Full Transcript Below

Morag:

Thank you so much for joining me on the show today, Tim. It’s an absolute delight to have you here in conversation.

Tim:

Thanks for having me, Morag.

Morag:

There’s so many aspects of the work that you do that I’m really excited for us to explore together. Some of the things that you’re doing just for listeners to know at the moment, you’re a Greens candidate, you’re a musician, you’re a writer, you run the The Green Institute, you’re a dad. I’m wondering, what else have I missed, there’s so many different aspects to the work that you do from your creative life, to your professional life, to community life, to your family life and some of the conversations that we’ve had before, when we’ve met, have been around these issues of change of leadership of where is power and how we move towards the kind of society that we dream of and that we know is the kind of regenerative and ecologically and socially just world. Before we start heading off in the direction of talking about what that is and how we move to it, I wonder whether you might just spend a moment reflecting on what was your point of awakening about social and ecological justice? What sparked you to dedicate your life as you do, wholly and completely to this work?

Tim:

I think there’s a few things that from very early childhood kind of pushed me in that direction. One is growing up as the child of refugees and the grandchild of Holocaust survivors and so from a very, very early age, I guess, I grew up with stories of both some of the most awful things that humans can do to each other and in terms of the things that powerful people, in some of the so called most civilized places in the world, due to power less people and at the same time the extraordinary things that extraordinarily brave members of the community groups do for each other at those moments that it’s through the actions of good people in relationship with other good people who saved countless lives, when governments were destroying and corporations working with governments to destroy it. So I grew up with this extremely strong sense and my family, not just the Holocaust, but my family, fled multiple times from powerful people from Czarist Russia, from the pogroms under terrorists Russia, from the communists in China and in Hungary. So I really grew up very strongly with the sense that centralized power is the problem actually, that people exercising coercive, dominating power over other people is fundamentally the problem. So that’s been something from a very early childhood. Another thing from very early childhood was just this love of nature and I grew up bushwalking a lot and spending time up in the mountains and in the ocean and grew up from childhood with a deep, deep love of nature and then kind of, in late teenage, starting to notice things like the Rio Earth Summit and coming to this realization that love of nature, in the context of the destruction of nature, meant that this was going to be the key theme of my life, basically. The crisis of ecological destruction and kind of marrying that with these ideas of centralized coercive power being problematic and kind of come to how we need to work for change, to protect the environment while understanding ourselves as humans and as human society to be part of the environment and completely connected to it. 

One other final thing is as you mentioned, I’m a musician, and there’s a few things that I think I learned from music from a very early age. One is transcendence. It’s that I don’t think you can be a musician or a music level without understanding something about transcendence, about the greater than human and that’s through what music does to you. But it’s also in terms of performing and playing music and playing music with other people. There’s just this amazing, intense thing that happens when you’re connecting with other people and you’re creating something with other people and I think you can have that as a member of an audience as well, being part of this extraordinary creative thing that happens when people come together to do something like that. So that was a tremendously powerful lesson and then going into the music industry. Also, in my late teens, seeing how capitalism destroys creativity and destroys people and destroys artists. I saw in the music industry in Sydney, in the 90s, I just saw people’s lives being destroyed by venues being replaced by pokie machines and extraordinarily talented people just being left behind and destroyed, while other people who knew the right people or knew how to spend money on the right things would succeed.

Morag:

Since we’re talking about music. Do you want to just mention the green music? Because that’s something that you’ve created, isn’t it?

Tim:

Yeah, so that kind of came out of all of these various processes. As a musician, I was always trying to do things like talk on stage about environmental issues and occasionally write and perform songs about environmental issues and things. 

Morag:

So you’re a singer and a …singer and a viola player. 

