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We’re reflecting on some of the conversations POCACITO was fortunate to be a part of, four of which we want to share with you. Two of these talks took place as part of POCACITO events, and two are one-to-one interviews.
One thing that kept coming up is that the critical work of environmental and climate justice is happening at the local level. And it’s being led by civil society.
We met with community organizers and activists from Kyiv; Berlin; St. James Parish, Louisiana; and Superior, Arizona, to learn what this work looks like, and how we can help.
Electronic music track X1 by frankum -- https://freesound.org/s/426470/ -- License: Attribution 4.0
Hello, and welcome. I am Max Grunig here with Brendan O'Donnell. It's 01/03/2025. Happy New Year from Pocacito. Today, we have the second
Speaker 2:in our four part series of twenty twenty four conversations with community organizers and activists who are doing the work of environmental and climate justice.
Speaker 1:Sometimes in acutely critical conditions, as we heard in our last talk with Koshya Krinitsky of the Ukrainian NGO EcoAction, At other times, it's about building a global mass movement as we'll hear in this episode.
Speaker 2:We go back to late October in Charlottesville, Virginia, less than a dozen days before the US elections. And Pocacido, along with the Heinrich Bull Foundation in Washington DC, hosts a town hall meeting at local community radio station WTJU with two guests from Germany.
Speaker 1:It's Friday afternoon, and we spent the last day and a half with Luisa Neubauer and Helena Marshall, two prominent voices from the global climate justice movement. One highlight of their visit took place the night before when Helena screened her short documentary, Another World Is Possible, alongside some environmental films created by youth from around the Charlottesville area.
Speaker 2:When we sat down with Louisa and Helena at the radio station, we were joined by local climate activists of all ages.
Speaker 1:The idea was to facilitate a conversation between people working at different scales when it comes to climate justice. In Charlottesville, the aspirations are specific and local. The work Louisa and Helena do, going back to the earliest Fridays for Future marches, is attuned to systems and the need for systemic change. Change.
Speaker 2:And either way, it's about getting out there and making it happen. As Helena is fond of saying, hope comes from doing things.
Speaker 1:Brendan moderates a conversation with Louisa Neubauer and Helena Marshall recorded at WTJU studios in Charlottesville in front of a live audience on 10/25/2024.
Speaker 2:Helena gets us started with introductions.
Speaker 3:Hi. I'm Helena. I'm a clam activist from Germany. I'm based in Berlin, but I grew up partly here in The US on Cape Cod, also in The UK, which is why I sound like this. And I I, like, direct our national campaigns.
Speaker 3:We built this huge, incredible movement of volunteer young people who organize climate marches in about a 150 to 200 cities and bring tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of people onto the streets. And we've kind of changed the conversation about climate in our country. We've we had, like, six demands that we brought out six years ago when we started organizing these protests. And about four and a half of them, we sometimes disagree on how to exactly quantify, have been met. And so we are kind of in awe of what regular young people together have been able to achieve.
Speaker 3:But we are also now kind of at an impasse where we are facing a federal election in one year and feel a little bit caught between, like, extreme weather and the extreme right on the other side that has been getting stronger in Germany. And so we're here in this country where there are some similar developments who have that have already kind of gone further to hear from community members and activists and policymakers and organizers about what is working and what is not under these more difficult and constrained and stressful conditions to hopefully take some good ideas with us back
Speaker 4:to Europe.
Speaker 2:Thank you. And Luise?
Speaker 5:Yes. And I am Luise. I'm the the other activist from Germany. And I work alongside Helena and thousands of other people in Germany and Europe mostly. But we do obviously coordinate as much as we can around the world.
Speaker 5:And in my particular position, I do a lot of representational public media work. So I find myself in a lot of rooms with people that are usually less female and less young than I am. And so I'm the non suit person in those rooms. And we try to not only work towards policy goals, but we try to consider the cultural context in which we all live and work and dream and build futures. And so we try not to just be a movement but be a culture that people like and that people want to be part of and that people feel like they're missing out of when they're not there.
Speaker 5:So FOMO is really important for us, but we may be gonna get to that in our conversation anyhow.
Speaker 2:So for, those who haven't, been attending any of our our events over the last couple of days, Louisa and Helena visited UBA yesterday quite a bit, speaking to a couple of courses, I had a great lunch with some students and took a quick tour of of some of the issues at Grounds. And then last night, we had a wonderful film screening at Lighthouse Studio where Helena's film, Another World Is Possible was screened along with some short films created by local youth in coordination with another book, Charlottesville nonprofit c three. Today, however, you both had very different mornings. Right? You had different meetings today.
Speaker 5:We we were separated for a moment. But we're we're now together again. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And and compared to yesterday's program, I imagine it was a little bit different. And I wanted to start today by offering a moment to reflect on those meetings, sort of share with each other, but also with us what you experienced, what you found out about Charlottesville. That's exactly.
Speaker 5:Beautiful. Okay. Maybe I am I'm Yeah. What did you do? Yes.
Speaker 5:So, Ella, you need to help me out. Can we drop some names? That's upstairs. Oh, that's upstairs. So but that doesn't matter because it's all the spirit.
Speaker 5:So in our journey here in The US, we are aware that sometimes our work can seem very easy in Germany from the outside because we move in a quite, you know, what you call it environmentally friendly kind of environment. Recycling isn't something we usually discuss because we do it. And it's or we try to at least. And there is a general sentiment in the room that there is something that makes us a nation that has to do with protecting environment and climate in Germany. And yet, that is the surface of it.
Speaker 5:And yet, underneath that of that, we find that in Germany, there's a particular sense around in being very good in hiding stuff that we don't want to kind of confront. And so that means that while we have these great recycling systems that are kind of renowned all over the world, we are very good in exporting trash that we don't want to see. And shipping electronic waste to the ships or to the coast of Africa, for instance, not talking about it. Or quitting coal in Germany, but, you know, importing fracked LNG gas from The US and, you know, trying to make a point. So when we got to The US, one big question for us was like, what is happening here on a surface level, and what is being hidden underneath?
Speaker 5:And so for us being in Charlottesville also meant looking into history, looking into what is the the context of oppression of black history of enslaved workers across UVA, and how is this shaping discussions that are happening or that are being hidden. And I, today, and this morning, had a very, like, a very interesting conversation about these challenges coming along with not only being faced, like, this or I found that here in Charlottesville, it's very it's it's you can grasp really what it means to be squeezed in this tight spot between a very heavy past and a very heavy future that is both kind of, you know, creeping up on us, both having questions, both raising demands, both, like, putting us outside our comfort zone. And both the past and the future making it quite easy to kind of shy away and hide away and be like, ugh. It's too much. You know?
Speaker 5:We just want to live our lives. But those you know, that idea of just living the life is made impossible increasingly so because these these questions are in the room whether we like it or not. And so I think, yeah, that was a lot of my morning about with some amazing faculty member from UVA who is working with black history, with, reparations work, and with, yeah, challenging Charlottesville on its own, like, footsteps.
Speaker 2:And that was that was part of or or or that members working with UVA or through that institution. Helena, you were with a different kind of institution, but one that has a really important history here in in Charlottesville as well.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I met with Andrea Douglas, is the executive director of Jefferson School, which is this amazing institution that started off as a school for freed slaves after And it was a school for many years in all different forms. And there's now a heritage center. And it was a really, really moving conversation, not just we didn't just stay in the school. We actually walked around Charlottesville, and we looked at murals, and we looked at the new downtown that is kind of right between these two, like, historic neighborhoods and whose residents oftentimes can't really afford the new downtown that looks very nice and is without cars, which is great.
Speaker 3:And we talked a lot about how symbols matter and how people want us to believe that symbols and ideology and ideas aren't as important as food or having a roof over their head. And in a lot of ways, they matter differently, but they do matter. And we talked a lot about how the right to space is so fundamental and how this idea of who gets to take up public space and what is public space, which I thought you'd have actually really liked as a geographer, is so essential to the way that we think about who has the right to a city, who has the right to be. And so that was kind of how our conversation began. We looked at different murals that have now popped up around Charlottesville and who actually gets to decide what is art that is allowed to be in public space and what is art that is not allowed to be in public space.
Speaker 3:And then I think we and so the Jefferson School was really involved in the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee. And we we kind of saw these really eerie pictures of the statue being melted. And so they had to do it in secret because it was this whole big thing, and there were these organizations taking them to court because they had taken down the statue and because they had now taken responsibility for for it. And so they in, like, a secret thing, like, they started they had to cut off the legs of the horse in order to transport the statue.
