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The Sustainable Hour no. 607 | Transcript | Podcast notes
What happens when the climate crisis is accelerating, political systems are failing to respond, and more people are turning towards authoritarian and far-right politics?
In this 607th Sustainable Hour, our guest Tim Hollo suggests that part of the answer may be much closer to home than we think.
Get people growing food together. Repairing things together. Restoring bushland. Building community energy systems. Sharing meals. Making decisions together. Creating places where neighbours actually know each other.
Instead of waiting for permission, start practising the world we want to become.
Tim Hollo is an environmentalist, musician, writer, community builder and long-time climate activist. He founded Green Music Australia, previously headed The Green Institute, worked inside federal politics and wrote the book Living Democracy. He has now stepped back from much of that work while undertaking PhD research into a question that has become increasingly urgent:
How do we let go of old ways of thinking and organising when they are clearly no longer working?
When crisis doesn’t wake us up
Tim begins by challenging an assumption many climate campaigners have carried for years – that eventually the climate crisis would become so obvious that people would wake up and demand change.
Instead, he argues, growing instability can make people hold even tighter to what they already know.
“The more that the Earth is moving under us, the tighter we’re kind of holding on to old ways of being.”
So perhaps the question needs to change.
The climate movement has spent decades asking how to create the new world. Tim asks another question: how do we learn to release the old one?
That includes reconsidering our faith in electoral politics. After 25 years of working around federal politics – as an activist, political staffer and candidate – Tim says he has become deeply sceptical that governments operating within the existing political system will deliver transformation at the scale now required.
That doesn’t mean abandoning politics. It means putting much more energy somewhere else as well. On the ground.
Democracy as something we practise
For Tim, democracy is much bigger than voting every few years. It is something we practise.
• How do neighbours discuss difficult questions together? • How do school communities make decisions? • How do we listen when we disagree? • How do we share responsibility? • How do we create informal community assemblies? • How do we learn to solve problems together?
The same approach can be applied to climate action.
Community renewable-energy cooperatives. Home insulation. Community food. Repair cafés. Mutual aid. Bush regeneration. Rewilding.
These activities can attract people who might never attend a climate meeting or identify themselves as environmentalists. They work because they are useful, social and often enjoyable.
Tim points to Totally Renewable Yackandandah in north-east Victoria, where a community has spent years working towards 100 per cent renewable energy. People with very different political views can participate because the project saves money, builds resilience and strengthens the community.
He also points to rewilding projects overseas, where restored ecosystems are proving far more resilient to drought and extreme weather. The lesson is simple: transformation can begin before everyone agrees about why transformation is necessary.
Beyond the electoral battlefield
One of Tim’s strongest arguments concerns the enormous amount of energy environmental movements put into elections. Electoral politics turns almost everything into a contest – one side against another, winners against losers.
At the same time, citizens are repeatedly told that voting is their principal source of democratic power. Yet many people vote for change and then watch governments continue much as before.
That experience can leave people feeling powerless.
Tim argues for rebuilding democratic agency from below – while continuing to pressure governments, challenge fossil fuel projects, confront financial institutions and support communities resisting fossil fuel expansion.
The balance of effort needs to shift. Maybe 10 per cent towards community-building next year. Then 20 per cent. Learn the skills. Practise them. Build relationships.
Men, masculinity and another way of being together
Mik Aidt asks whether Tim has noticed differences between men and women in the community practices he is studying.
Many practices involving consensus, care and community support are indeed dominated by women, Tim says. Women are also strongly represented in the community independent movement. But he warns against assuming that these differences are somehow biologically fixed. They are deeply socialised.
What does deserve scrutiny, he argues, is the model of masculinity produced by Western modernity – and its emphasis on competition, control and adversarial behaviour. That opens another practical question: how can more men be invited into different ways of relating?
Bush regeneration could be one entry point. Repair cafés another.
Bring young men together to work physically on restoring land. Talk while working. Sit around a fire afterwards. Decide collectively what happens next. Ask questions. Listen.
The practical work becomes something more. It becomes practice in being together differently.
Designing places for kindness
From Denmark, Mik raises another piece of the puzzle: physical space.
Many Danish neighbourhoods have common areas where people can gather for dinners, meetings, celebrations and community activities. Much Australian suburban development offers few equivalent places.
Tim agrees: “We can design public space for kindness or we can design public space for selfishness.”
And we don’t necessarily need to wait for urban planners. Invite neighbours for dinner. Cook together. Turn some lawn into food production. Create informal gathering places. Start where you are.
Kindness, Tim says, will become increasingly important as climate and ecological disruption intensifies. Humans repeatedly demonstrate a remarkable capacity to care for one another during emergencies. That gives him optimism.
And then there are the robots
The conversation takes another turn when Mik brings up AI and robotics. Machines are beginning to perform tasks that until recently required human workers. If that continues, it could create enormous disruption.
It could also, Tim suggests, create an opportunity. Modern capitalism has taken extraordinary amounts of our time. If automation gives some of that time back, what might become possible if we spend more of it caring, creating, restoring ecosystems and participating in community life?
Climate disruption, ecological breakdown, AI, political instability and the rise of the far right are arriving simultaneously.
Tim’s conclusion is that the world of 2026 is profoundly different from the world of 2015, 2005 or even 2025. Our movements and institutions cannot keep behaving as though nothing fundamental has changed.
What should we be?
Towards the end of the conversation, the question shifts. Instead of asking only, “What should we do?”, Tim asks: “What should we be?”
Kinder. Better listeners. More flexible. More able to improvise. More capable of making decisions together. More willing to practise whatever comes next.
