(Photo: imago images / Future Image)
Dusseldorf Bernd Ulrich and Luisa Neubauer – a couple that couldn’t be more different. One journalist and deputy editor-in-chief of the weekly newspaper “Die Zeit”, the other activist and figurehead of the German youth movement Fridays for Future.
While Ulrich at the age of 60 belongs to the so-called baby boomer generation, the 25-year-old Neubauer is just getting started. Exactly these two have now written a book together: “We still have the choice”.
The Bundestag election has already been decided, but that is not the election Ulrich and Neubauer are talking about in a dialogue on almost 240 pages. It is, how could it be otherwise, about the climate crisis. Anyone who scents a non-fiction book with the problems and solutions in the fight against global warming is far from it.
Rather, the conversation between the two protagonists reveals the cause of the problem: Ulrich and many of his generation thought that they had done enough against climate change with protests against nuclear power. But Neubauer holds up the mirror to him. Ignorance and love of individualism meet activism and anger for change. At least in theory.
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After all, Ulrich has blossomed into an eco-activist himself in recent years after his “Volvo phase”, i.e. a fundamentally ecologically conscious life with phased meat consumption, cars, too much clothing and air travel. A real‧ discussion, which one could certainly have expected in this constellation, does not take place. Ulrich and Neubauer agree on the fundamental questions. Opinions only differ slightly from time to time about the “how”. But in the end, that might not be the point.
Luisa Neubauer, Bernd Ulrich: We still have a choice.
Tropics
Stuttgart 2021
240 pages
18 euros
The two also talk about the climate and corona, causes and solutions and the state of the environment in general. But actually another point stands out much more: the definition of freedom. Personally and individually, socially and politically. Ulrich summarizes the groundbreaking judgment of the Federal Constitutional Court on the federal government’s lax climate protection with the words “Climate protection is protection of freedom”.
This is exactly what the judges had argued: the current government’s inadequate climate protection limits the freedoms and rights of future generations. In other words: the decades of inactivity of the baby boomer generation (Ulrich) restrict the future rights and freedoms of millennials (Neubauer). This is how a conversation unfolds between representatives of two generations – about perception and reality, past and present, always with the climate crisis in mind.
But what is really interesting are the perspectives of Ulrich and Neubauer, who sometimes see the same situation completely differently. While journalists like Ulrich grew up on the principle of Hanns Joachim Friedrichs: “You can recognize a good journalist by […] that he is not in common with a cause, not even with a good cause; that he is there everywhere, but never belongs, “the famous daily topic moderator once said.
Naomi Klaein, Rebecca Stefoff: How to change everything.
Hoffmann and Campe
Hamburg 2021
256 pages
18 euros
On the other hand, Neubauer demands basic climate training from the media, separate departments and the abolition of the “don’t-make-yourself-mantra”. In the end, this led to “that there is still a tendency to call climate journalists activist inside,” said Neubauer.
The argument between the two about the role of the media in combating the climate crisis is the only part of the book in which there is really a discussion. The fact that the journalistic mainstream made it possible to turn the climate crisis into what it is today, as Neubauer says, does not allow the deputy editor-in-chief of “Zeit” to sit on himself.
Ulrich, who disagrees with Neubauer only a little on most of the other topics, finally gives her an opposition here. And that’s just as well.
Climate protection as a question of social justice
Otherwise this dialogue between two perspectives from different decades would have turned out to be monotonous and harmonious. Because the reader learns a lot about Ulrich and Neubauer’s personal experiences, but then the two interlocutors exchange pages on the Merkel era, philosophize about the connections between the climate crisis and the emergence of the corona pandemic and recapitulate the emergence of the German Fridays for future movement.
All in all, really interesting thoughts and approaches arise again and again. Ulrich and Neubauer make an effort not to let the individual answers get out of hand, so that the conversation is entertaining almost most of the time. In the end, however, it is mostly a look back at the past. A socio-cultural observation of how then could become today. But outside of the last ten or twenty pages, not much about what the future looks like.
In “We still have a choice”, ignorance meets anger for change.
(Photo: ROPI)
For this it is better to use Naomi Klein’s “What to do now” afterwards. The Canadian journalist is one of the sharpest critics of neoliberal capitalism. Now she has teamed up with the youth book author Rebecca Stefoff to make the topic of climate change understandable for the younger generation.
And she succeeded in doing that. On almost 250 pages, the two authors explain why the global temperature is rising and who are causing the crisis. In doing so, they manage to translate the complicated context into a language suitable for young people without simplifying it.
Klein and Stefoff do not neglect any aspect and use the example of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans to make it clear that climate protection is also a question of social justice.
In 2005, it hit mainly the black residential areas of the city, where the state disaster control had completely failed. The reconstruction was then left to companies that built condominiums instead of cheaper socially expensive apartments. Former residents could no longer afford it.
A practical and understandable overview of the most important problems, those responsible and countermeasures is thus developed in nine chapters. In addition, areas marked in yellow present successful campaigns by young climate protectors.
It may not be a typical non-fiction book, but it is a thoroughly successful book to educate people about climate change. If you are looking for good arguments to get involved in climate protection, you will find it here. The authors provide you with a veritable tool kit for a better future. Written for a generation that will probably deal with this topic all their lives – whether they want it or not.
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