Speaker 3:And so that took all day to do that. And she showed us all these pictures that they'd taken. And then they tried to put it on the truck and it didn't fit because the head was hanging off. So then they had to cut off the head in order for the statue to fit on the truck in order for for them to be able to transport it. And then they melted it down, and they melted down the sword of the statue into this this pot of metal, and they made bars out of it.
Speaker 3:And I thought, yeah, there's that row of pictures told such, like, a deep story that was about so much more than this statue. It was yeah. It felt very, like, a very big privilege to be able to to be in this space and to see this city and to see, like, another side of its history and how it's developed.
Speaker 2:One of the things I was privileged to join you in this conversation with Andrea today, and one of the issues she was discussing that they're facing is how do you maintain imagination? How do you keep people connected to that? I think it sometimes gets miss misnamed hope, but rather this imagination. That's also something that came up last night in in our conversation. For both of you and and please audience members are welcome to to let us know if they want to contribute in these questions because they are very local as well.
Speaker 2:But what what sort of connection to the past or how might the past help us in maintaining imagination for looking at something like the climate movement or when we're looking at what justice and climate justice mean?
Speaker 5:Yeah. Maybe to start off with this question of imagination. And I remember when I was in school, we had to do this paradise exercise where we would lie down on the mats in the in the gym or so, and we would then have to, like, imagine this, like, flying horse and the river and something. And apparently, I think it was a moment for teachers to breathe or so. But we were put into this place, and we should imagine their paradise.
Speaker 5:And I think that has really put me off this whole imagination thing for a while because I felt like, you know, I'm kind of done with the flying horses. And I I for a long time, I didn't really understand the concept of why we need to imagine stuff if we can just do stuff. Right? And and then I we we started doing the movement work, and suddenly I found and and we were we were in it. So for us, it was never that big revolutionary thing that popped up with young people taking on the streets.
Speaker 5:It was just us being burned out in front of Zoom and trying to hold things together and trying to make it and be on time and not be cold all the time and have the right words for the right moment and then apologize to the right people and disappoint not too much, but everyone, like, equally. What do you do? For us, it was sweat and tears, and sometimes it's bright moments, but it was mostly sweat and tears, I would say. And then I would read about it on the news later on, and they they put it like this saying, there was nothing, and then there was the kids. But and then they would make something up.
Speaker 5:But they have failed or they have succeeded, and now they're somewhere else. And I looked at how the storytelling about us was telling a very different story about how change works, and in fact, was blending out all aspects of change and change making, changing mindsets, changing courage, changing people's perspective on what they could do. And when I read up on our own stories that were written about us, I felt almost discouraged because I was like, oh, so there was this magic wand, and then the kids came, and then then they left. And, you know, it was everything but sweat and tears. And that got me that got me thinking about how we talk about change and what stuff that we include and what's the stuff that we exclude.
Speaker 5:So we tend to include that big prominent figure, that one hero that has to come. And they are either incredibly talented or are very lucky. They're never just hardworking and doing the stuff that needs to get done. Then there is this big one big enemy that has to be fought. It can't be diffused different difficulties.
Speaker 5:It can't be many barriers. It has to be this big enemy. And then there has to be this kind of end story. And it has to be black or white. It has to be this happy end, or it has to be this downfall.
Speaker 5:It can't be anything in between. And what we found was none of that existed as it did. Everything was just different. And we started asking ourselves, how are we supposed to imagine change if the way we talk about past change is so incomplete, is such a wishful thinking about how we like things to be, because maybe it makes it easy for us to assume that we could never do this or someone else will do it, or it's not the right time because we're not lucky enough or we're not talented enough or there's no enemy or there's no whatever. There's no magic wand.
Speaker 5:And so when we coming back to your question, what means talking about the past, understanding how the past works, for me, it's not just acknowledging that there is a past and a context, but it's the ability and the courage it takes to look closely and accept the fact that really looking closely means looking closely not somewhere else, but looking closely back to us, reflecting back, feeling like checking on our own privileges, checking on their own moments we could do some more work or could do that next step or challenge ourselves on something. And then, however, I feel, while for a moment it might make sound like Mike it might lead everything to sound a bit more difficult and complicated and, you know, inconvenient, so many doors will open up because, you know, we suddenly, you see the world around us not just being a world, but just an accumulation of change that has been fought for and that has been contested and that has been defeated and that has been backlashed and that has been kind of growing again. And if you take it like that, I mean, our everyday lives, our normality is an accumulation of utopias of the past.
Speaker 5:Helen and me, to young women, we can sit here and say whatever we want to because generations of women had fought before us for that very right. And we just take it and we sit here. Who are we to now assume that other things that might seem radical or naive or utopian aren't possible if we are here incorporating normalizing that utopia of the past? It's a Friday afternoon. We will go into weekends.
Speaker 5:Who has fought for the right of a weekend? A working day. All these things, the civil rights movement, the ability to speak up no matter your skin color. All these things are part of our, yeah, of our present. And learning about that is not just about learning about the past, but it's about learning about what could be possible in the future.
Speaker 2:That was thank you for that. And this talk about imagination, this talk about making those that imagination and or or or bringing it into into what's real, what's experienced, what what is worked for and earned and fought for. That leads me to remember that you are not only climate activists, your students, that you have multiple responsibilities in the world. And Helena, you've studied economics. Correct?
Speaker 2:One of the things that I wanted to ask you about is metrics. One of the things that I wanted to ask you about is how do we identify measure understand that change is happening? If we don't want to use the same sort of scarcity economics measurements or fossil fuel mental infrastructures, what is it that we can look to that help us know that we're making change?
Speaker 3:I'm gonna start, like, two steps backward, and then I'll get to your question. I finished school and I was doing all this climate movement stuff from like tenth grade onward. And I was thinking about what I wanted to study at university. And for me, I I kind of landed on economics because it was kind of the thing I felt I understood least. Like, we were doing all these climate discussions and we were meeting with leading politicians And the thing we would kind of keep, like, banging up against was this magical thing, the economy.
Speaker 3:And it was always kind of said in a sense and with a tone that that was not something that I was or, like, that we as young people were allowed to have an opinion on. Or, like, that was not something that we could discuss or, like, contest. And so the economy was always like kind of this magical hammer to like finish the conversation and get onto the next thing. And so I yeah. I really wanted to understand what was behind the magical curtain and like what this thing was and to like make it something that I was allowed to talk about as well.
Speaker 3:And in that one of the like studying economics mostly teaches you why economists have such terrible answers and such insufficient answers to the crises of the world today. So I definitely learned that. But I think I I like, one of the books that shaped me most in my thinking about the economy is this amazing book by Mariana Mazzucato, who's this amazing economist. And she wrote this book called The Value of Everything, where she kind of, like, tracked our theory of value through, like, the centuries and looked at how our understanding of value has changed, how there are different economic theories of what is valuable and what isn't, and how the way that we usually measure value, which is GDP, right, is actually a very limited view of what value is and something that isn't actually sufficiently, like, intellectually grounded. Because the way we measure value in GDP is that value is anything that has a price, and the price displays a value.
Speaker 3:But that's a circle that isn't based on anything. And that was very, very interesting to me. And it kind of yeah. Because, you know, there's all these crazy things that happen in GDP where suddenly companies buy back their own shares and then their share value rises, but they haven't created anything. They haven't created destruction, but they haven't created anything of, like, of true value either.
Speaker 3:And I think that we need to have like, part of the conversation we need to have when we're talking about the ecological crisis is what is actually important for us. In this world where things are falling apart all around us, what do we want to save? What do we want to create? What do we want to uphold? And we obviously talk a lot about emissions, like getting them down to zero.
Speaker 3:People tell us a lot, oh, we are doing better, but better is not good enough. Right? We need to get down to zero. That's that's the big job that we have in these, you know, next two essential decades. And then we need to talk about well-being.
Speaker 3:Right? Like, how are people doing in that society? And I think there are, of course, like, different, like, measurements that have been and, like, different indicators that have been developed about well-being. But I think it you know, at the end of the day, I think we can't we have to go past the point where we come up with some tool and then let the tool do the work for us. Right?