Tim:

Singer and a viola player. The band is for playing. When my oldest child was born, I kind of went, “Okay, we’ve actually got to really walk the talk here” and so I insisted that our albums were recorded in studios that are 100% renewable, powered and reducing our travel and recycled cardboard packaging for the CDs and all that kind of stuff and through the process of doing that, I started talking to a lot of people, in the industry, about there are things we can do, we can fix this, because music industry is full of all of these forward thinking people just kind of taking part in an industry which is extraordinarily destructive. And around about the same time, I guess, for a few years, as I was having those conversations and a little bit down the track, I was working for Christine Milne, in the Australian Senate, as one of her advisers and through that period, we managed to get this amazing package of climate reforms through the parliament with a carbon price and renewable energy bank and all of these kinds of things. And then they got destroyed. Because we hadn’t managed to change politics, we’ve managed to get something through the parliament, but we hadn’t managed to change politics. So I kind of burned out of politics really badly at that point and kind of stepped back and when we actually were going to do some big deep change here, we’ve got to do some social change, we’ve got to start to shift cultures and social norms and ideas about who we are as people and as a society and as an ecology. So I put my big focus for several years, then into the role of music in that the role of musicians as cultural leaders, using shifts in behavior in the music industry, trying to phase out plastic water bottles, shifting packaging, moving to 100% renewables using those kinds of things as drivers for social change.

Morag:

So this is really interesting, because you’re talking about centralized power in government and cultural change and this burnout, but yet you put yourself right in the midst of it all again, being a candidate for the Greens for Canberra. So tell me a little bit about how you present in that space from this perspective of cultural change and being able to put yourself in a space where you can, from within the system, be helping to bring the changes you want to see?

Tim:

This is one of the reasons why I’m running for a lower house seat, in fact, when the Greens are kind of most often focused on in the Senate, because I think there’s an amazing role that we can actually use with local parliamentarians, that is virtually never used. The idea of setting up a House of Representatives is about trying to elect representatives for the community to take their issues into parliament’s and it virtually never operates like that, certainly not in the Australian context. It’s just ticking a box, usually for one of the major parties and sending them off and basically voting in a presidential way for the leader of that party. Whereas I think there’s an extraordinary capacity, which folks, like the voices for the entire project, are really leading in very interesting ways. But there are others who are doing similar kinds of things to say there should be a role for the local member actually, as being the way I put it as being a kind of a facilitator for the community. I would like to be an MP as facilitator for the community who can bring the community together and host these deliberative, participatory conversations and actually get people together to think about what are the issues that we are concerned about, how can we talk through them together in ways that actually enable us to find creative solutions and then, as an MP, take that voice into the parliament and take the solutions and the ideas into parliament. But more than that, actually take the process in the parliament and start to demonstrate that there are other ways of governing. That governing doesn’t have to be this top down coercive approach governing, it can be about how you create space for the community to find our own way forward together. It’s a radically different form of governance and I think it’s probably in the long run going to be impossible to do within the current political system and we’re going to need dramatic reform of the way our political and economic systems work. But what I would like to try to do is demonstrate the possibility of that future through the current system. I think there is scope to do that.

Morag:

So what are some of those processes that you’re talking about in terms of engaging people? Because something that I read on your side, you were saying, “Big changes are possible, but change won’t last unless it comes from the community” and so this idea of it’s not just bottom up and it’s not just top down? There’s something else going on in between here and this is the space that I kind of, correct me if I’m wrong, but this is kind of the space where you are . Is this facilitating the change and the communication and being almost like a bridge or catalyst for change? Within both systems, I suppose. But what are some of those systems of communication or of relationship building that you’ve found that you might work with or have worked with already that can help to unlock some of these conversations?

Tim:

So I think there’s all sorts of really different ways and before I get to some of those examples, I want to pick up just briefly on the bottom up and top down. Because this is something I’ve been thinking about a lot in the context of encapsulating my idea of politics through the word ecology. And what is ecological politics and this idea of interdependence and interconnection and interdependent diversity and a lot of the time in these kinds of conversations, people talk about grassroots politics and I love that terminology. It’s really important that the grass roots are what I’m trying to encapsulate. Actually, ecosystems are the grassroots, they’re also the bushes. They’re also the trees. They’re also the birds that fly between and the insects and it’s the mycelium in the soil and all of it and the ecology only works because of the interdependence of all of those different parts. We tend to think of democracy in the Western way, as the superstructure of powerful people, and everybody else who occasionally votes to elect the relevant people to the superstructure and you kind of elect them once every few years and they go off and they govern you for a few years and then they come back and you’ll vote for them again. That’s utterly different from any ecological system. It’s a complete failure in those terms. So what we really need to try to do is find mechanisms of interconnectivity everywhere we possibly can and build on that. 

