Growing gardens on the grave of the old world – celebrating community energy

By building alternative systems from the ground up while existing systems collapse, communities like Yackandandah are creating pathways to a democratic and ecological future

In the light of the rapid dismantling of US democratic institutions, and global certainties that rely on it, it is timely to publish this lightly edited version of a speech Green Institute Executive Director Tim Hollo gave to the 10^th birthday celebrations of Totally Renewable Yackandandah, on November 16, 2024

Good evening, everyone, and what a pleasure and privilege it is for me to be here with you for this “celebration of the richness of community efforts”. I plan to riff off that idea tonight and speak to you about not just the richness but the beautiful power of community efforts to create transformative change. To transform us, our communities, and the whole world.

This celebration is being held at a challenging, confronting, dark moment of history, make no mistake. Andwhat you are doing here is a model of precisely what we need to be doing. It’s the end of the world as we know it, and, here in Yackandandah, I feel fine! Because this community is living into being the world we need in order to survive and thrive.

Before I go any further, I want to acknowledge the First Nations peoples whose stolen land we are on, their elders past, present and those still to come, and their deep, ancient and enduring connection to and stewardship of this country. This always was and always will be Aboriginal land. There is so much depth and wisdom to be found in conversation with First Nations people, learning about the system of deep democracy that they developed over millennia of balancing independence and interdependence, autonomy and entanglement, with each other and with country. As a nation, we have so much to learn from them, from their culture, and their systems of governing, if we but decided to listen.

I also want to acknowledge some of the luminaries here – the wonderful Helen Haines MP, without doubt one of the shining lights of our Federal Parliament (a shining light in a very murky darkness), and her path-blazing predecessor, Cathy McGowan, as well as my good friends, retired Greens MPs and recent Yackandandans, Mark Parnell and Penny Wright, the excellent Denis Ginnivan, the mellifluous Shane Howard, and I’m sure many more who I apologise for not singling out. But I know you won’t mind too much, because what is so extraordinary about you all as leaders is how you lead not from in front, and not from behind, but from among. You lead by bringing people together, creating space for the wisdom of the group to emerge. And what we’re celebrating here with Totally Renewable Yackandandah is testament to that leadership from so many of you.

And on that note, congratulations! Happy birthday! And thank you! Never doubt that what you are doing here matters. That it has a measurable impact – on the climate, on ecosystems, on communities, on our common future.

Your bold vision and your clear action. Your determination. Your leadership and collaboration. Your cultivation of connection, of trust, of interdependence. You are leading the way to a radical reimagination not just of Yackandandah, not just of energy systems, but of the world.

Now, as may be becoming clear, at this point I do want to clarify that I hope I’m not here under false pretences. I saw on the promotional materials that I’m an energy policy expert. Let me confess: I’m not an energy wonk, although I do have plenty of experience in policy and campaigns on climate and energy, going back almost a quarter of a century – experience that led me here tonight along a weird, winding path.

I cut my teeth around the turn of the millennium working on two campaigns around the then Mandatory Renewable Energy Target, or MRET, introduced as a sop by the Howard Government, who couldn’t go to Kyoto with nothing. The first campaign was to get the burning of native forest timber products removed from the definition of Renewable Energy Certificates, or RECs. We branded them Dead Koala RECs, and eventually we got them out, although we’ve had to reprosecute the case several times in the intervening decades.

The second campaign was to raise the ambition. John Howard’s MRET was a target of 2% new renewables by 2020. 2%. I was at Greenpeace, and we bought a couple of cases of cheap light beer, soaked off the labels, and replaced them with labels reading “Howard’s 2% MRET – weak as piss”, and distributed them widely through parliament house. I seem to remember that, as well as Bob Brown, a certain Anthony Albanese had one in his office for a while. And, when Howard finally lost government, the parliament finally lifted the target to 20% – a target that Australia breezed through to 27% by that date, and have now left in our dust to almost 40% just a few more years down the road.

How far we have come! And Totally Renewable Yack is totally such a great part of that journey. Because, every step of the way, it has been communities leading – demanding action, yes, but also simply stepping up and taking action. Policy has hindered or helped, but communities coming together to act has led the way.