As a musician, Tim describes it as learning how to “jam our way” into the future. And that leads us back to one of the oldest ideas in social change: Be the change.
The episode features the new song ‘On the Ground’, inspired by the conversation with Tim Hollo:
– A song about letting go of failing systems and practising a kinder, more connected future – right where we are, on the ground.
“On the ground
We get our hands in the dirt
On the ground
We get to know each other’s names
On the ground
We don’t wait for permission
On the ground
We practise the world we want to become.”
Meanwhile, the climate warning grows louder
Colin Mockett‘s Global Outlook opens with the United Nations Environment Programme’s new Limiting Overshoot report.
The report says the world is now expected to exceed the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C warming threshold. The challenge becomes keeping that overshoot as small and short as possible while pushing temperatures back down.
Colin also reports from the Pacific Islands Forum in Palau, where Pacific leaders continue pressing Australia over fossil fuel expansion.
Later in the Hour:
• UN Secretary-General António Guterres warns that every additional fraction of warming will cost lives and push ecosystems closer to irreversible damage.
• A series of voices from the National Emergency Briefing describes climate disruption increasingly as a national security and societal stability issue.
• Professor Eugenie Kayak from Doctors for the Environment Australia explains why climate change affects virtually every part of the human body – and why climate solutions can simultaneously improve human health.
• ‘Electric Saul’ offers a lighter interlude on electrifying Australian homes and getting off gas.
• A satirical conversation about forests, fish, fossil fuels and endless economic expansion asks the obvious question: how can infinite growth work on a finite planet?
• Climate communicator Jay Lipman looks at UNEP’s overshoot graph and argues that it can be read as both a warning and a choice – because many of the technologies and strategies required to cut emissions are already known.
Episode 607 moves from a stark global warning to something intensely local. The ground is moving. Perhaps our response begins by putting our feet on it. And getting to know the people standing there with us.
→ Read more from Tim Hollo on his blog: in-between-days.ghost.io
“What we need to do is rebuild our democratic systems from the grassroots up. We need to build truly democratic systems. We need to be holding the pressure on those systems as they exist and trying, not giving up, trying, but doing so with a commitment that we understand it won’t work, and this is about actually demonstrating what might work instead.”
~ Tim Hollo, currently undertaking PhD studies
→ Subscribe to The Sustainable Hour podcast via Apple Podcasts or Spotify
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We at The Sustainable Hour would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which we are broadcasting, the Wadawurrung People. We pay our respects to their elders – past, present, and emerging, and extend that respect to all First Nations people.
The traditional custodians lived in harmony with the land for millennia, nurturing it and thriving in often harsh conditions. Their connection to the land was deeply spiritual and sustainable. This land was invaded and stolen from them. It was never ceded. Today, it is increasingly clear that if we are to survive the climate emergency we face, we must learn from their land management practices and cultural wisdom.
True climate justice cannot be achieved until Australia’s First Nations people receive the justice they deserve. When we speak about the future, we must include respect for those yet to be born, the generations to come. As the old saying reminds us: “We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children.” It is deeply unfair that decisions to ignore the climate emergency are being made by those who won’t live to face the worst impacts, leaving future generations to bear the burden of their inaction.
“The Indigenous worldview has been marginalised for generations because it was seen as antiquated and unscientific and its ethics of respect for Mother Earth were in conflict with the industrial worldview. But now, in this time of climate change and massive loss of biodiversity, we understand that the Indigenous worldview is neither unscientific nor antiquated, but is, in fact, a source of wisdom that we urgently need.”
~ Robin Wall Kimmerer, weallcanada.org
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Humanity is speeding past the point where we can avoid climate catastrophe.
That’s one of the key messages in the latest UN Environment Programme report.
This summer’s scorching heat, raging wildfires and deadly floods are a warning of what lies ahead. Every fraction of a degree of warming will cost lives, destroy livelihoods, deepen inequalities, and push ecosystems closer to irreversible damage.
But the solutions are at hand. We must accelerate the phaseout of fossil fuels and the renewables revolution, slash methane pollution, and protect land, forest and oceans. Governments must over-deliver on national climate plans, net-zero commitments, and beyond. Developed countries must triple adaptation finance and ensure it reaches those most at risk.
Now is the time to raise ambition, accelerate climate action, and fight for humanity.
~ Antonio Guterres
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UK’s Humanity Project: Help assembly culture flourish
Like most good things, Humanity Project came about by people listening to each other. The ultimate aim? To restore humanity in politics and strengthen democracy from the ground up.
In 2023, after a year of conversations, Humanity Project’s three convenors, Clare, Lee and Nick, knew they needed to join the dots between their communities working to end racism, take action on climate, and tackle the cost of living crisis.
Listening to stories from their communities, they heard what many of us know: that politics often feels done to us, not with us, and that many people feel cut off from decision-making by a system that too often serves the vested interests of the few.
“We asked ourselves: What would happen if the whole nation listened to itself, away from the media? If we came together across the country in our streets and neighbourhoods to hear what others had to say?”
Together, Clare, Lee and Nick knew their role was this: to help create new ways for people to listen to one another, connect across difference, participate in decisions that affect them, and discover their shared power to act.
Not waiting for others to fix things for us, but creating the conditions for communities to come together and shape what happens next.
The ultimate aim? To restore humanity in politics and strengthen democracy from the ground up.
What emerged from these conversations, and the work of many others since, is assembly culture.
→ Find out more about Humanity Project on www.humanityproject.uk
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TRANSCRIPT
of The Sustainable Hour no. 607
António Guterres, United Nations Secretary-General: (00:00)
Cooperation over chaos. We are all in this together.
