My guest in this episode of Sense-Making in a Changing World is Brisbane-based author, Geoff Ebbs. His latest book is Your Life, Your Planet published by Australian Geographic.
Over the decades as a dedicated environmental activist, he has many ways of explored ways of being a change-maker – politician, comedian, lecturer, author, engineer, actor, radio host (and guest) …. Since 2005 he has been curating an online news site, The Generator.news
Download this list of 10 of Morag’s favourite books.
Morag’s 4 part introduction to permaculture video series.
His focus in Your Life, Your Planet is about building a community of earth care [pr]activists . The book is a toolkit full of tips that will help you to reduce your environmental footprint and live well.
Our conversation focussed on the many ways of ‘being the change. Enjoy!
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Read the full transcript here.
Morag Gamble:
Welcome to the Sense-making in a Changing World Podcast, where we explore the kind of thinking we need to navigate a positive way forward. I’m your host Morag Gamble.. Permaculture Educator, and Global Ambassador, Filmmaker, Eco villager, Food Forester, Mother, Practivist and all-around lover of thinking, communicating and acting regeneratively. For a long time it’s been clear to me that to shift trajectory to a thriving one planet way of life we first need to shift our thinking. The way we perceive ourselves in relation to nature, self, and community is the core. So this is true now more than ever. And even the way change is changing, is changing. Unprecedented changes are happening all around us at a rapid pace. So how do we make sense of this? To know which way to turn, to know what action to focus on? So our efforts are worthwhile and nourishing and are working towards resilience, and reconnection. What better way to make sense than to join together with others in open generative conversation. In this podcast, I’ll share conversations with my friends and colleagues, people who inspire and challenge me in their ways of thinking, connecting and acting. These wonderful people are thinkers, doers, activists, scholars, writers, leaders, farmers, educators, people whose work informs permaculture and spark the imagination of what a post-COVID, climate-resilient, socially just future could look like. Their ideas and projects help us to make sense in this changing world to compost and digest the ideas and to nurture the fertile ground for new ideas, connections and actions. Together we’ll open up conversations in the world of permaculture design, regenerative thinking community action, earth repair, eco-literacy, and much more. I can’t wait to share these conversations with you.
Over the last three decades of personally making sense of the multiple crises we face. I always returned to the practical and positive world of permaculture with its ethics of earth care, people care and fair share. I’ve seen firsthand how adaptable and responsive it can be in all contexts from urban to rural, from refugee camps to suburbs. It helps people make sense of what’s happening around them and to learn accessible design tools, to shape their habitat positively and to contribute to cultural and ecological regeneration. This is why I’ve created the Permaculture Educators Program to help thousands of people to become permaculture teachers everywhere through an interactive online dual certificate of permaculture design and teaching. We sponsor global Permayouth programs, women’s self help groups in the global South and teens in refugee camps. So anyway, this podcast is sponsored by the Permaculture Education Institute and our Permaculture Educators Program. If you’d like to find more about permaculture, I’ve created a four-part permaculture video series to explain what permaculture is and also how you can make it your livelihood as well as your way of life. We’d love to invite you to join a wonderfully inspiring, friendly, and supportive global learning community. So I welcome you to share each of these conversations, and I’d also like to suggest you create a local conversation circle to explore the ideas shared in each show and discuss together how this makes sense in your local community and environment. I’d like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land in which I meet and speak with you today, the Gubbi Gubbi people and pay my respects to their elders past, present and emerging.
On sense-making in a changing world today, I’m joined by Geoff Ebbs, the Brisbane-based author of a new book called Your Life, Your Planet, published by Australian geographic. He’s a long time environmentalist who’s tried his hand at so many different ways of being a changemaker. As a politician, a comedian, a lecturer, author, engineer, actor, radio host and guest . We had such a great chat and the focus of his latest book is on how building communities can save the world. So come and join the conversation and welcome to the show today. Well, welcome to the show Geoff. It’s an absolute delight to have you here. I’ve just been reading your latest what your book, this book, Your life, Your planet. And the subtitle is what you can do right now packed with practical tips to immediately reduce your environmental footprint. And it’s published by Australian Geographic. So from this my guess is that your focus is really around what it is that we can do in our homes, in our communities to make a change. But I also noticed that you’re an actor you’ve stood for parliament several times. You stood against Kevin Rudd as well I saw. Politician, activist writer , so many different elements of this. And I guess the key thread that I see is this key passion to want to bring about change that we need to see in the world. So maybe let’s just start at the, sort of, at this end of the conversation around, well, tell us a little bit about the book and why and how this book came into being and what you’re hoping this book will do.
