Germany: Are climate activists hurting their own cause?
Climate activists managed to piss off a lot of Berliners last week, said Marion van der Kraats and Verena Schmitt-Roschmann in the Berliner Morgenpost. The group Last Generation, which bills itself as a youth movement to save humanity from extinction, set up dozens of roadblocks during the morning rush hour, snarling traffic in the German capital just as most Berliners were trying to get to work. Some activists marched slowly in the middle of the street. Others plopped themselves down in busy intersections and glued—yes, glued—their hands to the asphalt. Angry motorists honked and yelled, some of them jumping out of their cars and trying to forcibly pull the protesters off the street. Provoking fury was, of course, the point. Blocking someone’s path awakens a “primal instinct to defend territory.” But is it productive? Berlin had to deploy hundreds of police officers to get the protesters off the roads. When solvents failed to dissolve the glue, officers actually chiseled holes into the asphalt to remove the activists. At least 200 people were arrested. Many thousands more were inconvenienced and angered. Worst of all, dozens of ambulances and fire engines were delayed in answering emergency calls.
This kind of stunt is certainly a way for “a small group to make a big impact,” said Birgit Baumann in Der Standard (Austria). But these so-called climate gluers have gone too far. The activists even cemented themselves to a track in a Formula E race last week. That display, needless to say, did not win racing fans to their cause. At this point, “even the Greens are rolling their eyes in annoyance.” Paralyzing an entire city just gives a good cause a bad name and paints environmentalists as “troublemakers” who “only make our already difficult daily lives harder.” Troublemakers, sure, said Jonas Schaible in Der Spiegel, but not terrorists. The backlash to this kind of activism has been “strikingly disproportionate.” Conservative German politicians have compared Last Generation members to the Taliban, to the terrorist Baader-Meinhof gang from the 1970s, and even—shockingly, in this country—to Nazis. The rhetoric is nothing short of hysterical, considering these kids are explicitly nonviolent and have hurt only public property, not people. Even worse is the vitriol coming from the inconvenienced commuters. Our reporters covering the Berlin protest heard many drivers calling out for violence against the youth blocking the roads, saying things like “Just run them over!” and “Rip their hands off the asphalt!” Sorry, which group is supposed to be the Nazis?
It’s easy to say that the activists are being counterproductive by alienating the people, said Johannes Schneider in Die Zeit, but in fact our daily lives do need to be disrupted. To avoid catastrophic global warming, “dramatic action is urgently required in every context, which also implies that society, and perhaps democracy as well, will have to change extremely, and extremely quickly.” Rather than demonizing activists, we should all ask ourselves: “Which side of history would you rather be on? Surely not on the side of those too stupid to understand the threat or too unscrupulous to face it.”