Jingle: (00:14)
The Sustainable Hour. For a green, clean, sustainable Geelong: The Sustainable Hour.
Tony Gleeson: (00:24)
You’re listening to The Sustainable Hour podcast. We’d like to start off as always by acknowledging that we’re broadcasting from the land of the Wadawurrung people. We pay tribute to their elders – past, present, and those that earn that great honour in the future. We’re on stolen land, land that was never ceded. Always was and always will be First Nations land. We need to listen to the ancient wisdom that they acquired by nurturing both their communities and their country before it was stolen by the first white colonisers. In that ancient wisdom there’s so much of the information that we’re going to need as we navigate the climate crisis. We need to take that seriously because they did that for so long.
Mik Aidt: (01:27)
The world is changing around us, and certainly here in Europe where I am at the moment, I can tell you, everyone’s talking about again now the right-wing politics moving in we’re seeing it in the UK and in France and now with a landslide election in Germany where a party similar to One Nation has won a major election victory this week and of course inside the climate movement and among all the environment groups here in Europe, people are talking now about how do they respond. Because this is certainly not looking good for the energy transition, the action on climate. These right-wing parties are exactly like Pauline Hanson, very much against renewable energy and against any type of climate policies. So what are we going to do about it? That’s a question which we’ll be talking about today in The Sustainable Hour. But first of all, we need to hear what else has been happening around the world. And for that we are privileged to have Colin Mockett OAM, at the news-desk. Colin, you have the global outlook for us, so let’s hear what you have taken notice of this week.
Colin Mockett’s Global Outlook: (02:47)
Thank you, Mik, and our roundup this week begins in the UN headquarters in New York, where a new UN environment programme report admitted that the world has lost any chance of holding global warming to 1.5°C degrees, as was agreed in the Paris Agreement. Now the UN realist scientists are predicting temperatures will reach 2.6°C degrees by the end of the century.
If all governments continue with their current policies, that temperature rise would have catastrophic consequences for the world, significantly increasing risks including the collapse of the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets and the destruction of the Amazon rainforests, the report said. A further danger would be changes to the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation.
The vast ocean current that helps regulate the world’s climate by redistributing heat around the globe. Now in the light of this, Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and our climate change and energy minister Chris Bowen, who were in Palau attending the Pacific Islands Forum, faced down Vanuatu’s climate change minister, Ralph Regenvanu, who called on Australia specifically to stop expanding its fossil fuel extraction and exporting. Australia is not doing enough, he said. Australia is a major producer of fossil fuels. We all know fossil fuels are the primary driver of the climate crisis. As I said.
So the very least a country like Australia should be doing is stopping future expansion, and it’s not doing that. When asked about this criticism, Anthony Albanese said Australia’s Pacific neighbours had not raised objections during their forum talks.
Australia is highly regarded when it comes to climate change and the talking down of Australia does not happen from outside Australia, he said, in answer to the talking down of Australia by the by the climate minister. The Pacific leaders have respect for the position that we’re taking, and they also understand with the transition because they’re dealing with it as well. That the transition can’t happen overnight.
That it requires strategies and policies to be put in place. And one of these things that renewables require is firming capacity, and gas has a role to play in firming capacity. Now that’s our Prime Minister’s measured response to climate change. And our politicians wonder why we don’t trust them anymore. That was his answer to a direct criticism.
But back to the UN report, the most optimistic pathway said it would see the average global temperature arrested at one point eight degrees later this century before slowly being driven down. Now that’s what would occur if all governments managed to fully implement all of their current national climate plans and meet all long term net zero targets.
At present there is a persistent gap between the emissions reductions countries have pledged and the policies in place to deliver them, says the report, in a section that was headed Limiting Overshoot, navigating exceedance at 1.5°C degrees centigrade and pathways towards return. But even this came with a warning. Exceedance of 1.5°C degrees Celsius should not be interpreted as safe or acceptable. There are no benign scenarios with global temperature rise above this level, the report said. Now practically all the Pacific Forum members were among the nations that successfully lobbied for the world to adopt the 1.5°C degree target, as crucial to their very existence during the Paris negotiations.
And Australia has apparently championed their course ever since. That’s because it looks to maintain its security influence around the region. Now this was taken on board in the UN report. In Pacific Atoll states such as Tuvalu and Kiribati, the loss of habitability is a present reality occurring well before total physical submersion, the report states. And the host of the Pacific Island Forum, which was a week ago now, Palau President Surangel Whipps Jr said of the report: It is hard to overstate the depth of emotion for those of us living on the front line after having fought so hard to put the 1.5 degree limit at the heart of the Paris Agreement.
It is a further glimpse into a perilous future that has already arrived. To continue to have a fighting chance calls for greater ambition and no longer enough, we need to see an urgent and unprecedented increase in political will and investment in a climate safe future. Nobody can read this report and conclude otherwise because
Now asked to comment on this, our Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said it was clear all nations needed to take more action. Climate change is real, the science is real, the action that is required is real as well, and the economic cost of inaction is real, he said. So we can expect some action, do you think? But the final word should go to Nepal’s Prime Minister Balendra Shah, who said: The floods in the Bhote Koshi River in Rasuwa are not an ordinary flood, he said. It was one of the region’s major disasters triggered by an avalanche of snow and ice in the Himalayan region. The people of the pool are one of the major victims of the changing climate and its impact.
Even though they contribute less than 0.01 per cent of the carbon pollution that is causing the warming. He added that Nepal’s glaciers have lost almost a third of their volume in the past thirty years due to global warming, which the United Nations reported in twenty twenty three. The rooftops of the world are caving in, said UN Chief António Guterres at the time. Nearly two billion people across Asia rely on the annual summer melt from those glaciers to sustain agriculture and generate power.
