goodchat. - Berish Bilander from Green Music Australia.

Welcome to our goodchat. series, where we’ll be interviewing people in the music, events and sustainability space about how they got to where they are, what inspires them and what’s next.

Berish Bilander is a passionate campaigner, an accomplished musician with an Honours degree from WAAPA, a music teacher for 12 years and has toured as a freelance pianist for Vika, Linda and The General Assembly. He’s also the CEO of Green Music Australia, a registered charity that aims to green the music industry and which bettercup partners with for Party with the Planet, a campaign that encourages consumers to think about the waste they produce at festivals. 

You’ve worked on so many campaigns throughout your career, including opposing the East West Link, Stop Adani, the BYO bottle campaign, Party with the Planet, and you’ve worked alongside refugees to close offshore detention camps. Putting aside the hugely emotional nature of these, particularly closing offshore detention camps, which do you think has helped you learn the most about effective campaigning?

I think they’ve all helped me learn bits about campaigning. It’s a big journey getting involved in activist work where you’re exposed to different theories of change; some people suggest that the best way is to advocate directly to the government and use democratic channels and sometimes when those channels get exhausted people talk about direct action, non-violent interventions, some people talk about building people power, and so I think I was exposed to all different things. 

For example the toll roads campaign, the campaign to try and stop a major road going through the heartland of Melbourne’s inner north, really made me see diversity, and how different tactics can add together to create enormous pressure and change the course of politics in very unexpected ways. Whereas some of the work I’ve done within the music scene has been more focused on “inside track” campaigning, and by that I mean working with allies in the political systems, advocating internally and getting the right voices to join your cause. 

I’m still learning and will be for the rest of my life! I think one can never know everything – every campaign is different, every situation has a kind of evolution from every other campaign that’s happened before it and it’s also something completely new due to the dynamics of the politics of the time.

Speaking of campaigning, when events approach us to switch to reusable cups, we find that one of the biggest challenges is communicating the system simply and effectively to punters. You are great at engaging artists and other people with a wide reach to help promote your message. How do you use their voices to achieve your goals- are you aiming to educate patrons directly or target higher ups to effect change from the top down?

I think a bit of both. We recognise that artists have enormous sway when it comes to internal advocacy within the industry. Say for example in the case of #BYOBottle, one of the pivotal things about that campaign is that the artist changes their drinks rider to ask for tap water, reusable cups and jugs, and importantly, no singe-use plastic water bottles. This hospitality rider is used within the industry to advocate for change. 

It’s not something that an audience member would see, it’s something every venue these artists play at would see, and by changing their rider they’re communicating an expectation and a desire for change to other people in the music scene. When more and more artists adopt these riders, and venues get hundreds of plastic free requests coming through, the likelihood of change is significant. 

Obviously though, with #BYOBottle there’s a public component to it and we’re calling on artists to not have any disposable bottled water on stage and to instead rock their reusables, whether it’s a cup or a bottle. So when fans are watching their favourite artist up on stage there’s no single use plastic. This sends a strong message.

Public advocacy could also be something more overt, like an artist talking about waste on stage, and I know some of the artists that supported our cause have referenced plastic pollution and how proud they are to be part of the campaign and also to be using something like a reusable bottle which is probably better in every way, better for their health, better for the environment, and so on.

You started campaigning with Green Music Australia in 2016, and became co-CEO in 2018 along with Emma Bosworth, and then more recently CEO. It’s so crazy that we met in 2017, it feels like so long ago! You must have been really happy to find an organisation that so closely linked your love for environment & music. As Green Music Australia started in 2013, how much do you think it’s grown since you joined?

I think it’s grown enormously but I also think it’s got a long way to go too. Our vision is that the entire music scene puts its creativity towards not only creating beautiful art, but also healing the planet we live on. This could look like solar stages, zero waste events, mass tree plantings in between sets. The list goes on. Taking fans on this journey is central to our theory of change.

I’m also keen to see green art blossom into such a big and decentralised movement that it’ll go way beyond anything you or I could possibly imagine. Future event holders are going to come up with all sorts of crazy inspiring ways to foster a more caring and earth-connected culture, especially if they listen to First Nations folks. We’re coming from a place where trashing music sites is commonplace, single-use plastics were ubiquitous, fossil fuel sourced energy is the norm including diesel-powered generators. But what we’re seeing, thanks in part to our hard work, is a pivot away from this, akin to what’s happening in our broader society. Green Music purposely promotes the good stuff that’s happening and advocates for these better practices to become more widely adopted. Then what we’re seeing is that the music scene can use its social clout to encourage positive change more broadly across society. 