So, yeah, I’m all about energy, but I’m not an energy policy wonk. I’m not going to spend my address talking to you about levelised cost of energy and grid stability, EROI and AEMO, PPAs and VPPs. Cue disappointment from three people in the room, and relief from everyone else.

But!

I am, however, a democracy and governance wonk! I’ve spent my life and my career studying and practising how change happens, how decisions are made, how power works now and how it might work differently, driven by my concerns about the climate, and energy, equity and justice, and a livable future for all.

And the combination of the two is why we’re all here! Because that, surely, is what Totally Renewable Yack is – a remarkable demonstration of deep, participatory democracy and the energy transition together. I want to help you recognise this evening quite how crucial and transformative that potentially is.

Democratising and decentralising has always been part of the energy transition story. It’s one of the reasons why it is so hard to make it happen through the existing systems of power and governance and so-called democracy. It’s why the transition has to be led through community efforts, through devolving power to the grassroots and cultivating models of trust and interdependence and mutuality, withdrawing our consent from those centralised systems of power.

Fossil fuels, which lend themselves structurally to large, centralised energy systems, are entangled with the existing systems of power. Fossil fuels, liberal democracy, capitalism, the Industrial Revolution and the Westphalian nation state system emerged together and are co-dependent.

Yes, fear not, fellow wonks! We are going to get a bit nerdy! Hands up who knows what the Westphalian nation state is? Doesn’t matter! I won’t mention it again. Probably…

And good that we can laugh. We have to laugh. Because we’re also about to get a bit dark. And we have to do that, too.

I don’t need to tell you that, while I was preparing this speech, Donald Trump was re-elected President of the USA. I don’t need to tell you that he has already set in motion plans, structurally made possible by his first term, to dismantle American democracy, such as it has been; to end the administrative state and its checks and balances, to empower robber-baron corporate corruption, to spread disinformation and hate and division unhindered by institutional or cultural barriers. I don’t need to tell you that Russia and China and Hungary and Israel and Argentina and so many other illiberal states are doing the same, and that France and Germany are not far behind, and that Australia is not immune.

I don’t need to tell you that this is happening as global average temperatures hit 1.5 degrees above the preindustrial average with no sign of turning around, bringing already catastrophic impacts on ecosystems, on infrastructure, on communities.

I don’t need to tell you that we’re in crisis. Polycrisis. Multi-system collapse.

What I do think, maybe I need to tell you, because it’s the bit I need to work hardest to convince people of, even now, is that the system of “democracy” we’ve invested our trust in for our entire lives, this liberal, capitalist, representative democratic comfort zone we still like to think will help us solve these crises?

That’s over. It was never truly what its mythology said it was, to be clear. But now it’s dead.

Not to put too fine a point on it, its rotting corpse is attracting flies. Big orange-painted flies. The stench, or should I say the Musk, is making us sick.

It’s time we buried it. Composted it. It’s time to grow our gardens on its grave, in the ashes and stones of the crumbling old world. And share the flowers and the fruit.

As Antonio Gramsci wrote a century ago, when the old world is dying and the new is struggling to be born, this is the time of monsters. But if we help the new world to be born, to toddle to her feet and learn to run, the potential for positive transformation, to embrace deep democracy, regenerative and restorative forms of power and governance, is right here in front of us. It’s right here in Yackandandah!

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OK. Wonk moment. We need to define some terms.

Democracy comes from the Ancient Greek words demos, meaning people, and kratos, meaning power. All it means, really, is a system where power is exercised by the people. But this raises a whole lot of new questions – who are the people? Who gets to take part, and to what extent? All adults? Adolescents? Citizens only, or also residents? Do we make access available equally to all, or more easily to certain people and types of people? Do we make decisions directly together, or through representatives? Do we make decisions in adversarial, argumentative ways, or through deliberation? Do we strive for majority rules, or for consensus?

These aren’t abstract process questions. They matter, because the process changes the outcome. And it changes us, our community, our relationships. An adversarial system, in which we are constantly told to pick a side and fight for it, gives us a certain set of outcomes and a certain type of societal relationship, with each other, with power, with governance, with the Earth. A deliberative system, where we create the space to sit down together and listen to each other, work out where we’re coming from, be creative, gives us very different outcomes, and very different relationships. Representative democracy will give us different outcomes and relationships from a participatory, or a delegated democratic model.