And we thought that the climate change effects in the northern summer, with Europe currently experiencing its fifth heat wave and fires are still burning in the Americas. We thought that they were the things to worry about. What we should be worrying about is global leaders, including our own, who talk as if they’re doing something and then carrying on backing fossil fuel burning as if no danger existed at all. And that caustic assessment ends our roundup for this week.
Jingle: (11:10)
Listen to our Sustainable Hour – for the future.
. . .
Tony: (11:18)
Our guest today is Tim Hollo. Tim’s very much a friend of The Sustainable Hour. He’s been on a number of times. He’s a long term, long time climate activist. he’s an author. He started off green music and he’s currently taken time off from all of that to complete a PhD. So thanks for coming on, Tim. Tell us what’s up front for you at the moment.
Tim Hollo: (11:48)
Well, I guess what’s really upfront for me, and as you say, the kind of the reason why I’ve taken a bit of a step back to do some research is I think like a lot of people I speak to, I’m looking at the world at the moment and we’re obviously seeing, as we just heard in the roundup, we’re we’re seeing the the climate crisis that many of us have been expecting for a long time is here with us right now.
And at the same time, there was kind of there was always a bit of a myth, I think, around the place that when the poo really started to hit the fans, people would actually wake up and change would happen and change would happen fast. And I think it was always something of a myth, but it was a myth that we all sort of held on to quite tightly. And what we’re seeing is that the opposite is the case. And that the more that things are shaking.
The more that the earth is moving under us, the tighter we’re kind of holding on to old ways of being. And so what I am really wanting to do is think very deeply and talk to people around the place, around Australia and elsewhere around the world about what are some of the things that we can think about doing that help us to let go, actually. We think a lot about how do we make the world that we want.
And there’s a lot of people doing wonderful work about making the world that we want. But we don’t really think very much about how do we let go of the old. That’s my really big question. How do we actually let go of our of our you know tight hold on the old ways of being and doing?
Colin: (13:39)
That’s a a really neat little conundrum, Tim. I’ve no doubt that the speed of change has has really heated up over the course of the last six months in Australia. But that’s basically because people have been buying electric cars because of the oil crisis in the Middle East. And it’s put things front of mind of people and they’re thinking well I can do something about it.
So something is changing but it’s not for the right reasons. It’s not because we want to stop global warming, it’s because petrol’s got short and expensive. how on earth can you get through to people and say, look, there’s more to it than the price of filling your tank. We’ve got to save the planet. So
Tim: (14:32)
It’s interesting. I don’t really mind why people do things as long as they do things that will put us in the right direction. but I think there is nevertheless the conundrum as you put it that we’ve got to do a lot more than simply swapping out two EVs, for instance. Not that that’s not a good thing to do but we have to do a lot more than that.
And what we have to do is learn to live in harmony with the natural world again. And we need to do that much more deeply than in fact in some ways we’ve ever done, because we’ve never lived as a species in a world where the natural environment that we’re part of is changing as rapidly as it is already and is going to do for the rest of our lives.
So I don’t really mind why people do it. And so this is one of the things that I’ve been thinking about, in fact, is precisely this is how do we think about not in fact how we convince people to do it, but what are some of the practices that we can think about doing that shift the way we think about the world by doing the practices?
So for instance, I’m thinking a lot about you know, I’ve been on this show before talking about my work around democracy and how we how we improve democracy and my book Living Democracy. And what’s really at the core of that is this idea that actually democracy is a practice. Democracy is a living practice. It’s not just how we vote every now and then. It’s not just elections, it’s not even just kind of making law. It’s a living practice of how we live together, how we engage with difficult questions together and work through difficult moments together so that we can come out the other side stronger as a community.
And I think the best way of improving our democracy is by doing it – is by getting people together in their local communities and doing conversations in the community? How do we set up little informal kind of community assemblies so that we can discuss stuff together? How do we do our school P and Cs in more democratic ways? And that starts to flow through so that it improves democracy without even having to talk to people about the fact that we’re improving democracy. And that’s what I’m really trying to think about in the very closely related question of climate and ecological crises as well.
It’s really hard to convince people of something. It’s really easy actually to get people involved in fun activities. And when they’re involved in fun activities, whether it’s getting together to do community renewable energy cooperatives or insulate houses together, you know, practices of doing weatherisation, practices of of community food, rewilding in the community, all sorts of stuff like that. That’s just a lot of fun and it’s engaging.
And people will do it whether they believe it’s necessary or not, because it’s a fun practice. And that way we start to get to transformation much faster than we can do it if we try to keep bashing on people’s doors and try to convince them of stuff that they’re just not ready to believe.
Colin: (17:47)
Have you got a a couple of concrete examples you can put before us?
Tim: (17:53)
Well, I think it’s interesting – I was thinking about the rewilding one. There’s been some really powerful reportage recently on how areas that have been rewilded, where they’ve been reintroducing beavers, for instance, who are doing the what beavers do. They’re damming up the creeks and they’re creating naturally creating wetlands.
And then there’s more plants sort of growing on the edges of the creeks and you’ve got less erosion happening and you’ve got all of a sudden this re beautiful kind of repopulation of the natural environment. And what they’re finding is that in the midst of the worst drought in what, 200 years and possibly much, much longer, the areas that have been rewilded are so much more robust and healthy than the areas which are not, which are currently under intensive farming, which shouldn’t really be a surprise. It’s kind of obvious that that’s the case.
But what I think is really important in the context of this conversation as well, is that the rewilding isn’t something that we’re doing because or it is being done because people have lobbied governments to do it.