Speaker 3:So I think the mission is a much harder one, which is we actually have to talk about what's important to us and what we wanna protect and who we wanna protect and why we wanna protect them. And so I think that, yeah, I can't give you the perfect metric. I think emissions is one of them, but we know we're in a biodiversity crisis as well. So we wanna, you know I would say I wanna protect that. And I think that for a community such as Charlottesville, there's probably other things that are of value that we wanna that need to be preserved or saved or built or created.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So I don't think I have a perfect answer. I think the answer is we need to talk about it.
Speaker 2:Well, that I think is the best answer because that's that's what we can do. I mean, that that's one thing is people can share their experiences and participate in in these kinds of conversations, which really does, I think, help us then define how we get to where we have to be. So the economy like you said is it can often be used and we have this in The United States all the time which the economy becomes that way of ending a conversation that if it's not economically viable within a certain understanding then then that's it. And that can really short circuit a lot of our political discourse and our our options of how we're we're going to even engage with the political process. I and so what I want to talk about next, what I wanted to ask about because this is something that may become very relevant or is very relevant to many people I think in The United States and that's disappointment with the political process.
Speaker 2:That is engaging with a political process and structure that has disappointed, that has not followed through, that has not seemed to be forthright and when given the opportunity too quickly sells out. But I'll just specify with the climate movement. We had that I think in The United States with the current administration's increase of fracking and drilling and their embrace globally of fossil fuel economies. And that makes it difficult to continue to support that. Same thing in Germany, of course.
Speaker 2:There are reasons to be a little bit disappointed with political parties that that promised so much or where we thought there might be a way forward. How do you deal with that political disappointment without disengaging? And how do you ensure that participation continues to increase even though there's so much reason for doubt?
Speaker 5:Yes. Big question. If I can just make a do like, remark on one thing because, one, I think a bit of a culture clash clash we have encountered throughout a journey in The US compared to where we usually work is this amazing absence of the elephant in the room, which is an election happening in ten days. And so apparently, there's this thing that you don't talk about it. But as you know, we feel like we can bring it in.
Speaker 5:You know? And so just to kind of drop that one here, ten days before the election, one thing that really strikes me is the fact that people will say, sorry. Climate environment can't really do this here because the number one voter issue is, quote, unquote, the economy. And then, as you say, that's the end of the story. That's the end of the discussion.
Speaker 5:And I think, imagine if that was the beginning of the discussion. And we then ask, so what is the economy for you? What is it? Like, what is it that you really care about? And you will find and we've been having these conversations because we looked for them.
Speaker 5:And we've been having some of these conversations where people then said, yeah. Can I afford my bus ticket? We're like, oh. So we talk about public transport and the freedom or the lack of freedom that comes along with not being attached to a public transport system. People would worry about gas prices, a utility price.
Speaker 5:We're like, oh, that's very interesting. So can we talk about sustainable and affordable infrastructure? People would talk about how safe are their children in schools, but also in the world. Can they afford college? But also, what air do they breathe?
Speaker 5:It's not always a surface issue. But when digging deep, many of these things are there. And they are as everything attached to the world we live in and we live from and we increasingly try to ignore. There's this journalist called Wolfgang Blau, and he likes to say, the climate isn't the elephant in the room. The climate is the room.
Speaker 5:And we can imagine and pretend it's not there. But it's always there. It's everything we breathe, we live, we see, we walk on, we eat. We wouldn't survive a single day on this planet if it wasn't for the ecosystems around us that sustain us. And, you know, the arrogance that comes with that to pretend we can make a decision about the political future in one of the most powerful countries in the world while uninviting the world from that world country, it's a heartache to me.
Speaker 5:And we saw two hurricanes kind of smashing that equation saying, you know, you can pretend that the world isn't there, but the hurricanes are gonna be there and the despair is gonna be there. So how about acknowledging that and opening the doors and opening our eyes to that? Well, anyhow, so that's on the economy. And to the to the well, I think the the political questions, of course, it's a super tricky one because our job is to criticize the government and to get people at the same time excited to interact with what the government does. And I think the main question for us in our work is, what is the story we tell of the division of labor in a society?
Speaker 5:Do we elect a government every so and so years, so and so many years, to do the job for us? We don't think that's working out, because we clearly see that there we need civil society to push for the things that governments wouldn't ever do, wouldn't ever historically consider to do if it wasn't for the people. So what we do is when we interact with governments and when we talk about elections, but also kind of the work of political powers and political parties, we speak of the conditions under which we organize. So what is a political framework in which we move? And so election for us means making the most of that framework, trying to create a political environment that allows us to push for more change, while then acknowledging we are needed, and we are needed big time.
Speaker 5:And in all our experience with that activism on the ground, we've seen different governments come and go. And obviously, having good people and power makes a big difference. But creating people power was way more important to us because it changed the narrative infrastructure in which we would move. Yeah. And then I think there's this beauty of ambiguity in activism, acknowledging that things can be amazing and miserable at the same time, that we can win big time at the same time as we lose something else, And that everything that we do is going to be progress.
Speaker 5:And all the big revolutions, again, coming back to the how we talk about the past thing. Every big revolution, every big success of the past was usually heavy contested, a defeat for many, not at all glorified, and not at all that one big moment. But it was a progress over time. And we try to celebrate this idea that there is a significant difference between a miserable and a less miserable situation in which we find ourselves in. Is it all we ever wanted?
Speaker 5:No. Are we trying to get there? Of course, we are. Is it guaranteed we're ever going to get there? We don't know.
Speaker 5:And that has all to do with appreciating looking closely.
Speaker 2:Helena, your please tell me that. Helena, you when you introduced yourself, you were talking about your work as you know, an an organizer. What does that mean? What what is the job? What is the work?
Speaker 2:And how do you do it every single day?
Speaker 5:Yeah. I would like to know that
Speaker 2:one. I
Speaker 3:like to describe the that work as bringing energy into a room and channeling it, I guess. I think that
Speaker 5:Can you give it can you illustrate that on a concrete example? Okay.
Speaker 6:I'll
Speaker 3:I'll go there in a second. I think that, like, in every in so many conversations that we've had, we've met so many people, like, here in this country as well, who just want to do something. Like, who are so frustrated, who are looking at the world around them and who want to do something, but they do not know what that thing is and they have not been asked to do something so they don't do it. And I think that a lot of the work of an organizer is to find people, to find the thing they want to do something about and to invite them in. And I think that's so that's a big part of the work is recognizing that you don't need to you don't need to, like, inspire people.
Speaker 3:You don't need to empower them because they have power. Right? And people are so ready to do something. But I think that we like, we build power when we coordinate, when we are strategic. Right?
Speaker 3:When people aren't running around doing a million different things, but a million people come together and do one thing. It doesn't always have to be a million, but it helps. And so, like, a few weeks ago, a few months ago, we wanted to stop this gas field in Germany. So crazy idea, 2024. Germany was one of the governments that in at in Glasgow, the climate conference signed this agreement saying they wouldn't build or invest in any new fossil fuel infrastructure.
Speaker 3:Then we had a pandemic and an energy crisis, and now Germany has continuously used that as an excuse to break these promises that they've made. Even though we are no longer in an energy crisis, we have more than enough energy in Germany. And so they they want to open this new gas field in in in the North Sea, like, right outside of this German island. This German island is famous for its pristine air, its pristine water, its ecosystems, the entire economy of the island, the entire identity of this island is that people go there to enjoy nature, to enjoy the beach. And so they were not happy about a gas drilling tower being put in front of their island.
Speaker 3:And we were not happy about a gas drilling tower put in front of the island because it breaks it's not, you know, compatible with Germany's climate goals, and it's a really disastrous sign to send out to the world that we that we, in our own front yards, continue building this kind of infrastructure. So we knew all that. Those facts have been known for quite a while though. So there's been all kinds of organizations who've been doing the great small work of, you know, going to court, writing inquiries, writing reports nobody cared. Right?
Speaker 3:And that's really frustrating. And so we would call the people on the island, they would be like, yeah, I don't know. It's getting the work is really hard. We don't know. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Thank you. Bye. Like, that was the conversations we're having. And so what we did is we made a party out of it. Like, we got all these young people together and we wrote a letter and then we did a petition and then we did this huge demonstration on the island and it was the biggest demonstration that Ireland had ever seen.