There are some obvious things like simply creating space for citizens assemblies and that kind of thing. I’m a big fan of those in kind of institutional ways, but also in quite ordinary kind of practical day to day ways of just bringing people together and having conversations. That’s something I did in the last federal election campaign and had grand plans to do before COVID interrupted this time. We’re still hoping to do some of those where going out into a community for instance and you book a date for a public meeting and say, we want to discuss with your suburb, what are the issues that are relevant to you and then you letterbox the whole suburb to invite people and then you door knock in that suburb and you say, “Hey, we want to be talking with your people in the neighborhood about what the issues are” and you start gleaning what’s going on and what’s happening and you listen and you bring them together and then you sit down in a relational way. That’s the key with the citizens assemblies and really well developed and well run deliberative sessions like these are amazing where you can bring people together who might have quite drastically opposing views on a particular idea often in local communities, it’s a particular development, do you want this development to go ahead or do you not? Through deliberative sessions, you can have conversations which aren’t about yes or no, they’re about finding what we love about our community, finding what we value, which is usually the same. Because humans generally value the same things. We value connectivity, we value green space, we value the capacity to meet people and all these kinds of things and finding solutions together. And through those kinds of conversations, almost always you can find a really constructive solution that most people will at least be willing to live with. So I’m a big fan of those deliberative kinds of sessions. But they don’t need to be so formalized. It’s really a lot of the time just about listening with open ears and hearing what’s going on and then feeding back and conversing. It should be a conversation that ideas build upon each other so that you can take it towards a solution.

Morag:

Yes I think that’s wonderful and I’m still smiling, because just what you said about it being an ecology, it just shifts everything because it takes away that whole dualism of it and that it’s not that we’re against them or we got to fight this system. It’s we are it and it is us and we are the community and we’re everywhere within that system and the relationship. It’s all about that interconnectedness or the patterns of connection within and finding ways to open up the possibilities, those unprecedented possibilities that happen when you sit in conversation or space and take away that “us and them” and I think that’s kind of a huge possibility and just framing it in that way. I think it is a massive mind shift and so I wonder whether this is what you’ve been focusing on with your writing, too? Isn’t it like this whole concept of leaving democracy? Can you maybe just describe what a living democracy is and what that looks like?

Tim:

I’m currently, as I mentioned, kind of in the process of trying to cut about 20,000 words from my book on this, which is, fingers crossed, gonna be out next year, called Living Democracy, and I came to that title because I’d been talking about democracy as ecology and really wanting to kind of build up this idea and people kept saying to me, “You can’t have that as the title of a book. It’s too complex, nobody will read ecological democracy.” But then in discussion with a few friends, and again this is the thing when writing a book is such a communal process, really, if you want to do it well, it’s having all these conversations with people because then you have this aha moment, which comes out of somewhere else that you weren’t expecting. So what I’m trying to say with Living Democracy is three things in one: living democracy, as in democracy, is a living thing. Actually, in its own right, we have to understand, as we understand that the human body is an ecosystem. We understand that more and more now in scientific terms. It’s not this individual block. It’s actually an ecosystem more than half of elf who sell or don’t even have Human DNA, we are an ecosystem of a whole lot of different organisms and a community is this combination of so many different organisms interacting. 

Democracy can and should be imagined as simply the extension of human society and one of the tools that human society uses to self govern. So we can imagine it as a living thing in its own right. So living democracy as a living entity in its own right. But then flip it and think about living democracy. In verbal terms, democracy is a practice, democracy is a living practice, and if we want to have a democratic system that is healthy and that is worthy of its name, we need to live it, we need to live it every day. We need to practice the habits of democratic participation. So that’s a crucial part of it and then the third part drawing it together, is that we can design democracy on the theme of living things and ecology. That we can design democratic systems that actually learn the lessons of ecology, that are all about interdependence and diversity and managing change and all these lessons that we can learn from living systems. So that’s how I envisage living democracy as a living entity, evolving out of living things and designed on the basis of living things and as a living practice all together.

