Confronting climate

Network thinking: An interview with Scott Ludlam

Former senator and deputy leader of the Australian Greens Scott Ludlam speaks with Rebecca Ryall about his acclaimed book Full Circle, as well as climate anxiety, the communication of science and the potential of activism.

Scott Ludlam may be Australia’s political answer to David Attenborough. The journey of reading Full Circle is akin to watching A Life On Our Planet – the going’s rough, the visualisations uncomfortable – the situation seems hopeless. But somewhere, around three quarters of the way in, they both manage to instil hope and empower their audience to think global, act local. Ludlam’s work is meticulously researched and draws from disparate fields, such as geo-history, politics and systems theory. His narrative rendering of deep history, woven throughout the book, could work as a standalone story, but here he uses it, regularly inserted, to refocus the gaze. The global story he tells sits within the embrace of the local, his local – landscape, community and life experience. Full Circle introduces activists and campaigners from all parts of the globe, with such evocative writing of place and space, that they could be any one of us. In fact, his referencing of the Bentley campaign, in several places, directly links this farreaching work to our little corner of the world.

This book delivers a crash course in network thinking and then applies this understanding to systems change, empowering and affirming each and every action directed toward change. Ludlam proposes a model for regenerative economy as not only achievable but inevitable. I spoke to Scott recently about his work, the COVID pandemic and his career in politics and beyond. The book engages with elements of system theory, in understanding how a knowledge of the behaviour of biological systems may help us to create more equitable social systems. It seems reasonable to me that COVID is a perfectly legitimate, systemic response to ecological decline – a symptom of a system in crisis. It could even be framed as an attempt to eradicate the species which is so directly responsible for the ecological crisis the planet is dealing with. Ecosystem decline – such as the thawing of permafrosts – is bringing us into contact with all sorts of pathogens that we don’t have any experience dealing with, so you definitely could say that smashing down rainforest, cornering creatures in ever-diminishing pockets of viable ecosystems is exposing us in ways we haven’t experienced before. I’m not comfortable with the idea of some overreaching consciousness or planetary agency that is trying to wipe us out. That takes us into some quite dangerous terrain where we feel like the people who are dying by the millions of this disease must somehow deserve it because we are the plague. The moment you start treating human beings as a pathogen on the face of the earth, that could maybe do with a bit of a cull, you are squarely in the domain of eco-fascism. It is distressing to me, as someone who came through the lineage of deep ecology, to see these lines of argument taking us into some really dangerous territory. A virus has no agency. It is not being sent out by some kind of Gaian super-consciousness to make sure that there are less people. I am much more interested in the systems, in how our society is organised industrially, to point the finger at that, than to think that maybe there’s too many humans and maybe it would be better if the planet killed a few of us off. I think we have to be really careful about a) assigning agency to the planet as a whole, and b) justifying COVID as some kind of revenge happening on the species. The book feels like an empowerment for activism, for small actions that will contribute to a larger change. There’s been much written about this term ‘acedia’ which attempts to explain our collective sense of apathy in the face of the overwhelming size of the problem of ecological decline. Many of us seem to want government to legislate for change, rather than demand it and choose it as a consumer. I don’t like to think of us as consumers. You know this whole idea originated with the carbon footprint calculator, which was invented by an oil major – BP. It was invented by BP to push responsibility back onto us and to make us feel even more guilty as failed human beings if we’ve used a throwaway coffee cup while these oil majors are out deliberately creating demand for new plastics, new uses for oil. They’ve corrupted politics such that the real transition we need is now decades late. So, I feel a bit resistant, as an individual person, a) to being referred to as a consumer, and b) being told that the responsibility is mine because I didn’t recycle. That’s been fabricated by a very specific, and very clever, set of communications professionals. While I’ve been over here sorting my yoghurt containers into different coloured bins, ALCOA has just been able to set up a smelter down the road that’s going to poison an entire watershed. So, let’s be really clear – I will use a keep cup, if the hundred corporations that are responsible for seventy per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions are abolished. I feel like that should be the agreement. The oil and gas industry in America has been outed (in the Amy Westervelt podcast Drilled) as using the pandemic to drive more consumption of plastic. There’s been a real push around rolling back so many initiatives targeting singleuse plastics. I feel like we need to be aware of what industry is doing to create demand, at the same time as looking over our own patch. I don’t like the idea of playing one side of that campaign against the other. I do not want to be lectured at by an oil major about my personal responsibility while they’re still out there drilling more of this stuff. Do you experience climate despair, and if so, how do you deal with it? I always feel better, have less anxiety, when I’m working on something. My go-to coping strategy is finding others of like mind and just doing the work. Finding somewhere useful to be, in the midst of it, somehow quiets a lot of the background anxiety. The fires changed something though. There’s often an abstraction to the idea of climate change, because it’s so slow-moving and it’s on graphs, or