Speaker 3:5,000 people lived there and we had a demonstration with 2,000 people on this island and we brought our friends who do music. And so the work is saying, guys, this is important and here's how we're actually going to play an important role and here's how it's gonna be cool and here's how it's gonna also be work. But, yeah, like, I guess then the work is doing that. Like, getting everyone together and saying, okay, this is the thing we're gonna do now and here's what we're gonna do and do you guys have ideas and let's get started. If that if that
Speaker 5:makes I remember that moment we were sitting in my, like, at my desk in my in my flat in Berlin, and we talked like, we called that guy. So we wanted we obviously, we knew we had to build, like, a local alliance with that island people. We can't come in there from the outside saying, hey. We're gonna you know, We need those guys to, like, have a sense, a shared agreement, like, a shared of what's going on with us. And so we had this phone number from Sky.
Speaker 5:I don't was it the like, it was one local guy who was quite, you know, like a significant local person there working with communities. And so we had this number. And I remember we sat there, and you called that guy. And he did this thing where you were like, hey, so we heard about these things, we're really excited. Can we do something about it?
Speaker 5:And this guy was like, yeah. We've tried, and, you know, it's been hard. And people are really frustrated. And, you know, if you if you you wanna demonstrate, I don't think anyone is gonna bother. And I remember you being like, that is such a that is such a good reflection of you.
Speaker 5:You know what? I think it's gonna be great. And I do felt in that moment, I I, like, I really, like, have you in my head right now, like, listening to that conversation you had. A lot of that organizing work is creating a sense of, like, actually, imagine we just did it. And imagine we all chipped in.
Speaker 5:And we all did this one additional step. And we all were just a bit more courageous than we would usually be. And so I think the role, and I think that's a lot of the work that you do, is about creating an idea that it could all go really badly. And then it's a anecdotal tale at a party. But it could also be that moment that we create something we couldn't have imagined a few days before.
Speaker 2:From the audience, questions, thoughts that you would like to to discuss with Louisa and Helena?
Speaker 5:Yes. An open mic. Yes.
Speaker 6:This past weekend, I was down in the Outer Banks, which is, I guess, a rough equivalent of the Cape Cod for the Mid Atlantic, although it wasn't glacially created. Anyway, I was on a fishing pier, and I started talking to a gentleman from Western North Carolina. And I asked, you know, did he suffer? And he said, my community was essentially wiped out. And we had a, you know, conversation about that, and he he talked about all the people that he knew that had lost their lives.
Speaker 6:But then, the conversation turned to or I asked what FEMA was doing. And he kind of got up close to me in a conspiratorial whisper said, you know, FEMA stopping the trucks and giving everything to the Mexicans. Okay. So nowhere in the conversation was there any acknowledgment of the linkage between what had happened and climate change. But I'm curious, my impression is in Germany, there's not such an issue of climate denialism.
Speaker 6:But what is the source of the growing opposition to climate policies expressed by the, I guess, mainly the right wing, but perhaps there's also apathy on the left wing side. I don't know.
Speaker 5:So there is this French philosopher. He's called Bruno Latour. He's a big ecology guy. And, he he recently died. And he brought up this phrase in ecology, which I found very powerful.
Speaker 5:He says, data and the climate crisis has prescriptive potential. So just acknowledging the data is kind of a to do list. So it makes so much sense to fight that data, that science, because the science itself reads itself as quite a precise idea of what we need to do because it's so prescriptive. And so I'm not surprised that the less people are like the first step you want to do in order to diffuse climate action because you worry. There's industry that worries about their profits, but I feel there's mostly politicians or people who are worried about their feelings.
Speaker 5:And that is not you know, I think it's more complicated than just just the profit angle to it. Think it has a lot to do with imagining something that is bigger than what we as a nation thought we were. You know? It can be painful and, you know, cause grievances and so on. So there is this data problem here, which in Germany went differently because at that very time that the science arose in Germany about climate, we had already some people fighting for solutions.
Speaker 5:So there was the time where you would kind of debate over the science was much shorter in Germany because the science kind of came a bit later to, like, the mainstream awareness people. And then, you know, '92, my grandmother put solar panels on her rooftop, and she would kind of make a plan for how to get solar funded on a local school. And then the ladies would go out and tell people to change electricity provider. And then the Greens came to government and said, hey, actually, we make a law about it to kind of channel that and make it profitable. So there wasn't much up like, wasn't much political vacuum where people would run around like all the bull guys saying, oh, you know, it might not be.
Speaker 5:And so we don't have that. But what is happening just as much, different nuances, different forms and shapes, is a denial that just takes a different shape. That is not about denying the science, but it's about denying the solutions. It's about denying the economic perspectives of the solution. It's denying that the public wants it.
Speaker 5:It's denying the urgency. It's denying the global responsibility. It's a denying of the problems. It's a fossil fuel. Of course, it's all that big rule books, that playbooks that we we know about.
Speaker 5:And I think what when you share about FEMA and this hurricane, I think it brings up an incredibly important point, and that is the end of an illusion. And it goes that illusion goes like that. It's a story that has been told over and over again. Once the crisis is there, people will wake up. They will act.
Speaker 5:They will want to do something. That was an illusion for some. It was a promise for others. And it was an excuse for, again, others. And what we find is that there is prescriptive potential in disasters.
Speaker 5:So we do see a lot of people finding themselves in the fires and the floods being like, oh my god. That is real. That's happening. And wherever that is happening, it's so important to acknowledge that and to channel that. But apparently and that that's the the the hope in that moment, we do not have to wait for that.
Speaker 5:Because we see people are able to acknowledge catastrophes even when they're not happening in their own house. And even when they're happening in their own house, they might as well deny that very catastrophe to happen to them. So we see that our cognitive ability to make up something we want to see in the world is quite big and quite powerful, and it can go either way. So we don't have to rely on any catastrophes, which is obviously also a horrible thing to approach. But we don't have to rely on any catastrophe to make someone's reality, because we make realities and how we talk about stuff and how we politically fuel stuff and how we make up stories, and make up political capital.
Speaker 5:And so what we try to do, and I think it was very disas like, it was, I think, yeah, I mentioned that very destructive, of course, to exclude the climate from the campaign. So when the climate hit the campaigns, no one had a, you know, no one had approached to that. But I think fueling that, working with who's there, who are the stories like, what are the stories that they're gonna tell? And maybe not him, but that neighbor might tell the story about how, for the first time, he got scared of a climate change that apparently isn't so far away. Making those stories the stories to kind of travel the world is one thing.
Speaker 5:But on the other side, maybe regrow some trust in people's ability to acknowledge a crisis that is not immediately at the doorstep, but that is around. Because as far as we know, people have that ability to do that in many things. Why shouldn't we have it when it comes to climate?
Speaker 6:And I'll just make one comment that Yes. Crisis can be an opportunity for novel solutions, it can also be exploited
Speaker 5:Excellent.
Speaker 6:By people looking for power. Yeah.
Speaker 5:And I do find, however, the FEMA situation has told us a lot about, you know, what this really is about. It's about distincting politics or, like, naming politics and what they are. It's politics of anxiety and of exploitation. It's a political mode that only works as long as people are scared. And it could never build sustainable solutions because that would eventually people lift people out of being scared.
Speaker 5:But that would take away the foundation of that very kind of politics. And we see it an extreme way here, but we see it everywhere. That you have to go around and scare people that someone's going to take something from you no matter the price, no matter the very livable costs, just for your own politics to work out.
Speaker 2:This this leads me to ask a question about the concept of community and what community means. Because this individualization, this idea of what can happen to me or almost this anxiety, fear can cause us to isolate from others I think and resist sort of connection. How do you understanding that acknowledging and seeing it, how do you build community? What is community? And maybe if you could talk a little bit about that idea of a transatlantic, a global community as well.
Speaker 3:I think that we, as societies, right, as globalized societies, facing trends that have, you know, little to do with the climate, but have a lot to do with institutions, have a lot to do with the decline of organized religion, have a lot to do with the rise of social media. And they lead to the social realm being very splitted and people not really outside of maybe their work or their educational institutions truly coming together with others and talking to them. And I think that, you know, is is leading to a lot of issues in all kinds of areas. It's leading to people feeling lonely. It's leading to people feeling like they are the only ones worried about issues that, frankly, everyone can see and that, frankly, everyone is exhausted by and is overwhelmed by.
Speaker 3:And so I think that in the climate crisis, which is one of the big issues, which is the biggest issue that we face as a society in the coming decades, it's like the very first step of fighting against it is actually bringing people together and having them realize that they're actually not the only ones who are worried. And that was one of the really transformative things the youth climate movement did, is that it allowed young people like myself, but so many others, to come together. And before they were even like, before they unfolded political power and created change in the world, the first, like, transformative step was to realize that you were actually not alone in your worries and your fears about the world. And just realizing that unlocked so much potential because as soon as you realize you're actually not alone, then that's like that allows you to maybe start to imagine that you could do something about the problem if other people are seeing this problem as well. And so that's considered as the basis of everything.