Morag:

Wow. So you’ve written it and called it an ecological manifesto. So is the way that you’re writing this, like a history of including a history of democracy? Or is it looking forward to how we are going to bring about these changes? Where do you see that we can take this journey from where we are now really quite stuck into opening up our understanding of what you’re speaking about? Because it makes so much sense to me. We’re looking at this in our food systems, we’re looking at this in our health systems, we’re looking at this in our design biomimicry, and this is applying that ecological thinking to the way that we work together as humans and it’s kind of revolutionary, really.

Tim:

Permaculture for democracy. To be clear, plenty of people have been talking about these ideas for a very long time. So yes, in the book, I’m trying to do a bit of history and that history goes back a very long way and a huge amount of what I’m writing in this book, of the ideas for the future, learns from indigenous governance. This is nothing new, this is how humans governed ourselves for 95% of our history. Indigenous governance is all about understanding interdependence, understanding that relationality deeply and determinately, anti hierarchical governance systems and understanding the human world to be one small part of this complex living world. So there’s an ancient history to these ideas. There’s also a modern history to these ideas.

So it draws a lot on ancient ideas, but it draws a lot on quite modern ideas, too. There’s a lot of ideas that come through the commons revolutions of the 15th, 16th, 17th century in England and Europe and kind of building through them into the into the rise of of anarchism, the ideas of Peter Kropotkin, one of the great anarchists of the 19th century, he mapped out an ecological idea through through the concept of mutual aid. He was an evolutionary scientist, who kind of contracted that guinean (25:08) idea of competition that said, “No, evolution actually is a process of mutual aid. It’s a process of communities, ecological communities, actually evolving together in ways that help all of us together” and then there’s been some amazing work through the work of Elinor Ostrom on governing the commons in the second half of the 20th century, many, many Bedi people have presented these ideas. What I’m trying to do is gather them together for this moment by saying, “Okay, this is the path.” So when you say manifest, I’m also trying to use the word maniFesto a bit as well. What I really don’t want to do is, what manifestos often do, which is say, this is the path and if you go off this path, you will surely be lost. I’m trying to actually say, this is the conception, this is the worldview and if we move across to this worldview, then whatever we do will work, actually. Because we each have to find our own path together and our communities have to find those parts together and we need to kind of have this Elinor Ostrom wrote about this idea of poly centricity. So many centers, instead of having centralized systems of power, each community needs to make its own determinations together democratically working out its own way through and then you need to have communities or communities which do that together and overlapping communities too and if we think about our own lives, like we make these decisions in our lives, in our families, and in our friendship groups, and sometimes in our suburbs, and in our state or territory, electorates and in our federal electorates, and in our purchasing patterns, and it’s all overlapping, there’s so many different things that we do. I’m trying to take people on that journey, I guess, in a sense, through my writing and through this book of how we can see, how we got to where we got to, and look at different ways of understanding the world and look at some examples of what people are doing all over the place, from Wangaratta. The voices were in dire need of some amazing work going on in Barcelona with new systems of government growing out of mutual aid projects.

Morag:

Can we talk a bit about that? The Barcelona project.