Geoff Ebbs:
Sure! Well , thanks Morag. The , relationship with Australian Geographic was initiated by them. So I’ve worked on a lot of other books written by me or my nom-de-plum Giovanni Ebono. It was a stage name that I also used to run a radio show in Byron Bay and became fairly well-known . So when I first ran for politics, I ran as Giovanni Ebono and I had to change my name to do that. So that was an interesting little diversion that had some odd l ong-term effects on my life a nd c areer. But anyway, there was a book called Sydney’s Guide to Saving the Planet written by Giovanni Ebono in 2008, which was, tips about reducing your carbon footprint be cause a t the time the popular knowledge about, you know, what carbon footprint was and what activities we engaged in was fairly limited. And so I thought it was useful put that together. These days, I think that the ch allenges h ave moved on and what we , what most of us who are sort of endeavoring to help promote a one planet lifestyle as you appropriately call it understand that a lot of the issues are behavioral, that there ar e a lot of things about the systemic nature of society that we as individuals do not have control over. And so while we can do things in our lives to minimize our personal im pact, the challenge is h ow do we participate or withdraw from those aspects of society that, yo u know, fundamentally problematic. So for example, a lot of us minimize the amount that we fly, but if we are really engaged in the political process and influencing society at a high level every now and then we have to jump on a plane to go to a conference or a meeting or whatever. And so there are clear limits to how much we as individuals can control. And in some wa ys i s some hope in there because we can see that systemic ch anges g radually occurring. And there’s also some sort of fear and desperation in it because just the fact that they’re outside ou r c ontrol means that it’s difficult when we have bad governments that won’t make decisions. Then we feel if t he train rushing faster towards the cliff and we don’t know what to do. And, u m , w hen we look at some of the really wicked problems like concrete, for example, it ‘s s omething we ‘ve r eally ugly began to deal with. Uh , y e ah, we fu ndamentally depend on it to hold the bricks in our home together, the services that we drive on and so on. So what I wanted to do was really try and address the issues about how we ordinary people living in suburban Australia can grapple with the day-to-day issues that we do have control ove r th a t in the context that we’ ve gi v en a world that we don’t have much control ove r. A nd so on one level, the book is 101 tips about living well. Some of them are sp ecifically the kinds of tips that you get in any book about reducing your carbon footprint, but some of them are muc h mo r e be havioral. So for example, in the section called garage, which is ab out transport and the kin ds of things we keep in our shi ns. S o tools and bar becue im plements and those kinds of things, one of the tips you just walk. So, you kn o w, w e should walk everywhere we can. And if we can ‘t wa lk there, then maybe we should jump on a bicycle and if it’s inappropriate to ri d e, t hen maybe we should drive. Then the question becomes, do we have to drive in our own car or can we borrow a car or rent one, or pay a driver to drive us around? And the answer to that will depend on a lot of thi ngs. S o, you know, but fundamentally we should walk. We should understand the value of walking. It’s good for our physical health. It’s good for our mental health. It’s good for our rel ationship wi th our community. It’s good for our relationship with our environment. The sor t of things that we learn when we’re walking, it really valuable in terms of how we place ourselves in our community and how we app ly to ourselves in our environment. And so to me, that’s quite a different approach than just measuring the amount of carbon that we consume or, u h , tr ying to list the kinds of products that we might buy that reduce impact, you kn o w. S o that’s a bit of a long rambling answer, but I think, i t gives you an indication of what I’m trying to do in Your life, Your planet.
Morag Gamble:
Yeah. And I totally agree. I think the attitude shift is where it’s at, because we can have as many different solutions and tech fixes, but until we actually start to shift the way that we think and interact and connect with our place, then those things can just still sit on the shelf or not really make any difference whatsoever. And there are limitations as you say, to what you can do at your own home. But thinking about everyone’s home is also the place where the conditions for change can happen. Aren’t they? So if you’re in a home where there is this kind of shift going on, and then you go out into your workplace, you take that with you or into your school environment or wherever it is, you take it out into your community. And I think, you know , we need to really value this home-based change, but as well within that context of the broader political framework and also community. Community and sharing is something that I’ve noticed that you talk a lot about, like the importance of community. Have you noticed there’s been a shift in our understanding about the value of community with COVID do you think?