Speaker 3:And then the next step is, of course, you know, finding the people who are responsible, putting political pressure on, being really, really annoying, asking the same questions again and again and again, you know, making clear that doing more is not enough, making clear that small steps are not enough in a big crisis. But the first step is bringing people together. And so we have a huge emphasis on doing that in person. So even though so much of our work happens on Zoom and so much of our national campaigning takes place in WhatsApp groups, we find that power is so much more tangible and physical when it happens in a room. And so most of our local groups have weekly plenaries where they bring people together.
Speaker 3:And we found that snacks really help to bring people there. We found that good music really helps, not of course during the plenary, but afterwards. And like making it a priority to actually bring people together in space, which is something that we don't do very often anymore in society. And yeah, sometimes that takes a bit of sometimes you have to ask people a few times before they show up because it's yeah, people are anxious to come to a place where they don't know anyone and to have to find the room and to not know the rules of how things happen there. So we do that a lot.
Speaker 3:We work on social media. We know that's a place where discourse happens, where narratives are told. But then we try and bring people from the digital world into the real world. And that is so much of mass protest, right, is actually showing up, is being on the streets, is taking up space, is making ourselves unignorable. And that is something that I think in this moment that we are in right now as society might, in many ways, be even more revolutionary than it has been ever before.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Hi. I'm Tom Olivier, again, and I'd like to make one comment and ask you all a question. The comments related to something, you mentioned before, namely the the coming election and the political polarization. And, I just wanted to say for one thing that the polarization you see in this country now has not been normal over the past sixty or fifty or sixty years.
Speaker 4:It's really far exacerbated. Now give you a point back in the nineteen nineties, Albemarle County, which surround Charlottesville, a number of us proposed that Albemarle County commit to protect its biodiversity. And, the board of supervisors, which was the highest level of the government, was a mix roughly I think roughly equal of Republicans and Democrats. And it was a pretty unusual proposal for them to do that. There was no federal endangered species act or anything like that coercing the county to do that.
Speaker 4:It was just a bunch of citizens, biologists from the university and citizens concerned, we proposed it. And kind of amazingly, this board of Republicans and Democrats voted unanimously with big smiles on their face to commit to do this, and they created you know, they did an assessment of the state of biodiversity. They created a standing committee in 2005. That committee still exists and still operates today. So it's it's been possible to really get environmental commitments with cooperation from both of The US's major political parties in the past, and sadly, a lot of that's gone away.
Speaker 4:But the problem that we face today with climate change, it's really a kind of pernicious or a a a wicked evolution of that. Today, we have an all democratic board of supervisors, yet those of us who are concerned about climate find it very difficult. They will do certain things on climate, and there is a significant climate program. But, for example, to come back to the economy, they just approved an enormous development proposal and refused to assess what its climatic impacts would be despite many of us saying, you need to do this. And there seem and it there seems to be a deep seated resistance to thinking about the conflict between environment and the economy even among Democrats.
Speaker 4:And I think this has led to a refusal to to imagine an economy and so on that avoids this kind of conflict. And we we just keep hitting dead ends, politically in terms of trying to make progress on the conflict between economic activity and preserving the environment. So it's a special, very difficult case. But the other question I had was
Speaker 5:ask a question back at that point?
Speaker 4:Sorry?
Speaker 5:Could I ask you a question on that comment? Sure. So quite a few people have told us a story about how Al Gore ran, and then, you know, it became a partisan issue back then. And, suddenly, the Republicans had to kind of distance themselves from the Democrats through climate anti notions and so on. And yet, could you pinpoint, like, especially, like, in the last years, what has fueled that polarization of our climate?
Speaker 5:What was it in your understanding?
Speaker 4:Well, climate, I guess, has a kind of long history. And I I I can I'll try to be brief, but it's had a lot of some twists and turns locally. If you go back to, the nineteen nineties and the early two thousands, you know, it was just still in the minds of most people, even scientists, an abstract possibility. And back in 2004, some we had a biodiversity work group in the county. I was a member.
Speaker 4:And we wrote a report, and we were aware that climate change was arising then as an issue. And we put a section in the report saying this may be happening, and if it does, it will affect a lot of things. And we need you need to start thinking about this and being prepared. I don't know how detailed your familiarity is with American political history, but I think we need
Speaker 5:too much almost.
Speaker 4:Okay. Well, back around 2008 or so, we had the rising of what well, there were two things. There was the great recession, which was a, I guess, a global recession where a lot of the economics went
Speaker 5:But we know the roots.
Speaker 4:Right. Yeah. And we had some changes in the political makeup of the board toward a more conservative, but we also had a rise of what was called the Tea Party in The United States, which was a a group of small government conservative people who were quite skeptical of government and were make all kinds of pretty wild claims at times about, climate change. And, for example, I remember a meeting in 2011. Albemarle County had signed up and was for and was using some software from a program.
Speaker 4:It was a the the initials were I c l and e its roots were in some sort of United Nations program to monitor climate change. And there was a giant meeting at the Albemarle County office building just a few blocks away with about 300 people one night, and that room was totally polarized between people who wanted the county to get out of Ikley and those who wanted us to stay. And I remember there were two physicians who stood up and said this was all part of a UN scheme. One said that it was part of United Nations mind control program. And I say that was 2011, and we realized that this kind of it was clear, a kind of conspirational right wing take on politics that was qualitatively very different from the sort of old time Republicans like George Bush and some of the others had appeared.
Speaker 4:And I would say a lot of the polarization that has gone on is since then. I remember meeting our climate the biodiversity committee, which I served on, we were gonna file an act present an action plan. And I remember taking the pains to meet with one of the supervisors to say, look, climate change and the need for climate action, it's gonna be in here. So you prepare yourself for it because there's going to be fallout. And what happened, I would say, was that locally, progressives took over the local government.
Speaker 4:It ceased being a mixed board, and that has made doing climate change acceptable. And years ago, about five years ago, the county created a climate action program because it was more homogeneous politically. But at the same time, there were clear bounds to come back, you know, talk about ending the conversation. There seems to be a real unwillingness. There's a there's support.
Speaker 4:There's money going into climate action. There are programs. There are greenhouse gas inventories and so on. But if you're politically active, you have a strong sense that, but don't screw up the economy or say we need to screw up the economy with anything you want us to do. And, of course, greenhouse gas is a function of economic activity.
Speaker 4:And in fact, if you talk to staff here in the climate program, a key strategy to becoming carbon neutral because the county committed to do that by twenty fifty some years ago, It's to protect sequestration capacities of our landscape, is about 95%. But they're they are approving and even promoting economic development projects that we know will destroy part of our open spaces and undermine sequestration while increasing greenhouse gas emissions. So there's a kind of compartmentalization of thinking that it's not rational, it's not scientific, and it's it's a kind of escape from reality. And this is all progressives doing this.
Speaker 5:Now we're getting a queue, so maybe we can jump to your question. Thank you so much for outlining that one. Did you have a question as well?
Speaker 4:Yeah. A question. Thank you. You can see there's a lot of gray hair in the room, and I mentioned this last night to some of you. We've tried on occasion to bring in young people to the climate action movement with very limited success, and you all have had great success.
Speaker 4:And I guess, really, my question is, do you have recommendations on how a bunch of old people might bring young people into this movement? Now say raise one additional point. A problem we recognize here, and I don't know if it's the same in Germany, but we have, you know, we have some very bright high school students here, people in their teens going to school, who are climate aware, but they're gonna most of them will go off to college somewhere else soon. And then we have University of Virginia with a lot of climate aware students. Most of them will be go so we have a a pool of young people, and they'll be leaving soon, is kind of a problem to recruiting activists who might have a multi year we would hope would have a multi year career here.
Speaker 4:So your suggestion?
Speaker 5:Very good very good point. I think on that, I think we would be brief because we, a, think there's you know, we need to work intergenerationally. You know, that's really necessary. But it's also great if each generation finds its own cause and its own, like, determination in this. And I'm thinking of my grandmother and her ladies environmentalist group.
Speaker 5:A bunch of they have very funny names that they call themselves, all ladies 80. And they've been around for, really, like, forever and been doing that work. And sometimes we would go on the streets together, and I would join them on something. But it's also great that they appreciate their own culture, and they do different stuff, and they speak different languages. And so I'm not sure if I would worry so much about recruiting young people to these well, whatever, like, whatever groups they are, but rather making sure that there are somewhere else people that do young people organizing.