In my book, Living Democracy, I propose a way of thinking about democratic systems based around ecology, ecological systems thinking. Where healthy ecological systems are characterised by diversity, interdependence, and impermanence, we have found ourselves stuck in a negative feedback loop that has created systems characterised by separation (hyper-individualism, disconnection from the natural world), domination (social hierarchies, coercion, anthropocentrism), and the pretence, the illusion of permanence (the idea that this is just the way it is, there is no alternative). This flows through into structures of power that are individualist, adversarial, hierarchical, exclusive, extractive, and stuck in a status quo bias that holds back change. That’s bad at any time. In the 21^st century, in the unstable and volatile world these systems have created, when we will need so much more connectivity, interdependence, quick and high-quality feedback, ability and willingness to come together across difference, it’s devastating.

We need to recover and re-embrace ecological worldviews, and cultivate systems of power supported by that thinking. And we need to do it fast. Because the thing about doing the opposite of what healthy ecosystems need is that you can only do it for so long before you trigger tipping points, and cause cascading collapse.

Let’s look at a few examples of this. Consider Robodebt.

What happens when you have a social security system based on a deeply embedded philosophy of socio-economic hierarchy – lifters and leaners, deserving and undeserving – and a punitive view of enforcement? It becomes your personal fault if you’re struggling, and the government’s job to punish you if you fail. Combine this with outsourcing of core services, and with stripped away accountability, both political and legal, for both ministers and public servants, and you get a draconian, and illegal, system that drove people to suicide.

There is so much evidence that giving humans what they need to survive and letting them choose, together, what to do, works better for everyone. But no, our system simply must exclude and coerce. It doesn’t know how to do otherwise.

Of course, even after the whole disgusting episode is now on the public record, the refusal of the new National Anti Corruption Commission to take it on leaves open the possibility that something like it could quite easily happen again. And it exposes a level of corruption within the NACC itself that reveals the depth of the crisis of governance.

I could spend the whole evening taking you through examples.

Universities have been turned into factories churning out widgets of “job-ready” workers (who, ironically, are worse trained for employment because of it) instead of institutions of learning and wisdom. Curricula are stripped back. Research is mired in bureaucracy. Costs are cut while prices are jacked up. The marketisation of education has been a massive failure every single way you look at it, with no change in sight.

Dare I mention housing? It’s bloody obvious that turning the basic right to shelter into an investment vehicle for the wealthy has led us to absolute crisis. No government is willing to act to change that.

And I don’t need to mention continuing to expand fossil fuels in a climate crisis, do I? NSW Premier Minns’ latest $450m gift to Origin to keep Eraring coal-fired power station going is a case in point. And while the Federal Government continues to approve gas extraction, the global climate conference is right now being held once again in a petro-state dictatorship.

All this, I want to emphasise, is unpopular. Governments aren’t doing these things because the public wants them to. They are acting against the public will, against the public interest, against good advice from the community and civil society, in a mockery of democracy.

Speaking of which, if we peek through our fingers at the US election once more, and look at states where there were ballot measures, we see evidence of people voting for abortion rights and for Trump, voting for increased minimum wage and worker protections and for Trump.

This isn’t to make fun of people, or blame people. The problem is systemic.

Government is in crisis. Having stripped out connection and interdependence and diversity and the possibility of change, government has destroyed its own ability to get decent advice, through the public service or public consultation or parliament or the ballot box; it has become hopelessly adversarial, and made negotiation and deliberation dirty words. Protest works less and less. Electoral systems of all kinds are breaking under the strain of splintering votes. Our Westminster system simply doesn’t know how to deal with shared power arrangements or the need for urgency. And in a world where trust and connection have been destroyed, misinformation and conspiracy theories thrive, intersecting, of course, with the collapse of education and media.

But it’s not just government. And it’s not just the intersection between government and capital, where questions of corruption and state capture linger in the shadows.

How’s that private sector that conservatives have long trumpeted as more efficient than government?

I have one word for you: Qantas.

Should I go on? 9 Fairfax? Telstra? Do we need to talk about the supermarkets? All of the problems of government apply to corporations – feedback mechanisms are broken, so market signals don’t work any better than democratic signals. Competition has led inexorably to homogenisation or monopoly, so diversity is gone. Bureaucracy, managerialism and status quo bias blind corporations to the need to change.

