The climate policy of recent years is a failure to make progress. I think it’s understandable to show your frustration through actions. Nevertheless, I hope that these actions will lead to open debates that will enable us to take action.
“Can they also talk or are they just sticking?” one participant asked me half annoyed half amused after my keynote. This is the type of communication that these latter-generation leaders find appropriate and loud enough to get their cause heard. And basically we know: you cannot not communicate.
“But then why this kind of communication?” he asked further. “You can demonstrate like everyone else, walking down the street with banners and loudly proclaiming your opinion with a megaphone. Then why such a thing? Violence isn’t a solution, neither is criminal acts.” I thought about it.
Prof. Dr. Anabel Ternès heads the Berlin Institute for Sustainable Management and is the founder of several sustainable start-ups in the eHealth, digital education, alternative energies and mobility sectors, including HealthMedo, CoCarrier and GetYourWings. The futurologist is an author and keynote speaker.
Putting together a few facts makes me think:
I could continue the list. She can depress. That people communicate with these facts, because of the non-developments of the last years and decades, with actions, because they think that this is the only way they will be heard for their goal of climate protection, saving the world – I find that absolutely understandable.
What I sometimes hear: people only stick to the streets because they want to be famous – that’s a bizarre idea, dismisses the action and the people behind it and is anything but meeting eye to eye. It doesn’t take the actions and the messages behind them seriously. Where disregard or scolding leads to: more drastic actions, anger – and no communication that can solve something.
Why not an open debate, why not address your own fears and concerns? Think about alternative options together, join forces and become much stronger. Why label, thereby paving even more anger and the path to crime for members of the Last Generation?
“What great debates those were,” a man in his mid-70s said to me while we were both watching the current news on the screen on the wall in the waiting lounge. “There was still the newspaper Das Parlament and they had it sent to them because they valued the clear debates in the Bundestag so much. There is nothing more of that.”
Line Nagell Ylvisaker: “My world is melting: How the climate is transforming my village”, Hoffmann and Campe Verlag, 8.99 euros
Perhaps the most recent example of the Natural History Museum in Berlin is a way for clear, goal-oriented communication: it was only when activists stuck to a dinosaur model that the Natural History Museum became a place where people, nature and the environment meet history and modernity, a place of communication .
This is where activists meet with politicians and representatives of NGOs to discuss solutions, constructively, with each other, through talking to each other, personally, on an equal footing. We need more of that – and then move from talking to each other to acting together.