Geoff Ebbs:
Oh, certainly. I think , 2020 was the most interesting year. You could possibly chosen to write a book like this because we were in the midst of seeing those long-term impacts that something like a pandemic has on society and the , um, the way that the shelves of supermarkets and shops empty was extraordinary to watch. People went for toilet paper first, which remains a mystery to me. And I’m sure it has an explanation, but nevertheless, that’s what happened. And then the basic food stuffs started to disappear. So sugar, flour, all of those things that people, you know, we all, well, people of my age grew up with those as being the things that you bought and a lot of other things you’ve made or group. And so those were the things you went to the grocers for those basic food stuffs . So to see them disappeared , it seemed to me to being a very strong indication that those old fashioned values were rising to four , then eggs started to disappear and then things like seedlings and chickens that people were buying and stuff disappear . So as the months go by, we saw this shifting of society from being a consumer society to having a mixture of consumption and production. And that reminded me of a term that first heard from a woman called Kath Green, who had written a chapter in a book about the Future of food, I think the name was. She used the term , turning our homes from being nodes of consumption, into being hubs of production. And her argument was that when we stay at home and we do things like knit, make bread, hem our own trousers and so on. We’re not only reducing the amount of things that we consume, but we’re actually disengaging from the notion that we go out into society and consume things and then we’d bring them or purchase things. And then we bring them back home and consume them. And what we’re starting to do is change that orientation of the individual as the consumer and society as the producer. And to me that explained a gap that I’d had in my thing, because I’d always said, grow it if you can , make it. So talking about food, grow it. If you can make your own , whether or not you’ve grown it , and whatever you do share it , because that’s the why that we will start to transform the nature of consumption. But I’d had real trouble sort of promoting that message. People thought it was sort of twee or quaint or didn’t quite see how it related to them. But hearing Kat talk about the hub of production versus nodes of consumption it all snapped into focus. And I saw the power of the of doing things at home and of sharing as the basis for building community. If someone pops up and pick up a loaf of bread, because you’ve cooked three loaves of bread, because it was just as easy to cook three, as it is to cook well, then naturally they will try and give you something in return. So all of a sudden you’re setting up a trading network just by baking your own bread.
Morag Gamble:
Unbelievable. Really isn’t it. And what’s wonderful too, is that this is kind of where the work of people like David Holmgren has gone as well with his RetroSuburbia work, basically focusing in on the suburban household as the main point of production and thinking about how education and childcare and food and all of these different things together. So I think it’s absolutely fantastic. Where did you first start noticing all of this? When was your sort of moment of awakening around these issues? What fuels your.. Well, I was lucky to grown up with grandparents who were very old fashioned farmers. And so mum had grown up on the farm and so it was sort of quite rural in nature and, you know , we grew a lot of food at home. So I had exposure as a child. Then I became immersed in technology and living a very sort of fast in the city, high-tech lifestyle as a young person and young parent, young family. So the moment of awakening for me was really the Iraq war over oil, which reported to be over the weapons of mass destruction. So during the time when the planes flew into the world trade center, I was living in Sydney and reverse commuting. So I lived in the city and then I commuted out to beautiful, more than suburbs , the Northern beaches to work at a book publisher’s premises , producing and editing books. And so I drove through the city and across the Harbor bridge every day and the image of planes flying overhead and the towers of the city was terrifying to me. And for one reason or another, I ended up editing a thing called Energy Daily, which was a newsletter for energy industry executives, people who bought and sold energy. So some of them didn’t work for the energy industry, but they were major consumers of energy. And what happened immediately obvious to me, editing that and looking close up at that industry was that the finance pages of the major newspapers were talking about the challenge of oil prices and have reliance on oil and fully aware of the indications of fossil fuels on climate. The international politics pages were describing a sort of geopolitical chess game where the end of [inaudible] was the driving force behind the move of Western powers into the middle East. The environmental pages had similar concerns, but from a different point of view, but on the front page, it was about weapons of mass destruction and how the UN the chief of the UN arms agency was , couldn’t fight his way out of a wet paper bag because the United States said, and so the nightly news, the front page of the newspaper, the conversation in the streets, the conversation at work was about the smoke screen that was being put out by a small member of vested intrested when there was this huge amount of information that was readily available for anyone who cared to look or knew about what was really going on. And so, as a journalist who’d been sort of pouring my way up the ladder of journalism, and I got into journalism through technology. So