The brilliant social critic and tech writer, Cory Doctorow, has coined a wonderful word to describe what’s going on: enshittification. He invented the term to describe the life cycle of tech platforms.

First, they’re good to their users, because they are there for their users. Then they get Venture Capital funding, and they abuse their users to make returns for VC. Then they get advertising, and the platform is redesigned to increase profits for advertisers. Of course, step by step, they make the experience worse and worse for users. And the platform no longer works for anyone.

Google is a prime example of this. Possibly the best, most transformative invention of the century, google search no longer works. Infested with advertising and AI, it feeds you garbage, when it used to find anything you were looking for, accurately, within milliseconds.

Enshittification now applies across the board, in a world of institutions in crisis. Nothing works anymore. Just when we need it to work better than ever.

Welcome to multi system collapse.

*

I want to pause the rant here for another wonk moment and introduce you to a new concept. New unless you’re an ecological scientist or a particular type of political scientist, or you’ve already read my book.

The concept is panarchy, and it was conceived by a team of ecological scientists led by Lance Gunderson and CS Holling, working to develop a systemic understanding of the world, of the connections between phenomena, of the balance between stability and change.

Panarchy gives us tremendous insights from what is an extraordinarily simple observation: that everything in the world goes through the same four-stage cycle of change: growth, conservation, release, and reorganisation.

Everything. Whether it’s the cells in our bodies, or our bodies themselves, whether it’s ecosystems or star systems or political systems, everything follows this cycle: growth, conservation in that form for a while, release or collapse or death, and reorganisation of its constituent elements into some other form.

And these cycles all interact with each other: small and fast cycles influence the make-up of the larger, slower ones; and larger, slower cycles influence the conditions under which the smaller and faster ones emerge and grow. And the feedbacks can create tremendous stability, the equilibrium that characterises most of our lives, most of the time. Because when one cycle is reaching release, another is in early stages of growth, and both are enmeshed with others that are sitting at conservation.

But sometimes, a whole lot of these cycles reach release at the same time. And that is a moment of tremendous, swift transformation – a tipping point from one equilibrium into another, a moment of collapse and regeneration, when what happens next depends on what’s growing underneath, and what the conditions for growth are.

In collapse is the space for renewal. All of a sudden, there’s scope for whatever else is growing to claim space. In a biodiverse environment, the removal of one species or destruction of one local ecological community will see a burst of growth of others, rapidly filling the gap. This can restabilise the larger cycles, although often with different characteristics that emerged through the localised collapse and renewal. Or the reorganisation can be far more dramatic.

In systems where there’s less diversity, or less interconnection, forests can rapidly become grasslands, grasslands deserts, coral reefs wastelands. Equally, eroded farms can become biodiverse and productive havens, and reintroducing apex predators can bring back birdlife and restore riverbanks. The greater the diversity, the more interdependence, the more swiftly a new healthy balance can emerge from what’s growing underneath and what the conditions for growth are.

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Let’s bring this back to this historical moment – to enshittification and the polycrisis and the rotting corpse of liberal democracy. And to Totally Renewable Yackandandah.

I think panarchy gives us a really interesting perspective on how transformational political change can happen, in moments like this.

From a panarchic perspective, working to reform a system which is already teetering on the edge of release, of collapse, is extremely dangerous. By making things a little less bad than they otherwise might be, reform enables it to hold on a little longer than might be healthy. At the same time, it suppresses, either directly or through opportunity costs, the growth of the new practices that we need to transform into a better way of living together. So, when collapse comes, it may be deeper, darker and longer than it needs to be.

Revolution, focusing primarily on destroying the old and far too little on creating the new, is even worse. Driving us apart, revolution creates scorched earth in which it’s harder to grow our new world. It would make collapse worse, and in many cases it drives regeneration and transformation in the wrong direction – towards more coercion and domination, separation and pretence of permanence.

But what if there were another way? What if there were a panarchic approach to transformation that learns from how change happens in the natural world? What if there were a model that took into account the fact that the existing system is already in collapse? That it’s not for us to burn it down or reform it, but to cultivate what is growing underneath, and what the conditions for growth are, as it collapses?

In Living Democracy, I propose a four step process of panarchic transformative change.