Tim:

So Barcelona, Spain, was hit extraordinarily hard by the global financial crisis and in the years following 2008, they got up to 50% unemployment rates, people losing homes, people not being able to afford to eat and there were huge protest movements that arose out of that the movement of the squares, they called it, people going into the squares in the cities and demanding action. Some really interesting political movements came out of that across the country, as they did with Occupy and in the US and all sorts of ways. In Barcelona, they took a slightly different tack, where they focused initially on mutual aid. So people were setting up food cooperatives, where people were growing food and distributing and sharing and cooking food and making sure that people had enough to eat and medical costs, where if you couldn’t afford the medical care you needed, you could go in there and other people would contribute to keep it going so that you can get free medical care because government was not supplying and housing. There were only squatters groups and housing coops where people were supporting each other to just stay where they were and have a roof over their heads and they were finding, of course, that they’re in conflict with the government the whole time. So heating up from municipal elections and municipal city governments in Europe, in many places are actually much more powerful than then in Australia. They’re kind of like state governments. They have a lot of management of a whole lot of city infrastructure. So coming up to the municipal elections in Barcelona, they came together and decided to kind of not form a political party, but they mapped out a set of principles that they could all agree to in a series of democratic participatory conversations and they ran for election. There’s this group of independents called Barcelona in Como Barcelona in common together and they won.

So they won the government of Barcelona, in minority with a couple of others with a Green Party and small other left pines and other Colau, whose housing activists, radical housing activists became the mayor of Barcelona and she’s now won a second term, they won a second term in government and they’ve been doing this amazing thing of running municipal government of a large city. Absolutely based on mutual aid and the commons and devolving power to the community and constant back and forth of communication with community groups and municipalizing the water supply, so taking it back from the privatized company instead of nationalizing municipal housing and taking municipal ownership and then devolving the management of that to the local communities to run it themselves, quite radical and astonishing things. They’ve also been very determinately globalist, at the same time. So saying that, they’ve been along with a few others launching this fearless cities network of cities around the world who are looking to reclaim governance, basically, for the people, and on behalf of the people running workshops around the place about how you can lead climate action and how you can lead refugee support action.

Morag:

So the municipalities are running these workshops, you’re saying.

Tim:

Absolutely. 

Morag:

So what I’m hearing then really is in order to address the challenges that we’re facing in the world at the scale that we’re facing, like climate change, the refugee crisis is just growing every day, that this radical shift in the way that governance is happening is central to us actually addressing it at the scale that we need to move forward.

Tim:

Absolutely. The core of my approach to it and my theory is that centralized systems of power are ever going to solve this problem and it’s really hard for us to grapple with those ideas with things like climate change, because we see climate change as a global problem, which needs a global solution and therefore it would have to come from centralized systems of power or centralized systems of power will won’t do it. They just won’t like we’re seeing that time and time again and increasingly, it’s been greenwashed. But, the Biden administration, which is globally trumpeting that it wants to take leadership on climate action, is still approving new fossil fuel infrastructure. And here in Australia, the Federal Labor opposition, which again, is trumpeting its commitment to climate action. At the same time you have Anthony Albanese going and visiting the Kaladze power station in Queensland, when it exploded, saying we need to get this coal fired power station back online as soon as possible and coal will have a future for decades to come in Australia. So systems or centralized power are incapable of imagining an alternative. Because one of the things that I’m going through in kind of the history of leading up to where we are, is that capitalism and representative democracy in the West evolved hand in glove with the fossil fuel industry, they absolutely are the same process and you kind of can’t disentangle them.

Morag:

I wanted to ask you a bit about the shifts that we’re seeing in centralized political systems and this sort of heading towards the right and sort of fascist states emerging and how we can balance that sort of something that I feel like is bubbling away and sometimes it feels a little bit out of reach when you’re working at a community level, how to touch and how to have some kind of level of agency there?

Tim:

To me, the agency that we have is our own agency in everything in connecting with others. Our agency and confronting the rise of authoritarianism and hate is by countering that in our own lives in every way we can, in my opinion. A lot of what I think is the most persuasive and brilliant analysis of the rise of the right goes back to what Hannah Arendt writes about the rise of the totalitarianism in the 1960s and her analysis is that the politics of hate and the politics of what they’re authoritarianism arise out of disconnection, actually. They flourish in times when people are alienated from each other and disconnected from each other in all sorts of ways and they can only flourish in those kinds of circumstances. Because one of the fascinating things, if you look at it, is actually the far right is much better at diagnosing many of the problems than a lot of mainstream politics is the far right. So the far right diagnoses a lot of these problems correctly, things like deindustrialization and the problems that it causes and the disconnection in our society. But what it does then, very cleverly, because it’s run always basically by the rich and powerful people like Donald Trump, it correctly diagnose the problems and then Mr. X people away from the actual causes and convinces them to hate a scary other, instead of convincing them to actually challenge the systemic understandings of how the world exists. So it says, here are the problems and they’re right about what many of the problems are and you can blame immigrants and you can blame black people and you can blame Jews and you can blame gay people and it’s an easy cop out and a very clever way of MIS directing attention away from the fact that usually the people at the head are the ones who are causing the problems. 