as a technologist who’d been interested in information systems and building information systems, I suddenly realized that it wasn’t the grassroots . It wasn’t the sharing of information that made the difference. It was who was controlling the puppet strings that really made the difference. And that was shocking to me because like a lot of us through, I dunno , the peace movement, feminism, the environmental movemen, climate change awareness. We all thought that if only we could get the information out there, people would realize that there was a need for change. So when you go back and you look at things like Rachel Carson’s silent spring, or Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful. All similar books that really set us on this path of awareness about the dangers of the industrial consumer society that we’d been building, all of those books were statements about what is really going on. And they revolutionize those who receptive to that message, but none of us were prepared for the backlash. None of us ever assumed that there would be an organized opposition that preyed in ignorance and fear to maintain the status quo. Now, in hindsight, how could we have expected anything else? It was a sort of deliberate naivety almost to think that that wasn’t going to happen, but I hadn’t realized that until I saw what was going on in the mainstream media, around the Iraq war, around the 9 11 and the subsequent war on terror. And so that was, that was my awakening. So I left city, moved to Northern New South Wales, became involved in community projects , became involved in green politics. I did a lot of different things to learn about public speakings, comedy training courses. I did radio, writing for radio courses. I ran the radio program. So I use my magazine skills, my technology skills to sort of frame all of that and do it as well as I could, but I was on a completely different journey than advocating for, but still I’ve still focused on awareness. And so I didn’t really realize until about a decade in politics that changed, I mean, politics must be a part of the process of change. Political parties and politicians really drive change. And so I’ve stepped back from that involvement in politics, try and drive change, and I’ve realized that my best skills are in writing and performing. And so that’s the way that I have to do it and the tool , so where I hopefully can drive as a wedge deepest and have the maximum impact. So I’ve gone from sort of try to shine my light where it’s darkest trying to shine my brightest light . Yeah. That’s a really, really great point. I am so glad that you said that because we can often spend a lifetime fighting things in areas where we just can never make shift happen. And yet when we focus on shining and also the thing that I..you know I wish I was funnier, I’m not a very funny person. I’m always so earnest , you know. I’d always wished I had the capacity to be a stand-up comic because I watch as hundreds and thousands of people, what comedians just rip stuff to shreds and get right to the heart of an issue. And if people in the palm of their hands, just, and like , like you said, it drives a wedge, it kind of opens up these doors, these portals for us to see something, how it hadn’t seen it before and be ready to be confronted? You know, I dunno , what’s your experience of being a comedian in this space?
Geoff Ebbs:
It’s terrifying. The reason is because you’re on your own with a microphone and an audience. you don’t have any of the structures that normally carry a performance. You don’t have a tune to sing along to or lyrics to repeat. And so it’s you in an emotional relationship with someone where you have to drive the relationship, and if you let the audience drive it you’ll completely lose it. And so really good comedians can get an audience that’s not responding to the normal performance and regain a connection and a trust with that audience and get them laughing again, and then go back to the things that they want to do and want to say. And so that’s a really admirable skill. And, y ou k now, I ‘m yet to develop that.
Morag Gamble:
I was going to say, do you think it’s part of where we need to be going, like these different ways of sharing the change, the sharing the ideas, you know, cause one is I go out and do talks and I run courses and I have a whole lot of different things like that, but different types of ways of communicating. I mean, I guess we need all people doing all different kinds of things, but I really think that music and the arts and poetry and theater and comedy all have a really important part to play in helping to shift this awareness.
Geoff Ebbs:
Look , we certainly need all those forms of communication because the real challenge is to bring people who are currently disinterested along. And I mean, that’s really where my focus, you know. I think the work you do is brilliant, but only people who want to learn about permaculture are ever going to come to you. I’ve done a lot of door knocking for various people , just ordinary suburban streets. And, you know, they’re the sort of people that Scott Morrison is reaching out to. When [ inaudible] never gonna drive electrical vehicles because that will lose their weekend. You know, the people who will comment like that, resonates with are real and they’re honesty . They’re genuine. They good people, they love nature. But I think experiencing nature is driving through it in a four-wheel drive and zipping over a river, you know, then you stop and kill a couple of fish and then you’re really got your hands involved in nature, you know? So to reach those people requires a different set of skills. Comedy might be one of those. The problem with comedy is that it’s not at all impassive. It is rude. It is crude.
Morag Gamble:
Maybe that’s why I can’t do it. I’m just so nice, I’m just. Can’t. I don’t know how to be rude.