Speaker 5:And then then then there is a good kind of moment to meet and to talk about this stuff and to collaborate where necessary. But I don't think there's so much of a glory in making everything everyone else's issue. And I'm thinking about Bill McKibben's third act. And I loved how my activism started with divestment and 350.org. And so I was really part of that movement.
Speaker 5:I even worked for three fifty for a few months as a summer job. And now I recently talked to Bill, and he joined me on my podcast. And it was so lovely to hear from him how he would say, Luisa, I appreciate the young folks, but now as a hangout with those guys who are getting less hair on their head and more hair on their ears, how he says it, I will now claim that you do the better parties, but we always did the better music. And in the beginning of each third act meeting, they would put the bowie on, and they would listen to those folks, to Johnny Cash and to all that great stuff that was around for much longer. And they would have that moment of appreciating that there's a generational thing that unites us.
Speaker 5:And that's beautiful. And let's appreciate that just as much as we appreciate other moments where we then collaborate eventually. And the best way for, like, any young person to be recruited is to find some young person to do that job. Yeah. Thank you
Speaker 4:very much.
Speaker 5:Sure.
Speaker 7:Hi. I've, I'm also part of Third Act, so we've done a lot of So we organized the DC thing, the Virginia branch. So we were the rocking rocking chair rebellion. I don't if you've seen that. Yes.
Speaker 7:We all brought rocking chairs and got arrested in them
Speaker 5:and Yay. You know, they they share those things in Germany. Right? It's really inspirational.
Speaker 7:That's good. That's good. So but my question is, I was also part of Declare Emergency. I'm not they were Yes. They were part of the a twenty two network.
Speaker 7:But we just finally I think we have to say it's defunct at this point. But we were so jealous of everything that was happening in Europe, and particularly in Germany. And we did everything that Roger Hallum told us to do about how to organize, and we were flyering like we put out 10,000 flyers in in, I think, Raleigh, and and, like, two people showed up. And we just did multiple things over and over again. And we so the question finally came to us, is is there something intrinsically different about organizing in The US than in Europe?
Speaker 7:Because I feel like, you know, we did all the right things. And now we're at the point where our chief folks can't even go to DC anymore because they've been barred for life for showing up in DC. And many of our folks are are gonna be in jail long term and so which is pretty pretty awful. But, I mean but the organization has pretty much collapsed. But do you think there's an intrinsic difference?
Speaker 7:I mean, we feel like we were beating our heads against the wall and not coming close to anything anyone else was doing. So.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I think context always matters. Right? Like, I'm not even sure I could say the like, obviously, there are a lot of differences between The US and Europe, but there are also a lot differences between countries within Europe. There were these amazing activists in The Netherlands, Extinction Rebellion, who blocked this one big highway in the city for think over a month.
Speaker 3:Every single day, they would block this highway. And they forced their government to look at stopping all fossil fuel subsidies. It was amazing. And we looked at this in Germany. And we were like, that's so cool.
Speaker 3:And then, like, a bunch of us were like, oh, maybe we should do that as well. And then we talked about it a long time because blocking a highway seemed kind of cool, and it seemed like it worked. And then we ended up not doing it because we were in a very different situation. And in Germany, we didn't have a highway in the middle of our capital city. And the police in The Netherlands, what they did is they would arrest people, but then they would just drive them fifteen minutes away and then let them out of the van.
Speaker 3:And then the people would actually go back to the blockade. And, you know, so the structural like And then another thing in The Netherlands is that they brought one like What are they even called in English? Like a
Speaker 5:The water A water cannon.
Speaker 3:A water cannon. Mhmm. They brought one water cannon and it caused this huge scandal because that was not a normal thing. And they said And there was this huge solidarity wave in society where they said, you cannot shoot water cannons at young people protesting to end subsidies. And in Germany, they bring water We cannons all the don't like, that is not gonna cause an outcry.
Speaker 3:Like, I mean, not to our big climate marches.
Speaker 5:Stand around and say, look at that engineering. Wow.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Like, they bring umbrellas. Like, they're prepared. And so that's just one way to illustrate that the context is very different.
Speaker 5:Just so to put it boldly, right? We had highways somewhere. We had subsidies somewhere. We had people who would do something. We had all the ingredients you would think you would need to do that.
Speaker 5:And still, the infrastructure, the social infrastructure, the political infrastructure, the discursive infrastructure in which we navigate is not the same. And it's a country that's two hours from ours. Like, it's, you know, we live. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And so I think And that's why even in our last few weeks that we've been here, we're really careful that we are not here to tell you to do exactly what we did. That is not our mission in any way because we I don't think it would work. I don't think that you could follow this because so much of movement building is like a whirlwind, right, where suddenly things just come together and they work and something happens. But behind that are like hundreds of failures of moments where things came together and actually nothing happened and it didn't work and people showed up again anyway and they tried a different thing.
Speaker 3:And so I think that we need to iterate, right? And we need to try stuff. And then when we realize, wait a minute, this isn't working, then we need to pivot and do something else. And so I think that the idea that there can be any three step process that you can follow, that the idea that anyone could prescribe you a method that would work anywhere, to me, is absurd. And so we have all these local groups.
Speaker 3:And we coordinate on campaigns. We coordinate on climate strikes. But those climate strikes look differently. Like our East German friends in small towns, they do something very different than what we do with tens of thousands of people in Berlin in a capital city. And we always tell our activists and our organizers, you are the expert.
Speaker 3:Like, you are the expert on your community. You are the expert on your town because you know what's going on and you know how to move people there. And so with yeah. With I
Speaker 5:think there's value, though. There is obviously value in taking from what's happening in other places. And I think that has a lot to do with taking up or appreciating the idea that something might be possible that we haven't thought about before. So taking the spirit from that, taking the sense of, hey, we could go somewhere, taking that as an inspiration, de like, de clustering it, uncovering it, what is behind it, and, you know, figuring out what what is applicable to our context. And so, you know, it's it's our jobs as, like, a ecological civil society.
Speaker 5:It's our job to take those stories from over the from all over the world and make them the stories that people would talk about. So we would talk about all the time about those amazing people in The Netherlands to say, hey, they tackled fossil fuel subsidies. Why, you know, how about we tackle our fossil fuel subsidies as well? But we will have to find our unique way to that. And the beautiful thing is are people all over the place.
Speaker 5:And we don't have to invent the wheel again and again and again, because we can take from these ingredients. But no one can do that job for us, which is bringing it into a context where it makes sense to people. And just to maybe share a little anecdote on that one, we had an amazing webinar, transatlantic webinar, just a few days ago between an organizer in Texas and me talking about LNG and the fracking and how we kind of, as an importing country in Germany, can learn from the resistance in Texas and Louisiana, but also how do we work. And it was so interesting to see how this organizer from Texas, from this amazing group called what is it called? The oil with oil witness, they're called, how how they would organize.
Speaker 5:And when when she talked about LNG, however, she would mention, and I love that, that the emissions from, like, that are caused through LNG in The US are much worse than the ones from Russia. And she would kept on like, she she kind of frequently mentioned that point that this is much worse than in Russia. And I thought it was interesting because for a German audience, it didn't make sense because we never talked about the emissions from Russia. But apparently, in her communities, it was a big thing that people would say, oh, but Russia is much worse in climate than we are. So and and it was just a single thing where you where I would see all the, like, environmental Germans being like, we hate LNG anyhow, but we don't like Russia's also invading Ukraine, so we don't really we don't but it's a it's a small thing.
Speaker 5:It's a it's a local language that you speak everywhere. Yeah.
Speaker 8:Hi. Thank you for coming. Guess I have a question sort of about the way climate policy has been positioned. So if we're talking about I guess the essence of my question is now in many places so Virginia, for example, the Virginia Clean Economy Act is we're hopefully going to be carbon zero by 2050, which I think is I think that's right. Right?
Speaker 8:We have to phase out fossil fuels from the Virginia economy, by then. But what it really is is it's a requirement. Right? So it'll require the utility companies, localities, and and at the end of the day, people to, change the way they consume energy. And then globally, you obviously have the Paris Accords, and you can see how easy it was for The United States to enter and exit that.