So I think, to me, the fundamental answer to that is that we need to connect, we need to build social cohesion. This politics of hate thrives in disconnected societies. So the answer is to connect our societies, the answer is to build social cohesion, to cultivate trust, to cultivate mutual respect, to do these things, like bring people together with very different opinions to sit around tables together and knock them out politely and frankly together so that they can come to agreement and demonstrate that this other way of doing things is not only possible, but it’s better. So the far right says you’re disconnected and creates an “us and them” and I think we need to say we’re disconnected. So we need to create a “we, they,” we need to understand a better way of doing this and come together and that’s how we’ll get through this and to me this is even more crucial at this point in history when we’re facing ecological crisis. Because one of the things that’s always terrified me most about the climate crisis and other ecological crises is that you can very, very easily imagine it, leading us straight towards authoritarianism. Because people get scared and people want to protect what’s ours and you see that from the far right too there’s this rising idea of ecofascism, which is not ecological. But it does say we need to protect our land, our healthy Greenland, from those scary people over there who want to invade and take over. We need to understand the extraordinary risk that increasing climate disasters and ecological disasters will see us being pulled down that route and the only solution is to bring people together. The only solution is to create this understanding of interdependence.

Morag:

Which is kind of challenging at the moment, particularly because of all the lockdowns and people being separated. I suppose that the challenge is that we have to bring people together at this time when we need to be having these conversations desperately.

Tim:

That’s one of the most confronting things for me in the last little while. I’m absolutely convinced that it needs to be done. Some of it can be done through zoom and things, but not that well. It really needs to be done in person and it’s been really striking to me how different the experience of lockdown in 2020 and 2021 were. Where in 2020, there was this immediate burst of mutual aid. So many of us were kind of immediately going around and letterboxing our neighborhoods and saying, “Hey, can we help out? Let’s be connected through all this” and then the government stepped in and started regulating and telling people what to do and people fell into line for a while and then this year when we have these extra lock downs, I know Melbournes was different because they had several along the way and it probably accelerated faster, but in the lockdowns as I found them this year, because people expected the government to provide the solutions. There was a lot more division and anger and a lot less we’re all in this together. 

Morag:

That’s very true.

Tim:

I’m somewhat hopeful that as we emerge from the lockdown, as long as things don’t get disastrous soon, we can start to bring people together and start to talk about exactly this publicly. Okay, so what went well during lockdowns, what went badly during lockdowns, how did we cope, how did some of us cope better than others. Obviously a huge difference was in 2020, the government doubled job keeper and job seeker and lifted mutual obligations and made life a lot easier for people who are living hand to mouth. This year, they didn’t. But the difference between a mutual aid approach and a government regulatory approach and how it changed the way we think of each other and relate to each other, I think is a really stark part of the picture, and how can we now run a sort of a post pandemic participatory process kind of thing to work through how can we do better next time. Because if there’s one thing we know, we’re now in the world of consequences ecologically. We’re going to be rolling from crisis to crisis for the rest of our lives. We need to be ready. So that it’s community mutual aid, which drives a response and not government authoritarianism.

Morag:

So with cop 26 upon us now, I feel a bit despondent about it, I have to be honest. Particularly without a country’s response to it. You’re based in Canberra, what are you seeing and hearing and what are the possibilities for engagement in that process or something around it that can raise awareness or action or a sense of togetherness in Australia?