Geoff Ebbs:
You really have to be prepared to , I mean, writers always talk about killing their own children because you develop a character that you love dearly and then perhaps inevitable, but the only way the plot can work is when you kill them off. I mean, again, that’s oversimplifying for the sake of a cheap joke, but you know , that’s what you, that’s what you do in comedy. So you can’t afford to be politically correct or sensitive. And so it’s quite, in some ways it’s quite distracting. And so it’s a double, it’s a double -edged sword, but certainly it’s a useful tool.
Morag Gamble:
So I’m wondering then, you know, because you have dived into comedy at times, you’re a lecturer at Uni and you’ve been in the political world. In terms of, you know, doing something like being a lecturer and being in the world of politics. What are some of your experiences there of where you felt like, Oh yeah, this is, this is really helping to make a difference or maybe what are some of the challenges like really wanting to get to like where is it that we can help to get ourselves unstuck?
Geoff Ebbs:
Well, I think one of the reasons that I keep developing new hats to wear, and moving from one career to another is largely because of frustration. So I can talk a lot about what doesn’t work in each of those areas. Now that might be failing on my part, that I’m just not good at things , but partly for the sake of my own ego, I’d like to think that I’ve actually identified some of the fundamental challenges. So, you know , I mean, I just talked about the difficulty of comedy being sort of crude and harsh. One of the challenges that I’ve had in politics is that always promising people, that you can do things which are in fact very difficult to do. And so you’re in, you’re asking them to invest their trust in you in a way that you may not be able to deliver. And I found that quite harrowing. Um , the other thing is that the political process sort of choose people up and the kinds of shenanigans that we’re hearing about in parliament house, partly just because of the disgusting nature of certain groups of people in our society. But it’s also partly because our , the nature of politics is adversarial. It’s about power and it’s completely outcomes focused. So it’s never about the journey. You know , the ends always justify the means . So to me, that’s a limitation of politics. What gives me hope about all of those experiences that I’ve had though, is that when you are passionate about something and you advocate consistently for it, you do see the changeoccur. And so in putting a weekly radio show together for a community radio station in Byron Bay, which, you know , has a reasonable sort of footprint, we measure our audience at about three and a half thousand active listeners a week, which is not to be sneezed at, but it’s not the thousands or tens of thousands of audiences that metropolitan radio stations or at right-wing shock jocks get, but what I’ve found was that we were writing original stories based on first sources of news. And what was happening is that maybe six weeks later, maybe as close as three weeks later, those stories would pop up in the mainstream news. Now we had very little evidence that we were driving the news agenda, but we occasionally did have evidence in the form of a ABC radio Perth calling us and say , where did you source that story? I would like talk to that person who you quoted, things like that. So, and you know , I mean, what we’ve seen the way Fox news is driven the media agenda in America. It’s not based on its popularity or its reach. It’s just based on its constant advocacy for an extreme point of view. So similarly in politics, if you hold the line and refuse to compromise, the agenda starts to shift. And it’s really, really important that we counter that behavior coming from the Murdochs of the world and the coal lobbies and so on. So even though I personally exhausted myself in certainly in politics , uh, that doesn’t mean that it’s not worth doing it just means that I had to move on from my own wellbeing .
Morag Gamble:
Yeah, it’s interesting. Isn’t it? I mean, it’s, I’ve often toyed with the idea of standing as, as well, and kind of stop myself before even getting to the point of that. You got to. Knowing that that would be the end for me, knowing, like, feeling that the toxic nature of the culture there and thinking that there’s, you know , for someone like me, probably the best thing I could do is to help to do what you were just talking about there. Showing up consistently sharing a different story and inviting people to come and hear that and be part of that other story. And I ‘m helping to describe what that is helping to demonstrate what that is. Um and consistently doing that. I think it’s something that you like that you can continue to show up w ith every day and to have something that’s real and viable not just ecologically or socially, but also financially as well as a viable alternative. And I think when we need other stories that are visible.