I think that we’re most certainly moving in the right direction. When we started we were very small and had maybe 10 ambassadors involved in our campaigns. Now we’ve got 140-odd ambassadors spreading the word and it’s growing year after year.  

It’s exponential growth as well, you get to 10 people and then those 10 people spread it around and it’s so much easier to grow once you’ve made that first start.

I think so. I mean we’ve definitely seen that in the work you guys do, in the reusable space. When we first met there wasn’t much acknowledgement coming from festival directors of the need to tackle the huge waste problem. Or if they did show concern, they hadn’t yet introduced systems to stop the mess.

It’s moved enormously since then, to people saying “we need to find alternatives to single-use”. That’s where others coming in like yourselves with better reusable systems has been so positive.

If Green Music Australia could close down for good and be remembered as a huge success, having achieved all its goals, what would that look like?

It’s a huge question. I could reference what I said a moment ago in terms of this vision for the arts scene leading the way to a greener world. 

So, embodying the values that we think are important. For many decades now, the influences within the arts and music scene have been co-opted into selling the old story of overconsumption- let’s buy another one of these things that we all “need” when we don’t really need it. 

The new story has to be about connecting with land and belonging to place. I don’t know exactly what that’s going look like in the future, but if it became normal for people to think in that way, if it became normal for people to elevate First Nations voices and leadership because they do already think in those terms, I think we would have achieved a huge amount, and that’s from the artist perspective. 

From the events perspective that thinking is also totally relevant, in the way that we go about putting together or curating events.  This means thinking about who we work with the traditional custodians of the land through to how we, I don’t even want to say “manage waste”

If our dream came to fruition, people wouldn’t even be able to use the word “waste” because that concept has in it some notion that we can create something and then put it somewhere else and not have to deal with it. So we can create something toxic that doesn’t sit within the natural world and that’s OK, and that’s obviously not OK! 

I think compost is a great example of something that’s a full cycle idea; when you eat food and it goes back into the earth and creates new food, that’s the perfect vision of a zero waste situation. 

Reusing is obviously part of the equation as well. If we’ve created something that’s valuable, whether it be a receptacle like a cup, or food packaging, whatever it might be.  If we treat it with respect and kindness and try and use it for as long as possible, and then have ways of disposing of it later where it creates something new, that’s a closed loop, and a much more wholesome approach. 

Everything has value and everything is connected to a country. We have to respect the land and water, and be grateful for Mother Nature. I would be thrilled if Green Music helped to mainstream some of these ideas.

The previous GMA CEO and one of the founders, Tim Hollo, left to pursue a political career with the Greens as the Federal Member for the seat of Canberra. As someone who has spent years campaigning, do you see yourself following in his footsteps and- do you think you’ll need to renounce as many citizenships as he did (7)?

No, I’m sad to say I’m definitely not cut out for politics, so no worries about the citizenships there!

I’m also very happy being unaligned with any political party, in the sense that I think that strengthens my ability to advocate for change. People know that I’m not associated with the Greens or the ALP or any other party for that matter. I’m focused on doing my bit to create a groundswell of people who want the change. There’s a guy called Daniel Hunter, an American activist who is one of my heroes. 

He talks about this idea that a good way of imagining a politician in terms of how to shift their views on certain issues is if you imagine that they are like a balloon tied down to a rock, and if you go to advocate to them directly and you say “Hey, we really want you to do this” and you give them a bit of a hit, you’re hitting a balloon. You push them one way, and then they come right back to where they were moments ago, because they’re tied to this rock. They’re being hit about by all sorts of different forces, because there’s so many different people that want this politician to act in different ways. 

What’s needed is to move the rock itself, the thing that anchors that politician to a particular spot. That’s when you change society’s attitudes towards things – when the rock actually shifts. I think Green Music Australia as an organisation understands this principal, and is trying to harness creative energy and the power of the music scene to move that rock. 

So music lovers get to see that there is another way; that renewable energy is a better form of energy creation than fossil fuels, or that First Nations led activism and First Nations led ideas are essential to us coming to a better place in knowing how to co-exist with the animals and the plants and everything else that lives in our country.

Does that affect your campaigning- do you centre campaigns around trying to move the rock?

Oh absolutely. I mean if it doesn’t directly impact on my work, it certainly means I’m more inclined to want to work alongside groups that think like that. Many other activists talk about these ideas of people power influence – most of the major campaigning organisations that we’re affiliated with, that we work alongside. 

From the school strike network through to #SEEDMOB and AYCC, a lot of the major campaigning groups on environmental issues in Australia see that what we have to do is not walk the halls of power, so be able to say g'day to the to the mining minister of the day and have a word with him, that’s not going to make any difference. It’s about creating a groundswell of people-powered opposition to what’s currently happening and create a vision for the future that’s hopeful and just.