Tim:

I think that the sense of togetherness is completely disconnected from the government and will remain so and is likely to remain so for the foreseeable future. That kind of approach to climate action needs to come from the community and it does come from the community and it already is coming from the community. We see that in obvious things like the student school strikes and things like that, but we see it in the growth of community renewable energy cooperatives and urban agriculture. So many of these things that are going on and people are finding solutions that they want to get involved in and there’s a ton of that going on in Australia, in terms of the cop. I guess I have a bit of hope that while I don’t think that the centralized powers of government corporations that run these cops are going to actually provide the solution. What they are doing now is buying us a bit of space. Actually, they’re buying us a bit of time, because they are proposing to cut emissions soon, nowhere near fast enough and nowhere near soon enough. But there is action and there’s enough action, I am hopeful to mean that we’re not going to go off the precipice quite so fast and so every year that we can by ourselves of carbon budget, every kind of tonne of carbon, is a tonne of carbon worth it. Because it gives us a bit more time to do the dramatic changes of systems that are going to be required to actually truly solve the climate crisis. So I see the cop process. Obviously it’s a valuable process as long as it’s to the extent that it can buy us a bit more time. But the problem with our global governance system is it’s based on a collection of sovereign states acting as sovereigns and that the entire geopolitical system is based on individualism, it’s based on competition instead of an understanding of interdependence.

Morag:

So what I’m hearing you saying then essentially is in creating this living democracy in bringing about the change that we need to see in the world, it is about us stepping up in our communities, in our places, in our neighborhoods, in whichever organization or whatever the capacity we have, that the power of positive change lies within communities. Is that what you’re saying?

Tim:

Absolutely, the power to change lies in all of us and we have to embrace that and we have to take that agency. People often ask me, “What’s the one thing that I should be doing?” And I say, “What do you want to do? Where are your skills? What are you interested in?” But the one thing I always say is that don’t ask me what’s the one thing I should do on my own, because don’t ever do it on your own, we have to be acting together, we have to be bringing people together in everything that we’re doing and I envisaged this process of changes, kind of communities, creating new ways of doing things together or adopting very old ways of doing things and really reinventing these new ways of doing things and by doing that, and in the process of doing that, creating the context and the space for other people to follow suit. That is one of the things that sort of article out from Barcelona talks a lot about this idea that a globalism of municipalities is not about kind of this growth, where suddenly Barcelona is taking over all of Spain and governing and whatever it’s about seating other ideas for other people to follow and you get growth by new growth popping up around it and it won’t be the same. It’ll be slightly different, it might be completely different but with very similar values and that’s how this change happens. People all over the place are starting processes of change to create a new system. Encouraging and creating space for others to follow suit and in that process, importantly, removing the supports. So people are growing their own little systems, new systems, from the ground up supporting and enabling and seeding others to do the same and in the process of removing consent from the current system as it currently exists and saying no, like with food, we don’t want to buy into the supermarket duopoly. We don’t want to buy into this whole system, we’re gonna start growing our own food and distributing it in our own networks and by doing that, we create the system ourselves, we create the new option, but we’re at the same time withdrawing our consent from the way things currently operate and that will accelerate the collapse of the current system, while growing the new to take over.

Morag:

I think one of the key things too, about this transition is about sharing the story. So sharing the story, what’s happening, but as I’m sharing the story of what’s happened in the community so that it becomes visible and how to do that, I suppose, is a big question in and of itself. Because if you’re not using the mainstream media that’s existing, because there’s stories that don’t really get into that. It is about sharing stories, sharing songs, rippling it out from place to place. 

Tim:

Yes, and your podcast is part of that. So thank you very much.

Morag:

Well, thank you for being my guest on the show today. It’s been such a pleasure to see you again and to dive into this conversation and good luck with finishing the book. I look forward to it when it comes out and sharing it around with as many possible people as we can and thank you because I always love speaking with you. It helps to kind of ground my thinking and really give a sense of where it is that the work that I’m doing in the world is and making a contribution. You kind of helped me to create a framework for that thinking. So thank you.

Tim:

Thank you so much. Always, always a pleasure to talk with you and thanks for the opportunity. 

Morag:

All right. Take care.