Five things I’ve learned

To have without possessing,
to do without claiming,
lead without controlling:
this is mysterious power

Tao Te Ching Chapter 51. Translated by Ursula Le Guin

Dante’s Inferno famously begins something like this: “Midway upon the journey of life, I found myself in a dark forest, the right path lost.” After two decades of environmental advocacy and activism, the places that underpinned my sense of purpose are being reduced to ashes. The forest is dark and fallen silent. It has prompted reflection.

Many people are distressed. We share our distress, and that is good. And yet, there is a need for optimistic energy and loving purpose. Like many people I know, I am a domesticated creature and have been unused to calamity. In this time of trouble, I want to dig out buried and untested reserves of strength and joyfulness. It is no betrayal of the world and its suffering to be joyful. We owe it to the Earth that gave us life to muster our energies for one more decade before the gateway closes forever between this era and the next. Our ancestors lived in an era of ignorance of climate change. Our descendants will live in an era of regret and bitterness. We live in the between-time. We know the wages of our civilisation is destruction. We think there might still be a chance to avoid this destruction being utter and irrevocable. No one has ever or will ever live in a more consequential moment.

I hope you find these five insights useful in carrying this load.

1. Be water: hold on to your credulity and stay low

There is egoism at the heart of environmentalism. The core claim, “one person can make a difference,” relies on a vision of the self that stretches beyond its limitations. This is a vision that I have shared and relished. I have felt the flow of energy as authority figures bend unwillingly to the demands of resisters. There have even been moments when my decisions have felt meaningful to me, as if they were not mere dissent, but carried consequences.

Such energies are heady and can be dangerous. That is why I’ve used an excerpt from the Tao Te Ching to begin this list. Le Guin writes in a note on Chapter 55 of the book, “We rise, flourish, fail. The Way never fails. We are waves. It is the sea.” One needs to feel purposeful, but at the same time resist the temptation to feel powerful. Let the energies flow through you, but do not nestle into the hubris that you control or direct them.

When the Hong Kongers say “be water,” I think of the Tao. This lesson is not merely tactical, but has meaning in all our endeavours: lobbying, strategy, media, conversation. Whatever yields cannot be broken, the Tao teaches: “Nothing in the world/ is as soft, as weak, as water;/ nothing else can wear away/ the hard, the strong,/ and remain unaltered.” (Chapter 78)

Let go, give way, respond and stay low. This is how you wear away the rock and make pathways through it.

2. Consensus and conflict are the Yin and Yang of environmental struggle.

I have over the last two decades played widely varied activist roles. I’ve collected environmental data in forests and waterways, run street stalls, knocked on doors, locked-on, raised funds, fronted the media, met with Ministers and leaders, written reports and legislative amendments, presented to investors and analysts, coordinated coalitions and pushed past barricades. What I have learned is that there must be conflict and there must be consensus. The inter-play of these forces is the engine of environmental struggle and the question always before us is: when to fight, or when to yield and negotiate? Reading Bill Moyer’s “four roles” of activism (citizen, radical, reformer, change agent) as categories of people is too rigid: the dynamism of the struggle requires us, at varied times and circumstances, to adopt these each of roles.

There is a tension between reform and radicalism: instead of favouring one or another, embody the tension with every action you take. The challenge for steady-headed reformists is to continually test whether their work is fit for the cause or whether it is feeding the social and political dynamic that treats the earth and its ecosystems as expendable fodder for ephemeral wealth. The challenge for hot-headed radicals to push up against the world as it is and then seep into it, loosening the footings of a system that enslaves and degrades the Earth and asking: how can my vision be made real?

I don’t pretend to have the wisdom to discern what action is called upon from me at all times, but this discernment is, to me, the task we should set ourselves.

3. Keep money in its place

Supporting ourselves while we agitate for our vision of a living Earth and sustainable human communities is a perennial problem, solved by us in different ways fitting different times and places. How we solve this problem shapes our advocacy and activism. I spent a decade as an unpaid activist and a decade working full time for four very different environment organisations and this is what I have learned: when money is not kept in its place, praise and prominence take dangerous control of your movement or your group. Money can be used to recognise value, but sometimes the value it creates is illusory. A CEO of an environment organisation once told me that high salaries command respect. Such respect is founded on the illusion of a world without end, where wealth is created out of nothing rather than being heaved out of the Earth’s body, or the bodies of people’s labour.

I’m not here to shame anyone for earning their living in defence of the earth. It’s how I’ve earned my living for the last decade. However, if your movement would not exist but for the instigation of professionals, it is not a movement. If your vision of change relies on paid coordination, money will act as a constraint on it, no matter how much of it you have. You could raise millions, but it will always feel as if it is not enough. Raise money and give it to people to enable their good work, but keep it firmly in its place.

4. There are no ends: all things are means.

The old worn slogan “the end justifies the means” fundamentally misconstrues the world. There is no end: there is no particle separate from the wave that runs through it. The quality of the process, your actions, the movement you create, sets in motion further motion. If your means are unscrupulous, untrue or unjust, those qualities will continue to reverberate. The English word “power,” like “love,” is deeply inadequate. When an environmentalist exhorts their peers that we must “build power” they could be describing any number of dynamics. What do we mean when we say this? I use this word, “power,” but it leaves me worried, because power and morality are fundamentally antithetical. Power is inherently coercive and not consistent with the moral goods we seek — peace, ecological sustainability, social justice, loving and free familial and neighbourly relations. These goals cannot be brought about within social and political structures that are based on power relations. Mutual aid is not a power relationship, but it is hard for us to envision when we have been raised in a system of domination and hierarchy.

Letting go of the illusion of “ends” allows us to make good along the journey, every day. In Australia, there’s a particular need for environmentalists to use our means to actively redress and make amends the damage and injustice of colonisation, which is ongoing. A narrow pursuit of goals and objectives perpetuates that injustice by delaying and setting aside the work of overturning it. One of the things we’re learning is that there is no such thing as “winning.” If we will never reach an end, it’s nonsensical to put off the work that needs to be done to support Aboriginal self-determination, land rights, healing, truth-telling and the restoration of Indigenous ecological knowledge to its central place in Australian environmental decisions.

5. Know when to valiantly speak truth and when to hold your counsel

This may be the hardest lesson of all. Some people struggle with speaking out and confronting the lies and illusions of the powerful. My problem has generally been the opposite: I have had to learn that boldly speaking the truth, or what I believe to be the truth, is not always necessary or helpful. For me, it isn’t even particularly valiant. It has been far harder for me to refrain from expressing myself and my views. I remember clearly the period when I realised that rightness is neither sufficient nor generative. It has been a revelation to me to understand speech not as an extension of myself, but as a bridge between people. To speak words and communicate sentiments that are necessary for the moment, rather than using words and sentiments as extensions of the self, is transformative. As a habitually garrulous person, I relish the sensation of withholding speech. Speech is an ecosystem and some of us are weedy and assertive. There are times when it is important to speak and to disrupt with your speech, but those times are far rarer than activist utterance.

None of us know how best to work in a time like this. There has never been one before. Be kind to each other and take the charitable view of why people do what they do. We’re going to need a lot of love in the years ahead.