Speaker 8:Right? So they're precarious in themselves. But I I just wanna I think it's an interesting thing because I think right now, you know, as at least in the Virginia context, the VCA or VCEA was passed, you know, I think in 2020 or 2019. So it's a different political context. It was before the pandemic or maybe at the beginning of the pandemic.
Speaker 8:Now it feels like this burden and this requirement. People are like, ugh. It's, like, so annoying. I have to, like, you know we're like, we want more solar panels, but we're not doing it in a way that's artful where people have a lot of environmental concerns about the way solar, solar panels work. We're sort of requiring people with large swaths of land that could be used for agriculture to assume this sort of responsibility to generate clean energy.
Speaker 8:Right? And so I just wanted to when when climate policy, when it sort of revolves around restrictions and it revolves people's perception of it is as a sort of nuisance in something like the legwork wasn't done to connect the requirements to, like, someone's actual material reality. How do we, like, solve that? Because I'm what I'm fearful of and actually what I'm expecting, considering we talk about the election, you know, the Harris campaign endorsing fracking as a way to get votes in Pennsylvania. Right?
Speaker 8:So it's a politically convenient way to get maybe a handful of votes. And because of the electoral college, those votes are probably worth 30 times what our votes are worth, you know, as far as the national results go. So, anyway, that's my question is really thinking about I feel like we're we're facing this backlash because people are thinking about, sort of regulations or restrictions around making our economy greener and having less emissions as, like, burdensome, and we haven't created a way to accommodate or sort of, like, make people whole to comply with those regulations. So I guess what do we do? Because it's it's like, you know, they're good.
Speaker 8:Like, I agree. I think it's a great thing that I can't believe it actually. The Virginia's let legislature has endorsed a plan that I mean, I wouldn't say it's as ambitious as it could be, but it's still pretty amazing. But if that's just going to fall away, you know, where are we left? Are we in a worse place than before?
Speaker 8:Because now instead of this abstract view of of climate change, we have this, like, well, we tried that. It was really annoying. My tack my utility bill went up, and that's be not because of progress. It's because of the greed of the utility provide you know, etcetera, etcetera. So, anyway, that's just my purview of of things right now.
Speaker 8:So
Speaker 3:Yeah. I think that's a really good question. There was I think there was this moment, right? And I think that happened in a lot of places right around that time frame, like 2019, where the climate movement got really annoying in a good way, in a great way. And so all kinds of different government entities started putting these climate targets and goals into place.
Speaker 3:And that happened in all different levels. And we had municipalities declaring cloud emergencies. We had the European Union declaring a climate emergency. Everyone was putting these goals into place, which is part of what we need. Right?
Speaker 3:Part of part of the climate transition is setting standards, is setting red lines, is setting is is knowing where we want to go. But that's the first step. The second step is then actually going there. And my yeah. I think that in a lot of places, these goals were set, like, kind of with no idea of how that would then actually look, like no imagination of what that could look like.
Speaker 3:And kind of also with the hope that it would just shut people up because now we have a goal, but it's decades away, so we don't need to actually do anything right now. And so you can go home now. Goodbye. Thank you very much to the children, you know? But now we're actually in a place where things are going to get concrete.
Speaker 3:And obviously, when it gets concrete, there are like the Then real material questions of that come up of how we want to use land, how we want to use space. Who gets who like, where does the money from, like, renewable energy go like, who does it go to? Who gets to Who gets to earn money from this transition? Who loses it? Who bears the costs?
Speaker 3:And what we need is a politics that takes responsibility for bringing people together and that narrates the transition. I think that we see that in Germany a lot where we actually have a quite progressive government. But they've come up with a style of politics where they think that just having good policies is enough. And so they kind of sit in their offices, and it's probably all these boys who come up with great technocratic plans for how we're going to reduce emissions. But there's no coalition building happening.
Speaker 3:So they're not talking to movements. They're not talking to people. And then we have this chancellor. He's I don't know. Whatever.
Speaker 5:Do you
Speaker 3:have feelings? He, you know, he just he has this new catchphrase, you will never walk alone from the song. Right? So he'll just he keeps repeating that. Not a fan, anyway.
Speaker 3:And I think he's kind of telling the story of we will do this great transition, but don't worry. You will not feel anything. You will not notice anything. Nothing will change, and you will be Okay. And you know what?
Speaker 3:Nobody believes him because you don't need to be super educated. You don't need to be an expert on anything to know that actually decarbonizing our entire economy and politics and society is gonna make us feel something. All that to say that we never like, I never said it was gonna be easy. Right? This isn't something we ever we've built societies, we've built structures that are based, like, fundamentally based on burning fossil fuels.
Speaker 3:We drive around in little metal boxes that burn fossil fuels, and we live in houses that have little metal things of fossil fuels in our basements, and we fly around in metal tubes in the sky that are burning fossil fuels, like, society is built on that. And so to get to change that is is is is gonna is gonna be hard. And so when it's hard and because and we not changing anything is gonna be so much harder anyway. But anyway and and so we don't do that by snapping our fingers. We do that by getting in the trenches and doing the hard work and having the conversations and bringing people together.
Speaker 3:And then also talking about how and I'm not a great believer in only talking about the positive effects. I don't think that's I don't think that's convincing either if we just say, oh, and it's all gonna be wonderful, so that's why we should do it. But I think that's part of it. Right? Having the conversation of when we do this and when we make these transitions and when we rebuild our infrastructure and when we reimagine what this what uptown could look like, what good could come of that as well and how can we imagine this future and who could could be part of that.
Speaker 3:And so, yeah, I think it's about creating coalitions, about bringing people together, about making it concrete, and about allowing people to to be part of the process of rethinking what the world could look like. Yeah.
Speaker 5:I was trying to think, meanwhile, of, like, a practical example we could provide. And I think just to flag, Germany, have this we have a constitutional thing that we can't make debt debt. So so we can't just spend money. Right? So I think if you want to find one key difference between environmental politics in Germany and The US, it's that this money runs on spending money and Germany runs on regulation.
Speaker 5:And I feel, whilst Germany is very bad in finding money and spending it well, The US has to do like, learn about regulation much more. And I think that is something where we can maybe learn from each other, but we also must learn from each other. And And in Germany, we need to figure out our money problem, but that's a different story. So, obviously, there's more of a culture around regulation. And I did feel that maybe two things have worked out very well when we talk about these nitty gritty things.
Speaker 5:Three, actually. One is appreciating the conflict. So I remembered your comment about biodiversity. Like, everyone agreed on this, and it was a miraculous moment. There is no peace without conflict.
Speaker 5:So when we want to, like we've kind of gotten the low hanging fruits in in many ends. These are done. The the distant targets, the broad agreements, the coalitions, the little many very many groups in this small town, seems. Like, big you know, there's people doing stuff. That's great.
Speaker 5:But as it get it's getting, you know, nitty gritty. It's getting tough. And that is where conflict arises. And that can also mean that it's crucial progress that has to happen that wouldn't happen without a conflict. So I feel appreciation about those discussions, those conflict, number one.
Speaker 5:Number two is thinking about the framing. So I'm thinking about how in Germany, a lot of regulation when it come when it came to banning diesels from inner cities, getting solar up on the balconies of people, getting bike paths, changing parking lots to being, like, whatever, urban coffee spots, changing energy grids, all these things, rethinking we have the tree people here in the room. A lot of what local people try to do is to be very deliberate on the framing and really consider which hill you want to die on. Do you need to have this conversation about biodiversity and climate? Or can you do it about the quality of life and about increasing public safety so people wouldn't die from the air, whatever.
Speaker 5:But thinking about and we are fan a of having climate conversations. But when it's getting to a policy nitty gritty thing, framing matters so much. Who is it who's fighting for what? Is it the environmentalist who are kind of a bit of a bunch that tends to take everyone else's something away? Or is it the civil society that's just concerned citizens that want people to be safer and the children to be better off also.
Speaker 5:And number three is maybe one very coming back to the context thing. What has worked out before that can be the start of a legacy? So was there a regulation moment before in civil, for instance, where unlikely and maybe even unwanted regulation helped to kind of frog leap somewhere else? Can that be a story that makes it you know, that defines a bit of a culture saying, have we done it before? Look at that.
Speaker 5:And people didn't want it. You know, let's reflect ourselves. But now we can do it again. And that is never the same in different spaces and and locations. But maybe there's something kind of to take from its own from this own history of this place.
Speaker 8:Thank you.
Speaker 2:So speaking of taking something from this place, you all have spent the last day and a half here in Charlottesville. You've met quite a few people and learned about the complexity of of movement building and and of climate action here. What will you take from Charlottesville? What will you what have you learned here or what have you found inspiring or worth inquiring about further?