It’s being done because people are just getting out there and doing it themselves. And whether they believe it’s kind of for climate or the environment or not, in fact a lot of it is kind of on the basis of interesting sort of old patriotism, we want the England of how it used to be, sort of thing. And people are just doing it. So I think that’s a really powerful example of it.
I think, you know, you folks have spoken a lot as well to the people down in Indi in northern Victoria and there’s a lot going on there that’s really interesting as well. Not just the the famous voices for Indi kind of independent political project, but things like hundred percent renewable or totally renewable Yackandandah, a small town down there near Wangaratta, where the local communities got together and they’ve just decided we’re gonna make our community a hundred percent renewables and they’re doing it without aren’t really much or any kind of government support or control. And people who have really vastly different opinions about the environment and climate and politics are doing it because it’s a good community activity, it’s saving them money, they like it, it’s bringing them together, it’s just good stuff.
So that I think is the really interesting thing going on there. That, like, you can move away from fossil fuel not by convincing people that fossil fuels are bad, but by getting people together and saying, ‘Hey, how about we do a local community microgrid here based on renewables and batteries?’ And: ‘Here’s how it’s gonna work. Do you wanna come and get involved?’
A much more kind of emergent constructive way of going about things suddenly becomes possible if we take that approach.
Colin: (20:58)
I can see how that would work at a community level, Tim, but how do you get, for example, our federal government to bring in measures that would stop us exporting our gas around the world and exporting our coal around the world, which is putting CO2 in the atmosphere for which we don’t even get credited.
Tim: (21:22)
I don’t think we’re going to convince our federal government to do that. I honestly don’t. There’s absolutely no signal that this set of politicians within this system of politics is able to do it. So again, I think what we need to do is on the ground, we need to be there on the ground blockading some of these sites. We need to be in the foyers of the banks and the corporations that are doing it and blockading them and and turning away their funders and actually doing it ourselves and we need to be out and which is something that many people in the community are doing. we need to be out in the in the customer countries as well, working with other communities, grassroots communities in those countries supporting them in their projects to to stop these these imports from their perspective going ahead.
Tony: (22:20)
So it’s a whole systemic change then, Tim?
Tim: (22:24)
Yeah, I think is the really important thing that I’ve come to think about in the last little while. As you said, I’ve been on your show a number of times. People know if you’ve heard me or or or read what I write, I’ve been involved in politics for a long time, 25 years. I’ve been a staffer in federal parliament, I’ve been a candidate for the federal parliament. I am very convinced now that that pathway is broken to the extent that it ever worked.
And it only ever worked for a very kind of given meaning of worked, to the extent that it ever did, it doesn’t work anymore. And I think that’s one of the things that we need to let go of.
We need to let I’m not saying that we need to stop involvement with it altogether, to be very clear. But what I’m saying is that what’s really happened, and it’s actually it’s actually increased over the period of time when the whole system’s working less and less and less, ironically.
It’s increased the extent to which kind of almost the whole environment and climate movement in a country like Australia just only thinks in electoral terms. We’re pretty convinced that the only way we can make change is by convincing government to do it, at a time when it’s increasingly obvious that government won’t do it.
So what we need to do is rebuild our democratic systems from the grassroots up. We need to build truly democratic systems. We need to be holding the pressure on those systems as they exist and trying, not giving up, trying, but doing so with a commitment that we understand it won’t work, and this is about actually demonstrating what might work instead.
. . .
SONG (24:17)
‘On the Ground’
Verse 1:
The ground is moving.
The old ways aren’t working.
We keep holding tighter.
It’s time to release them.
Chorus:
On the ground
We get our hands in the dirt
On the ground
We get to know each other’s names
On the ground
We don’t wait for permission
On the ground
We practise the world we want to become
Verse 2:
Neighbours, gardens, repair cafes
food, trees, conversations
Change is something you do
Kinder, better listeners. Improvisations
Chorus:
On the ground
We get our hands in the dirt
On the ground
We get to know each other’s names
On the ground
We don’t wait for permission
On the ground
We practise the world we want to become
No map for what comes next
We practise what comes next
. . .
Colin: (26:02)
Have you found, Tim, in communities that have taken the change into their own hands, like Yackandandah, have you found that they then change their voting habits too? Is there any way of measuring that?
Tim: (26:19)
So the evidence in Yackandandah and Indi is that they do go quite neatly hand in hand. That when you get people building community together doing this work, they’re more open to voting for candidates who are more committed to that kind of work and to community, which tends to be independents and Greens.
There is also actually evidence that it doesn’t always happen. There are some really fantastic projects around the Hay Plain, for instance, in southern New South Wales. Really great projects that’s not that far from Indi, getting people to think more deeply about renewables and engage in that. And in those places, they’re still voting for one nation, or they’re voting more for one nation. So it doesn’t necessarily go together.
Which kind of emphasises my point, I guess, that we could actually we can get more done in community than perhaps we can politically. And one of the reasons I think about this, and this is kind of at the core of my research, is that the way we’re asked to think about the world.
Is radically different if you’re thinking about it in terms of electoral politics or if you’re thinking about it in terms of your local community and your neighbors and your friends. And when we think about electoral politics, there’s a couple of things going on. One is that it’s entirely adversarial, it’s a fight, it’s a battle. And when you put things in terms of a battle, people think aggressively and they think against each other. And that leads to more voting in those ways. But the other thing that’s going on is that we’re told in this world that the only way we can make change in our communities is by voting.
That’s the only way we can have power and agency is by voting. And yet the very clear evidence in our lives is that that doesn’t actually make any change at all. We vote in a new government and the policies don’t change.