Geoff Ebbs:
One thing that I think that’s really heartening is the the number of independent women who are appearing in federal politics. So starting with the campaigning in Northern Victoria, where some community groups decided that political parties weren’t serving their interests because they were safe, conservative seat they were getting no attention from either party. And so they would run against the parties and they did it completely from a grassroots approach. They didn’t appoint a candidate and then promote them and they went around the community said What do you care about? And then when they had an agenda together, these are the things that we want. Then they use that basically kitchen table and town hall network that they’d set up to call for people who were prepared to drive that agenda forward. And then they selected their candidates using the same process. Now it has got its second independent half the parties have not managed to break into that. And so now that that model is being used by, or being promoted by high profile candidates. Like I’m going to mispronounce her name, Zali Steggall Olympian high profile candidate who k nocked off Tony Abbott. You know, I mean, that’s fantastic. And what we see there is a new model that allows gentle caring kind of politics to break into that adversarial system. So, very small, very early days. But I t hink that’s hopeful in that respect. But what I see most important now is how are we going to learn to live with each other in community? So even intentional communities that have common values and set themselves up intentionally to live together and sort o ut their problems have trouble surviving. So there are a small number of intentional communities that have survived more than one generation. And without trying to analyze the reasons for that, just that statistical fact indicates h ow difficult that is. When we look at the suburban street, the average suburban street. If you try and get anything to happen in that street, the types of arguments that will emerge are extraordinary. So it can be a s something as positive as a street party or a Christmas get together. When it’s something more challenging then the differences between people break apart [inaudible] w ork hard to get something nice, l ike a Christmas get together together. Sometimes yourself tearing your hair. I really want to s pend C hristmas w ith this people. It’s terrifying how hard it is to l ive with each other.
Morag Gamble:
I totally, I mean, I live in an eco village and as much as, you know, great stuff happens, there’s all also challenges. And fortunately this is one of the ones where we are here that is seeing another generation coming through where we’ve kind of got a third generations starting to come through here, which is absolutely fantastic. And I think it’s got something to do with the governance structure and the spaciousness of how we live. And I think that helps it . And there’s a lot of lessons in that. But so based on what you’ve just said, then, you know, from the writing, from the activists , from the comedy, from , politics, from radio and try and do something in your own local street. Where is it out of all of those experiences that you feel like is the most successful ways where we can start to help to shift this change towards where we need to be in the most rapid and effective ways, because we need to be not just tinkering along, you know, doing step-by-step now we really need to be pulling the finger out and doing it far more rapid pace than we have ever known possible. I mean, COVID changed a lot of things last year and opened up a lot of possibilities for change in ways that we didn’t know that we were capable of.
Geoff Ebbs:
Yes, the challenge is how quickly we’ve gone back to normal. I live in Brisbane. I live within listening distance of a freeway. And so for last year, the hum of the freeway dropped away too . You could hear individual cars again. And, you know , within weeks of the Christmas holiday is finishing and people having that feeling that COVID was over, you know, it’s the same hippie Bedlam that it was a year ago. So there has been some kind of permanent shifts , but eagerly and enthusiastically gone back to normal almost quickly as possible. So that’s just a precautionary comment. I mean, I think that watching the way we behave during COVID tells us a lot about what we can and can’t do. And so that’s a useful lesson and I think it shows a real hunger for living more simply and having control over our own time. And I think for me, the convenience and comfort of the drivers of consumerism and everything that consumes resources faster than nature can replenish them. I mean, we fundamentally, we live the lives that royalty lived a couple of centuries ago and none of us want to give that up. But the reason that only a very few people that pop of the socioeconomic pyramid head those luxuries a hundred years ago is because it actually requires quite a lot of resources to create that level of comfort. If you think about the smoothness of the ride we get, when we go in a car and you think about what other forms of transport, I don’t know if you’ve ever written around in a car thing, pulled by a horse. So it doesn’t matter how it will sprang of you. It is very bouncy and jerky compared to the ride in a modern car. If you were being carried along in one of those litters carried by four people on poles I mean, I haven’t had that experience, but it doesn’t look very comfy. And it’s certainly not very quick. You know we can drive a couple of hundred kilometers for lunch if we want it as Australians, we do that quite regularly.
Morag Gamble:
You mentioned time. This is a really interesting. Time is a huge part of this process of change. Like looking at the scale of change, the pace of change, the time that we want to take doing things like there’s so many different dimensions of time in this.
