, although the Greens vote has been gradually increasing in our communities over the years, but I don't think the support was especially enthusiastic. He's a decent enough bloke, and they're not as bad as the other mob.
And that's the thing. If democracy is just turning up to vote and relying on governments to solve our problems, we will always have a choice between more or less bad options, between different products sold to us by clever sales people. This is because we are leaving the field to others, to the corporate interests who are always in politicians' ears. Our movements for change will only be successful to the extent that we work at the same time for local. grassroots change that gives us a sense of control and relationship, and for big scale change that addresses the overwhelming momentum of destruction we are currently preparing for ourselves and our children. The two things belong together and are what makes politics truly ecological.
We might or might not succeed in making the big changes. The world is a big place, and the power of global capital is huge. But even if we fail, we will still have strong grass-roots networks and relationships which will leave us in a stronger position to deal with whatever comes our way.
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