its parts per million. When you are under this plume that can be seen from space, that will snuff the sun out for weeks and weeks... there’s something different about that.

Can you talk about the impact your political career had on your activism?

We had an agreement amongst my little team to try to not get arrested, not because of the optics or anything, but because the Constitution actually has some stuff to say about whether or not you’re allowed to hold office. I’m only now realising how ironic that it is. Being in office allowed me to be an activist legislator. I took all the campaigns I’d been working on, all the networks, and stepped it up. Suddenly I had a budget, could travel wherever I needed to go, could help other people to get around. And we have a platform, from which we can raise the voices of people who are frequently shut out from those channels. It gave us the opportunity to still take on the biggest bastards in the country, with this big megaphone we didn’t have before.

Probably the biggest impact on my activism at that time was that, as a senator, your schedule is locked in for as long as you’re in there, with all the sitting days, committee work, all the background stuff you don’t see and have to deal with as an activist.

The Greens party, since way back in its history, is an activist political organisation so it’s not like being elected as part of the Labor Party or the Liberal/Nationals – you’re not going to be discouraged from campaigning by party structures and the like. It’s formed as a campaigning organisation. You argue very convincingly in the book that capitalism is on the way out. What about democracy? You also clearly examine democracy and show it up as corrupted through state capture. Can democracy be recovered? Well, democracy is far older than capitalism and I think it is dangerous to conflate the two and think that we can’t have democracy without capitalism. We’re living through a particular strain of capitalism at the moment which is largely parasitic on the structures of democracy. Currently, I’d say capitalism has got a hold on democratic structures, you know it keeps some of them there to keep us pacified, to keep us thinking that we’ve got some kind of agency within those structures. Of course, mostly we do have some agency there, but we don’t choose to exercise it.

One of the appeals of your writing in this book is that it is incredibly visual. I wondered if you had ever thought about there being a visual element to that work?

That’s a really wild question. [Scott takes a moment to send me a YouTube link for his Tedx talk in Perth in 2017, which uses some of the imagery he was working with in the book.] I’m glad that you picked up the visual element of the work. My background is not as a writer at all. I trained as a designer. The reason that the book reads in such a visual way is that I am describing visual imagery. The imagery used in the Tedx talk displays my state of mind in the time just prior to setting out on the travel which informed the writing of this book. I’m describing images that I had made, and that I continue to make, because I continue to work visually. It helps me to understand stuff, if I can see it. So, if it reads that way, that makes me really happy. You reference the School Strike for Climate movement several times in the book. As I was reading, I felt there was a lot in your work which would be extremely valuable to these young campaigners, but the book might not be very accessible to them. I wonder if there is a way to further simplify some of the systems theory, and the statistics, to create some campaign objectives to guide the school strikers? Such as amplifying the mathematics of participation. You mention in the book that for a campaign to be successful and lead to change, only requires 3.5 per cent of the population to be actively participating. I found that to be an incredibly inspiring piece of information that I want every activist to know.

I hadn’t considered doing that. If there is a way to make it more accessible, I do think it is to present it visually. I have started doing that. I have presented to Tipping Point a couple of times and to School Strike organisers, but I haven’t done yet what you are suggesting. I am thinking on it though. I don’t want it to stay in a book. I want to communicate it more legibly, because I acknowledge that the book is pretty dense in parts and I don’t want that to put people off the message.

Full Circle by Scott Ludlam is published by Black Inc.