Geoff Ebbs:
So , I mean, we have to have the time to sew our own buttons and mend our own things. whether they clothes or kettles. If we don’t take the time to do those kinds of things, then we are throwing things away. The only way we can get time to do things like that. Well, we have to share around. So specialization has emerged as a way of allowing us to do the things that we’re good at and getting other people to help us. So yes, we can’t do everything. But that means that we have to offer to do our neighbor’s socks so that they can fix our toaster or whatever it is. So some of that requires quite a lot of humility, but the major challenge for us is that we don’t have enough time in our life already. And so we have to selectively stop doing things that are time-consuming that don’t help. So I say, you really have to think about how much time you spend staring at your screen. So a lot of us turned off our television some time ago and don’t have a television in our home, but personally I’ve found, I don’t know the stage of life that I’m at or whether really television has become so good and so compelling that I find myself binge watching a whole lot of shows in waves through very similar to the way I used to watch television. So, you know, that’s a challenging one. I think spending time in peak hour traffic is a complete waste of their lives. Not to mention all of the environment impacts that traffic and the road systems supported that. If you spent the same amount of time on a train, then at least you can work while you’re on the train, you can do things you’re not stressed by having to concentrate on this horrible thing that you’re doing sitting in big traffic. So we can make a list of things that are waste time and change our lives to reduce the amount of time that we waste. So that’s the beginning of the other thing is that we, by doing things together, we can, you know, the image of people sitting down to grind grain or whatever, those kinds of traditional images of food preparation. Those kinds of communal activities where we cooperatively make something that a multitasking in a completely different sense that we mean when we driving a car , talking on our telephone and cramming a hamburger into our mouth at the same time. If that’s multitasking , then that’s not healthy, but when we’re sitting around shelling peas or knitting together, we’re conversing. We are building community. We are learning from each other. We are sharing our knowledge as well as potentially our output. And sothe individual effort is very real. And so we gained time by spending time together in some way. Now I haven’t read the research that justifies that statement, but I’m sure that it’s true. So i t’s t he little things that need to be r esearched and j ustify, but that’s a s taple t hat I’m comfortable enough to make, even though I don’t have academic research t o b ack it up.
Morag Gamble:
So…You talked about post growth society. What does that look like to you? I mean, you’ve describing a bit of that there. Now. Are there any other, like, what are the dimensions of a post growth society?
Geoff Ebbs:
Well, I think one of the most important things to remember is that Japan hasn’t grown economically since 85. So, you know, that’s over 30 years of flat economic non-growth. In Japan is not a failed economy. Japanese people aren’t crawling around living in caves, eating dirt. When the nuclear disaster caused the Japanese economy to go into a shut down the price of the yen increased because Japan had so many overseas assets that the flood of money.. I mean, I don’t even want to try and explain the economics of that because I’m going to get a terribly wrong. But the fact is that Japanese yen increased in value against other currencies because of a disaster at home, because it’s the nature of the way its investment restructure . Every time that a neo liberal government gets into power in Japan saying that we going to borrow money integrated with world economy, import labor to make the economy grow again, I get chucked out. Japanese people do not want any of those things. Now, whatever you think about the values that implies or the homogenous nature of Japanese society and the possible xenophobia that goes with that, the reality is that you’ve got a functional modern economy that does not involve economic price . So it’s possible. It would probably involve different things in what we think of , but the mantra that we have and that we hear every day and you can’t open the newspaper or turn on the radio without – I’m showing my age, those things very often. But you know , you can’t look at your news feed without seeing someone telling you that the economic growth is good for you, or you’re not consuming. You should consume more to help the economy grow. We want to get people back to work so that they can participate in economic growth. Do we? I mean , really ? So we’ve got to think about what the value is and, you know, people who are concerned about population growth resist the idea that immigration is what has fueled Australia’s economic growth for the last two or three decades or so that’s six decades. Not because it’s not evident in the statistics because it might not be desirable.
Morag Gamble:
Ah , so we have many different aspects to this. We need to be thinking about home. We need to be thinking about what’s going on in our communities. We need to be thinking about the kinds of work that we’re doing. And we need to be thinking about where we spend our time and what we give value to. Also to be willing to step up and speak up and be an advocate and to participate in the politics. That doesn’t need to go into politics, but it needs to be, you know, being part of what’s going on in the community, the broader community, maybe even the bioregional community. Being a point with where people can hear a different story. You’ve got a radio show, for example, that’s consistent. You’re part of a community radio station. There’s this other voice that’s available to be heard. And so showing up, standing up, speaking up, giving things a go , creating different examples. I think these are all really important aspects of being part of the change. It’s not like what is the change? It’s like being part of the change process and that we are in the, in this time of great change. I mean, every era I know is a time of great change, but there’s something particular about now there’s a whole lot of things going on and there’s these looming dates that we have in front of us to create great levels of anxiety. I mean, do you feel that anxiety as you kind of heading towards the 2030 point or the..