So electoralism is really deeply, deeply disempowering, ironically, and people don’t feel like they have control and they’re right. And what happens when people don’t feel like they’re in control? They tend to vote for the far right. So even if you can kind of build community engagement, when the question is electoral, they might still go that way. It’s a big challenge.
Mik: (29:04)
Tim, in your research have you noticed any differences between men and women? You speak about aggression, and from America we get all these masculinity movements, even all the way at the top of the American government.
Tim: (29:20)
So, yes is the short answer. The longer answer is there’s a there’s a long way still to go in my research, but many of the practices that I’m looking at are practices that do tend to be dominated by women, practices of consensus decision making, for instance, practices of community care, and they tend to be led by women, and that’s what we you know, it’s no coincidence, I guess, that The Greens as a party have always been majority female and the independence movement, the the the community independence movement is massively overrepresented by women.
So I think there is something definitely there. That said, it’s very easy to kind of essentialise that and say, well, men are men and women are women and I just don’t believe that.
It’s very much socialised. And you know I as a as a facilitator of con the consensus decision making for one thing am often in spaces that are very female and and you know, and I’m there as a man in the same way that as a as a violin and viola player, I’ve often been in places that have been mostly female and there’s nothing to say that violinists should be should be mostly women.
So I think it’s really important that we don’t kind of over-essentialise it. but that we do recognise that the way Western modernity has defined masculinity is highly problematic. and that the pathway that we need to take needs to challenge that.
Mik: (31:04)
So so let’s talk a little bit about that pathway. I’m interested obviously I’m biased here because I just wrote a book called ‘Man of Earth’, which is about this topic and and I’m really curious to find pathways, for instance, to talk with men about this. Because as you say, the men are not showing up for the meetings.
Tim: (31:23)
Yeah. I mean, I think, yeah, in terms of the pathways, as I said, like I’m increasingly kind of as a as a political communicator by trade, I’m increasingly skeptical of political communication as a tool. and that what we need to do is practice. Literally practice. And again, as a musician, I think about practice a lot and what it means that practice means kind of going going over going over stuff over and over and over again and learning how to do something and we tend to practice even in our movements for change I think the climate movement has for a long time in Australia been practicing adversarial electoral politics.
We’ve been practicing having fights with people and trying to convince them with about stuff, which isn’t working. What if we practiced instead how we do good decision making together?
What if we practiced how we grow food together? What if we practiced doing bush regen and rewilding? What if we practiced mechanisms of care and community support and mutual aid and all of these kinds of things?
And we bring men into that as you know, wherever we possibly can. We make the invitation and we make the invitations as enticing as possible. So sometimes perhaps thinking about that bush regen. Bush regen is something that men often get involved in because it feels physical.
And young men who might otherwise be attracted potentially to the manosphere, bringing them together doing bush regen and having conversations while doing it. And then sitting around a campfire or whatever it is at the end of the day and chatting and and learning about how you actually make collective decisions together. Okay, where are we gonna go next? What are the options? What are the pros and cons? How do you feel about that? how do you feel about that? Let’s listen to each other and learn.
And similarly with kind of some you know some some of the other ideas like, you know, repair cafes and and other kind of more perhaps more physical engagement with these kinds of challenges, there are all sorts of pathways in. And if we practice not just the skills of what we’re actually doing in those places, but at the same time we’re practicing the skills of being together in a different way.
Being with each other in a different way and listening and learning together, I think that’s a really transformative path. And just a slight shift in our balance, away from constantly kind of fighting over elections. Just, you know, next year, 10 per cent of that effort we put into mutual aid and Bush regen and democ democracy. And then the next year, 20 per cent we shift across that way. And we start to learn how to do things differently. And we start to practice those skills and all of a sudden change.
Colin: (34:21)
Yes, we’ve had – actually – well, the last three weeks we’ve had guests on the program who’ve all come up with a similar theme of what we need now is kindness. And and you’re now pointing that kindness and saying, ‘Hey this is a way of achieving change.’
Mik: (34:50)
Can I then say that I think we also need physical places where this can happen? I’m in Denmark right now, and I see in the constructions of buildings and roads that appears to me the Danes have thought more about creating some common space, some community space, where they actually hold weekly events, monthly events and annual events, where they come together in the community. And maybe that’s something we need to think about as well, because I can tell you, personally, from my own street, we don’t have anywhere where we could meet, except on the street.
Tim: (35:24)
I absolutely agree, a hundred percent. and I think the two go together. We can design public space for kindness or we can design public space for selfishness. And Australia has unfortunately followed the US and Britain in designing public space recently, mostly for selfishness. And we yes, we need those spaces. And again, like I was saying with the rewilding, a lot of that’s just up to us. We don’t need to ask government for that. We don’t need to try to change policy about that. We just need to gather and make the space.
And some of it is really, really hyper local, inviting people over for dinner or inviting people over to to cook together, or if you’ve got a patch of land to you know, to dig up your lawn and plant some food, and just get on with it.
And I think really in terms of in terms of kindness, it’s always been important, hasn’t it? It’s always been important, but it’s only gonna get so much more important as as the crises roll one after another. and it’s also something that actually humans are really, really good at during moments of crisis.
Which is one of the reasons I actually hold on to a lot of a lot of optimism. I’m not going to say hope, I’m going to say optimism, because humans are really good at caring for each other in moments of crisis. And if we recognise those crises, then that’s spaces for kindness and then spaces for d for you know developing more more physical spaces for kindness.