It starts by sowing the seeds of the new world that we want to live together in. A world based on structures and worldviews of interdependence, diversity and impermanence. A mutual, collaborative world where all our voices, in their grand diversity, can be heard, can be listened to, as we come together and deliberate about our shared future.

It extends by cultivating healthy soils, not growing by building empires and taking over others’ space, but by supporting others to learn from what we’re doing, replicating our approach in different ways, interlinking and connecting with us as we scale.

It creates space for growth by weeding the ground, by explicitly withdrawing our consent from the old systems or domination and separation that have caused this polycrisis, systems that depend on our consent for their survival as they teeter on the edge of collapse.

And then it iterates. As we sow our seeds, cultivate healthy soils and weed the ground, we grow our garden on the grave of the old system, amidst the ashes and crumbling stones of the old world.

We keep doing what works. We keep supporting each other. We cultivate grassroots models of democratic participation and decision-making, where power stays with the people; and we keep creating new connections, coordinating and federating to scale up and out instead of growing and centralising and taking power further away; we challenge ourselves to reinvent when things don’t work, instead of getting stuck in old ways; we celebrate diverse approaches to a shared goal of surviving and thriving together, as we create a new, flourishing, Living Democracy.

Hello, Totally Renewable Yackandandah. How does it feel to be a model for transformative political change at the end of the world as we know it?

If the old energy system is characterised by big, centralised fossil fuel supply, managed by distant government, or large corporations entangled with those governments, Totally Renewable Yackandandah is sowing the seeds of a new model of dispersed, democratised generation, cooperatively owned and managed by the community itself.

Not seeking to control but to support others to join in, with informal and interpersonal links between the energy system and the food system and the political independents’ movement, which are on a similar path of collaborative, community-driven governance, networked rather than centralised, you are cultivating healthy soils.

Choosing to set up your own locally-owned and managed retailer, even, you are withdrawing consent from the old system, as community agriculture is withdrawing consent from the supermarket-controlled food system and Independents and Greens are withdrawing consent from the centralised old party political system, all devolving power back out into the community.

Learning as you go, studying your own progress and that of others, you are iterating the process, working towards a place where you become the model of a new system.

Remember how I said process matters? Doing things differently on the ground together, like you’re doing here, changes our relationships AND structures, and vice versa, creating positive feedback loops, virtuous cycles. I happened to meet Denis Ginnivan with a mutual friend, on one of his trips to Canberra, and he said something about this which I had to quote in my book. He said that part of what is going on here is simply “people being nicer to each other.” He told me that “when people feel positive about being a citizen, the system begins to change itself.”

What this, thinking panarchically again, also shows us is how fast change can happen in this model. Because if (instead of working for policies to change everything from above, waiting for Godot, and breeding resentment) you folks simply get up and do it yourselves, if you can transform Yackandandah within a decade, folks down the road in Beechworth can do the same, at the same time, and folks up in Bega and in Lismore, and suburb by suburb in Canberra and Melbourne can do the same. And we learn from each other, and we coordinate our efforts, and we bring power to the people in more ways than one, and we change the whole world.

This … might not work. Prediction is difficult, as they say, especially about the future. But it might. It could. If we really give it a go.

And I think, if you’ll indulge me as I wrap this up, there are a couple of guiding principles (which I suspect you already know) that will help take this work from a valuable experiment at the margins into this truly transformational space.

Don’t succumb to the pressure to grow – scale through connections and cooperation. Don’t centralise, but build networks. Work around the system – use it where you can, carefully, but don’t let yourselves be co-opted or bought.

Trust yourselves, as your model shows you trust each other.

Totally Renewable Yackandandah is an incredible achievement in its own right, and even more so when you see it in its place in the transformation of energy systems and democratic systems going on around the globe.

When we look around the world, we can see disasters, for sure we can. But we can also see communities taking the lead, taking back their agency, stepping into their power, doing what needs to be done.

You, Totally Renewable Yackandandah, are why, at the end of the world as we know it, I feel fine. You are why we will not only survive, but thrive. Happy 10^th birthday, and thank you!

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Tim Hollo is Executive Director of The Green Institute, founder of Green Music Australia, has recorded and toured globally with FourPlay String Quartet (you’ll hear a tune from them in this episode), and is the author of Living Democracy: An ecological manifesto for the end of the world as we know it.

Feature image couresty Totally Renewable Yackandandah