Geoff Ebbs:
Oh I’m terrified. I have three daughters. They are concerned about whether or not they should have children because the state of the world. When I was a teenager and in my twenties, the threat of nuclear war caused some of us to seek about whether we should have children or not, but it was abstract in distance . And when I hear 25-year-old women now saying, I don’t think I will have children. They’re not, it’s not a sort of abstract philosophical discussion for them. It’s a visceral decision that they’re making with their gut, with their bodies saying this is not like fit place to breed in. You know, I mean, that’s terrifying. Not only are we talking about the potential failure of civilization. We’re really talking about sort of potential imminent collapse of ourselves as a species . But to me, there’s no point dwelling on that. I could write , you know , significant academic treaties, proving that that’s the case but that goes to the sort of, yeah , that’s a bit like standing on the side of the road with a sign saying the end of the world. I lived in Sydney. There was a guy who actually did that. He was like the cartoon character with the long beard and the sign saying Repent Sinners. It doesn’t help When I talked to Ross Garnaut in a fortnight, my question to him is going to be, do you have this grand plan for a post carbon economic abundance. What are the values that are inherent in that? What are we preserving? Why are we growing? What do we care about and what don’t we care about? Because to me, the basic challenge is there were too many of us . The globe might be able to support 10 billion people, but we might have to live in giant mega cities with completely unpopulated landscapes. We have robots grow food for us to do that. And I’m not sure that I want to live in that world. I do want to be able to go and pick leaves off the plant and eat them . You know, I do want to understand and have a relationship with my food. Now, I don’t go out and hunt meat . I don’t keep an animal and milk it, but I do have a whole lot of green leaves that grow well in subtropical Brisbane. And I haven’t bought spinach or silverbeet for three or four years because that makes sense to me. And so we have to be kind to ourselves too. We can’t put on this sort of morally strict I have to do this list of things because that’s the only way the planet can survive because we can’t sustain that. That takes too much moral fight . That’s fanatic, you know , that’s fanatical behavior. And even though I’ve been driven to be overly earnest as a politician and overly fanatical in quite a lot of the prescriptive part of things that I’ve come up with, I haven’t been able to find time in my own life. And what I’ve realized is that because they’re too harsh. So we can’t, I don’t think we can be fundamentalist to that. We have to nurture ourselves. We have to nurture our family. We have to nurture. So through that, what I can do at home, how can I best build that, that we are going to get through this because when it comes down to it, things can collapse on wall street and it might affect their day-to-day lives too much. Once things like the internet start to fall apart, though , then we are going to start to suffer. And so we do need to work at a systemic level as well. And so we each need to work out what we can do in our homes, in our screens, but we also need to work out how much, how we can best use our influence at a macro level. And so I think that it’s a combination of what we do at home and what we do in the world that is going to make the difference. And we each have to come to that conclusion for ourselves. Bob Brown used to say, each of us can only do one thing. And if that’s saving the blue throated thrush, then save the blue throated thrush. If the person who’s saving the blue throated thrush asks for your support , work out whether you can afford to help them or not, because your mission is to save the breadback or whatever it might be, you know? And I think that’s a really important thing to remember.
Morag Gamble:
Yeah. And then that reminds us too, that we’re all in it together that one planet living requires us to be passionate and focused on what it is that what we can do, where we’re at with the passion that we have for that, but not to be blinkered though.
Geoff Ebbs:
And not to try and do the same thing. So not going to be preached to it.
Morag Gamble:
Oh, wow . So much food for thought. Geoff, where can people find out more information about your book or any other work? Is there anything, any other websites that you’d like to let people know about where they can follow up?
Geoff Ebbs:
Well, I think my focus at the moment is largely on the book and my university work , which is not public. yourlifeyourplanet.com will get you to the site about the book. Abbreviate that to Y L Y P. So you can use that as a hashtag and so on that will get you somewhere on a few of the socials. And so yeah, hashtag Y L Y P or your life, your planet.com.
Morag Gamble:
Fantastic. So I’ll put those down in the show notes for anyone who’s listening to be able to follow those up. Thank you so much for your time today. It’s been an absolute delight to spend this hour with you and explore all the different aspects of of how we can actually make sense of what’s going on and to bring change in the ways that we’re able to. So thank you again, Geoff.
Geoff Ebbs:
Well , thanks for your open ended questions, Morag. It’s been very , um, it stretched my mind to have this conversation as well. So thank you.
Morag Gamble:
All right . Well, take care and hope to catch up with you again soon.
Geoff Ebbs:
Excellent! Bye for now.
Morag Gamble:
So that’s all for today. Thanks so much for joining us. Head on over to my YouTube channel, the link’s below, and then you’ll be able to watch this conversation, but also make sure that you subscribe because that way we notified of all new films that come out and also you’ll get notified of all the new, all the new interviews and conversations that come out. So thanks again for joining us, have a great week and I’ll see you next time.