Mik: (37:12)
And there’s an extra element here, Tim, that we need to think about: The robots are coming. The machines are taking jobs. And human beings will need to figure out what we do with our time and each other in the future. I can report from Denmark yesterday on the news was a report that robots now run faster than human beings and they look… you know, they have two legs, two arms and a something like a face.
Here in Denmark there are robots putting commodities in the shops up on the shelves. That’s something young young boys and girls used to do. Now it’s robots doing it. I think this is really important when we talk about community, because in community lies also something that is really important that we can do as humans while the robots are taking our jobs.
Tim: (38:05)
Right. It’s actually if that happens in that way, it’s in some ways a tremendous opportunity to reclaim our time and reclaim our our agency and our power to do stuff together in the community. ‘Cause one of the extraordinarily powerful things about late capitalism has been how it’s just stolen our time. and if we can get some of that back, well, what becomes possible.
The other thing that I think about about the robots about AI that that draws it back to kind of where I started is that yeah, it i it’s there sitting alongside the climate and ecological crisis having arrived and the dis massive, massive disruptions in our democratic systems that we’re seeing from the rise of the far right, and the just the the bare knuckle, completely blatant corruption of so much of our political system, as a really clear signal that the world that we are living in in 2026 is not the world that we were living in in 2025.
And it’s so far from the world that we were living in in 2015 or 2005 or 1995. The world is completely different. And we haven’t really engaged with that. We haven’t really thought about the fact that that means we have to change the way we do things. We have to change the way the movement works.
I’ve been a participant in the climate movement in Australia since the late 1990s. And most of what we’re doing is kind of the same. And that’s not good enough when the world has changed completely around us. We need to let go. We need to let go of what it was before and start thinking about how we work and campaign and live together in the world that’s actually here.
Mik: (40:04)
Tim, thank you so much for really taking us somewhere new. This has been so inspiring, and that’ll be all we can fit in in this particular Hour, but this will continue, Sustainable Hour after Sustainable Hour. We’re going to explore more of this and we would love to hear more from you when you come back with more research and more findings. What should we be, Tim?
Tim: (40:29)
What should we be is exactly the question. That is exactly the question that I’m playing with. And I’m writing a lot about at at my blog at In Between Days as I do my research.
What should we be? rather than what do we need to do, who do we need to become? Who do we need to become as a movement, as a community, as individuals?
We need to be kinder, we need to be listening better, we need to be flexible, we need to improvise, we need to kind of learn how to how to jam our way into whatever comes next. That’s exciting.
Mik: (41:07)
And it brings us back to the good old ‘Be the change’.
Tim: (41:11)
Be the change.
. . .
SONG (41:14)
‘I Heard It on The Sustainable Hour’
Verse 1:
I woke up feeling like the world’s on fire,
Storms are rising, rivers running drier.
But then I tuned in, turned the dial,
And found a reason to stay inspired.
Pre-Chorus:
They said, “The greatest threat is thinking someone else will do it.”
But I can feel the change – I know we’re moving through it.
Chorus:
I heard it on The Sustainable Hour –
Hope’s alive, and the time is now.
Stand up, speak out, let’s build our power,
Be the difference – we know how.
Verse 2:
They talk of profits, pipelines, and delay,
But we’ve got voices that won’t fade away.
From city streets to the coastal sand,
We’re backing leaders who take a stand.
Pre-Chorus:
They said, “A society grows great when we plant trees in whose shade we may never sit.”
So let’s rise up, this is it.
Chorus:
I heard it on The Sustainable Hour –
Hope’s alive, and the time is now.
Stand up, speak out, let’s build our power,
Be the difference – we know how.
Bridge – “I” to “We”:
We are the voices, we are the wave,
Lifting each other, brave and unafraid.
It’s not too late, don’t wait for someday,
Together we’ll light the way.
Final Chorus:
We heard it on The Sustainable Hour –
Hope’s alive, and the time is now.
Rise up, reach out, this is our power,
Be the difference – we know how!
. . .
National Emergency Briefing – short statements: (44:08)
The biggest concern is that we’re facing the potential of an ungovernable state unless government takes this seriously.
So I’m often asked, could these European style mega floods happen here? The honest answer is yes.
We’re running an increasing risk of these tipping points, including this critical one for the UK. In London it’s minus 20°C degrees in three frozen months of the year, and in Edinburgh, it’s minus 30°C degrees in five and a half frozen months of the year.
And I’m talking about the increasing pressure on global food supplies in the face of accelerating climate change and nature loss. And when families can’t afford to feed their children, societies break down. We see this all the time.
I’m 63, I may not have that much longer on the planet, but I’m scared for my own life and future, and I’m absolutely terrified for that of my son, and you should be too.
A safer future is still possible, but it requires urgency, coordination and sustained investment.
But there is also good opportunity. If we do treat this as the security challenge it is, the solutions make us stronger.
. . .
António Guterres, UN Secretary-General: (45:29)
Humanity is speeding past the limit to avoid climate catastrophe. Ten years ago in Paris, leaders pledged to limit temperature rise to 1.5°C degrees Celsius, the threshold scientists say is critical to avoiding the worst climate devastation. The latest report from the UN Environment Program delivers a stark warning, the world is failing to keep that promise.
We are set to breach the 1.5°C degree limit within the next few years. And this summer, scorching heat, raging wildfires, and deadly floods are a warning of what lies ahead. Every fraction of a degree will cost lives, destroy livelihoods, deepen inequality, and push ecosystems closer to irreversible damage. But we can still bring warming back below 1.5°C degrees by the end of the century.