Speaker 5:We have also have a question here. What do we can we
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Maybe that links also the question is what your plans are. And so this Revolution. Yeah. So whatever you feel you can share legally.
Speaker 1:And and that links to what what you take from this whole US from the experience here in in Charlottesville, of course, in particular. But also beyond that, what what where do you see yourself going? I mean, what I mean, you're also people. You're human beings. So are you gonna run on unlimited energy doing this every day forever?
Speaker 1:Or Yes.
Speaker 5:Actually, that's what we would like to do. Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's that's wonderful. I'm not I'm not questioning this in in the least. So so but I'm very curious, like, also how how it's yeah. What what do you take from this and where you take this and how, if if you know any such thing.
Speaker 5:That's a big question now. And and and okay. Helena, what do you think?
Speaker 3:Oh, wow. You're so nice, Luisa. Thank you. I guess I'll start. What do I take from from this place?
Speaker 3:I it made me think a lot about attention and where we put it. We were at the university yesterday in two different classes. And we talked to students all day. And we we heard so much about pollution and about trash and about how the the school composts. But students have to sort that compost.
Speaker 3:And so after we had to have like three or four things already at like 04:30 in the afternoon, someone told us, yeah, the university actually has its own, no, its own plant where they burn gas and also sometimes coal at the university. And nobody had told us this until, like, 05:00 in the afternoon. We had been there all day. We kept asking, so what are the issues here? What are you guys thinking about?
Speaker 3:How do you see the climate crisis taking place around you? What responsibility does the university have? And no one told us about this elephant in the room, this coal burning elephant, you know? And I was so astounded by that. And then we met these amazing boys who are going to make it their big project to shut this down We really have trust the their university town in the time that they're at the university.
Speaker 3:And I I think it taught me a lot about where like, how how fundamentally shaping it is, where we look and what we pay attention to, and how sometimes the thing that stares in the face, which may be the trash that's lying around, may not always be the most important thing. Like, from an emissions standpoint, from a climate standpoint, what impact is this university having? What is the story that we are telling about it around the world? That's that's a different thing than the thing that's staring us in the face. And I think that's the first thing I take away from here is how important it is to sometimes take a step back, look at the bigger picture, sometimes take a step forward, look down into, you know, the basement or wherever the heating pipes are running.
Speaker 3:And then maybe a second thing I take away from here is this idea of public space and who it belongs to and how much it shapes us. Andreas said this one amazing thing, is the true monument to Jefferson and to his legacy is the buildings that we walk through in this city. But it's also the story that we tell about him right, as this great founding father of this country, but also of UVA. And how that story, even while we put up plaques and we put up monuments, how that story hasn't really fundamentally changed over the last few years. And I think that this idea of the importance of how we think of history, but also how we think of the present and how we place ourselves within it and how that is illustrated in public space and is illustrated in the architecture around us and is illustrated by what we build, I think, also shaped me.
Speaker 3:Because in the climate transition, we will build a lot of things. That's part of it. And I really want to make sure that we do that in a just and equitable and responsible way and in a way that yeah, tells different stories about who we are and where we're going.
Speaker 2:Belinda.
Speaker 5:It was really nice already. I am trying to think. I think it's it's been interesting for us to see many places. I feel like I feel I felt the privilege of being able to come into a room often with people. And and Siva, we had this a couple of times.
Speaker 5:People kind of caring about similar things but not not having shared a room before. And they came together because we were there. And so maybe speaking about something that we are leaving or something we're taking is I hope we leave with a sense of, you know, of meaning behind curating meetings of people that might have to share something. And then I think another thing I I think we hope we leave is about setting a tone. So we really felt it in those classrooms where we were, that maybe it's a privilege for us as outsiders to come in and come in and don't you know, we don't know the specific codes in which people here talk about politics and about all these things.
Speaker 5:And it's for us, that that naivety that comes of it is great because it allows us to speak about stuff we really feel like maybe we should talk about it, not having to get all messed up about specific local norms on stuff. But we can take the privilege of coming from the outside and just doing it anyhow. And I think that is something that has encountered us a lot that people would kind of shy around get shy around many issues. And we try to open those doors and say, hey, what if we talked about that? What if we talked about the election?
Speaker 5:What if we talked about the fact that this is not a right versus left moment in this country? What about we talked about fossil fuels and, you know, and so on, and emissions and so on, and global questions, and what matters in this country is how it matters for the world. And something I leave I take with me from kind of relates back to what the comment I made in the beginning about in in Charlottesville, I fear what was I mean, we were just here for a few days. Right? I'm probably gonna run around in my life now, claiming to be an expert on Charlottesville and Germany.
Speaker 5:You know, in my old days in Charlottesville, you know, Seaville, as we as we like to name it. No. But being humble about the fact that this is, of course, just a a kind of little moment here, a little field trip, I felt this is a space where you don't have to look super closely to understand how much of the crises in the world, and especially in this country of the past and the future, accumulate in little spaces, sometimes with little signs on it and mostly without signs on it. How we are not with the climate crisis. We are at the end of this illusion that we can live of resources of millennials before us and futures that haven't been there yet and claim that to be the miracle of economy and the miracle of the great countries, why we are kind of using muscles that aren't our own.
Speaker 5:That is the end of the illusion that it's a climate crisis. But in this place, in this space this year, what we see is that there are just so many more illusions that are getting cracks. The illusion of the history of a country, of what is a nation, of an identity, of equality, of progress, of inclusion, of access, of power, of who are our heroes, and who are heroes that are not always heroes, but always have different stories to them. The power of the stories we tell about ourselves. And I find it makes just so much sense that people lose their breath under the burden of all these illusions cracking in the same time.
Speaker 5:And among all of that, I find the murals you talked about, the little steps that are being taken at the universities and the towns, little people kind of doing little things and big things and so on and so forth. That is the beauty of these cracks. Right? We know how a wallflower works. It wouldn't work without a crack.
Speaker 5:And eventually, you know, it's not just a wallflower anymore, but it's something that builds that biological body that can actually tear down walls and create something else. And so I'm taking this idea. Or I'm taking the many, many illusions here with me that are struggling and that are maybe cracking, and I think many and many times for the good, for the better, that are, for all the good reasons, causing people to feel so unstable, causing communities to not quite know where they are, getting very hectic about putting cement everywhere and to manifesting everything, literally sometimes, and materially something, and sometimes just spiritually or so on, emotionally. And then I'm thinking about the cracks that you can see here and the beauty that comes from those cracks.
Speaker 2:Are there any more questions from the audience? Any more comments that that you'd like to share about climate action, climate justice here in Charlottesville?
Speaker 5:So
Speaker 2:before we close or as a closing, one of the things I would like to know is climate activism, climate justice work can be emotionally and physically draining.
Speaker 5:We can circumvented that question. Yes. It is very much. We can test yeah. We can testify on that.
Speaker 5:Yes.
Speaker 2:So one of the things that we talk about there's there's a meeting actually with the office of sustainability I think last night while we were doing the the film screening sort of about maintaining self care, sort of well-being, ensuring that you felt as though your power was still accessible as you continue to fight and as you continue to do this work. What do you do for fun?
Speaker 5:Can we make this a quick one? Yeah. I think we will go out and hang out with the trees and have a coffee.
Speaker 2:Good.
Speaker 5:And, yes, I think that's we try to be mindful of taking space, And maybe we do this straight away, if that's okay.
Speaker 2:Right now. Okay. Thank you very much.
Speaker 5:Thank you so much.
Speaker 1:Luisa Neubauer and Helena Marshall in conversation with members of the Charlottesville community moderated by Brendan O'Donnell, recorded 10/25/2024.
Speaker 2:You can read more about their visit to Charlottesville at pocacido.org, and Louisa even wrote about her takeaways from Charlottesville for a column in the German newspaper Tats, which you can find at taz.de.
Speaker 1:Louisa and Helena also participated the following week in Pocacido's Transatlantic Forum for Environmental and Climate Justice in Washington on the November 1, which is where our next podcast episode comes from.
Speaker 2:The third conversation in our series is with Sharon Levine, founder and executive director of Rise St. James, the faith based environmental justice organization standing up to the petrochemical industry in Louisiana's Cancer Alley.
Speaker 1:Until then, for Pocacito, I'm Max Grunig along with Brendan O'Donnell. Thanks for listening.