We must make the overshoot as small and short as possible, limiting how high temperatures rise and how long they remain above 1.5°C. That demands an overshoot of ambition, accelerating the phase-out of fossil fuels and renewables revolution, slashing methane pollution and protecting land, forests and oceans. Governments must over-deliver our national climate plans, net zero commitments and beyond.
Developed countries must triple adaptation finance and ensure it reaches those most at risk. The science is clear. The solutions are at hand and the world has never been better equipped to deploy them. Now is the time to raise ambition and accelerate action.
Electric Saul:
People keep asking me how to electrify their homes. Now, I could lecture you on the thermodynamics, I could talk to you about the economics and why it will save you money, I could talk to you about the health benefits and why it’s good for you, your kids, and your pets. But really, there’s just millions of Australian households trying to get off gas, and there’s only one of me. Hey Saul, I’m you. But I don’t need coffee. And I can help countless families at any one time. Bloody hell, that’s deeply unsettling.
Wait, can you build an electric hydrofoil out of recycled parts from this office space? No. But I can help a family in Dubbo calculate the money they can save with a solar-powered EV in four milliseconds. Well, okay, that’s actually very useful.
Yeah. Your gas heater is a money pit. Switch to a heat pump. Save about $1,200 a year. Wait. Are you going to replace me? No silly. I’m answering the 10,000 questions across Australia that you don’t have time for. He’s annoying, but he’s right. Get your plan. Start saving. Try Electric Saul today.
. . .
Prof Eugenie Kayak – Doctors for the Environment: (48:43)
Climate change absolutely impacts every part of the human body. It really is one of the true existential threats to human health of this century. Hi, I’m Eugenie Kayak. I’m enterprise professor in sustainable health care at the Melbourne Medical School and a practicing anaesthetist in Melbourne. And importantly, I’m convener of Doctors for the Environment Australia’s Sustainable Healthcare Special Interest Group.
And I’ve been involved in DEA for almost 20 years now. So we as medical professions, I think it’s really important for us to get that message out that climate change is a health issue, it’s an all-encompassing health issues. We might hear about how it impacts the environment and the economy and industry, but ultimately it falls down to how it impacts our health and well-being. There’s no body system or organ system that isn’t impacted potentially.
From our accelerated climate change. So, as doctors and and other health professionals, we really have an important message to get across when it comes to action on climate change. I think probably most importantly also is that you know mitigating greenhouse gas emissions has many potential more immediate health co-benefits.
And so there are advantages. There are advantages to human health, to population health, with decreasing air pollution from fossil fuel combustion, from improving our diet so it’s more plant-based, from active transport. What drives me and keeps me going is one, the benefits of acting on climate change, but also that you know it is preventable. It is not black and white. We can mitigate and minimise the impacts of climate change, we have the tools to change things around.
. . .
We love you – Linkedin video: (50:32)
Hey man. Hey man. Look at that. It’s beautiful, right? And if I clear cut it, I can make a 7 per cent yield. And then use the profits to diversify your portfolio and start a fishing operation to take all the fish from the ocean. Use the 10 per cent profit margin to build a power plant to burn the coal you mine where the forest used to be. But business has never been better, and we’ll use the useless land we logged and killed and sucked dry to build
Then the forest will be gone. Then there would be no fish. But then the air will be ruined too.
Affordable housing. Chuck E. Cheese, Franchises, Franchises, Franchise, Applebee’s, Starbucks, Dutch Bros. GameStop, Chipotle, Panda Express, Chipotle.
Wait, but without any clean water or green anywhere, what will people eat? But from where? Somewhere else. And we’ll just keep taking and taking and the profits will grow faster and faster and it’ll never stop. It’s infinite. It’s infinite. It’s infinite. Why not?
No, it’s not. Because the world isn’t. You can’t keep taking more and more when you’ve destroyed the only planet we have. A system built on infinite growth just doesn’t work in a finite world.
But what about growth?
But if you can’t keep getting more, what’s the point?
Well, that’s easy. It’s to take care of what you have.
Yeah.
. . .
Jay Lipman: instagram video (52:00)
As someone who’s worked in climate for many years, let me explain why this graph is the most important thing you will see this year, and maybe the scariest, but let’s just start with important. So this is essentially the overshoot graph that came from the United Nations Environmental Programme report, which has been called the Overshoot Report because it is basically guaranteeing that we are going to overshoot the 1.5°C degree temperature increase goal above pre-industrial levels that we set at the Paris Climate Accords. Now why does this matter?
Because this graph is basically a choose your own adventure of what the world is going to look like if we act now and if we don’t. Because if we choose not to act, not to decarbonise the grid, to protect nature at scale, to do the things that we know would work, the world is going to look pretty dicey in five or ten years. Not 30 years, not fifty years. I mean look at this summer and the fires and the floods and the heat waves. This is the time to act.
And this is where honestly, as someone who works in climate, like I’m fired up. This is the opportunity for us to actually do what we know is necessary and we know what’s going to work. And that’s the craziest thing about, you know, climate, is we know exactly how to solve this problem. We know how to decarbonise the grid, we know how to decarbonise industry, we know how to preserve and protect nature at scale so it can sequester more carbon back into the earth. And so this graph is the most important thing you will see this year and should be the most inspiring because it shows that we can solve this problem if we act now. So if you’re in climate, if you’re doing the work, let’s go!
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
CALENDARS
Events we have talked about in The Sustainable Hour
Events in Victoria
The following is a collation of Victorian climate change events, activities, seminars, exhibitions, meetings and protests. Most are free, many ask for RSVP (which lets the organising group know how many to expect), some ask for donations to cover expenses, and a few require registration and fees. This calendar is provided as a free service by volunteers of the Victorian Climate Action Network. Information is as accurate as possible, but changes may occur.
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