The Doom-Ultras are back
A four-part story about the narratives emerging from the latest climate activist civil disobedience acts.
What kills the polar bears will kill Fred at some point as well.
“I’m not gonna grow old.“ Fred from Extinction Rebellion repeatedly drops this sentence in our conversation.
“What’s that about, you assume you will die soon?
“Oh, that’s too deep, that’s too personal of a question,“ Fred leaves me wondering if dying of climate crisis is too personal of a thing to him.
1. Markus, the german tv-host
There is a German TV host, I can’t get out of my mind.
It’s the words he spoke while interviewing a 20-year-old climate activist from The Last Generation, a climate movement that has made worldwide headlines with their radical acts of civil disobedience.
“You are here with us, a well-spoken, intelligent young woman, yet you persistently play the apocalypse’s advocate. And I keep wondering, why don’t you find comfort in art, but instead throw smashed potatoes at it? Art is a beautiful thing, it doesn’t demand a further explanation, it just is. Art is our heritage, it’s what will outlast human beings. You are not correct, in saying future floods will take it. You are 20, you are supposed to be optimistic. You should have trust in us as human beings and our ability to adapt. The history of our evolution is one of adaptation to hostile environments.“
Why
does
art
not
comfort
you?
Sir, as a kind of well-spoken, soon-to-be 28-year-old woman, I wonder, can optimism help me to grow a shell and gills quicker? Can you lead me to the evolutionary fast lane before the climate apocalypse makes its earth-shattering entry into my life?
It just hits too close to home. It’s been two weeks since the interview has been broadcasted and I still remember the underlying narratives, like subtitles beneath his words: — respect your heritage! — anger is ugly, art is beautiful — youthfulness equals optimism — the triumph of the fittest — the art crafting superhuman- is as inevitable as a climate catastrophe.
I find it hard to believe Markus finds a lot of comfort in art while withholding these cynical beliefs.
And I resent him for using art in his argument.
But there is another kind of undercurrent or subtext to his words, if you listen more carefully, he seems to be asking:
Why are you in such a hurry to reach the apocalypse? Would you please stop worshipping doom and get back to the beautiful things?
Honestly, get a grip, Markus, these kids are having a completely normal and healthy reaction to an emergent crisis.
The Last Generation moved away from climate action in the form of legal protesting and practice (illegal) civil disobedience, targeting critical infrastructure by glueing themselves to busy highways and inviting jail time or financial repressions in order to draw attention to their cause. Civil disobedience seems to make Markus uncomfortable, it manifests an urgency he might not want to feel yet. As long as the climate impacts are relatively moderate, moderate responses are welcomed.
2. The Fish-Hero
I have a lot of love for art
and I still think Markus’ argument is nonsense.
So, what I can do is write a piece that offers solace in the face of the climate crisis — but, not now, not today
Also, other people have done it recently, way better than I could, as exemplified by writer Yazan Mehlem and director Eunsoon Jung in their most recent play Searching for Uimi, in which they do offer some comforting solution to the climate crisis: The appearance of a miraculous fish, cat-walking dramatically into the building on two legs, somehow equipped to clean the ocean from all clutter, carrying his golden head with pride, shaking his hips to folkloristic music.
I laughed to the point of involuntary snorting. I fully lost it, perhaps, because I felt slightly exposed. As a writer I put a lot of emphasis on the *-*IMAGINATION*-*, imagining different futures, imagining non-patriarchal heroes and narrative-shifting story worlds.
I too could have come up with this sassy fish, a hero emerging from the dying sea to teach humankind how to solve the crisis — and worst of it all, in contrast to the makers of this play, I would have meant it unironically. A climate parable. An optimistic contribution to solving the climate crisis by me, the youthful artist. Truth is, one of the writers of this play had been a refugee at one point in their life. They had been forced into survival mode. When asked during the play if they were okay with others (German actors) impersonating their story on stage, they said it wouldn’t bother them, because anyone could become a refugee at any time.
Plays and paintings are fleeting things when the emergent climate crisis increasingly breaks biography and redirects people’s life.
“I can show you places the floods will never reach, like the Dolomites, an Italian mountain chain. We can store all of our art there,” Markus, the tv-host suggests towards the end of the show.
How much art can fit in one mountain chain though?
3. The mean girl
“It’s just not sexy to glue yourself to the street,” a student attending class with me at film school emanates the mean-girl trope.
“It’s just elitist and moralising of them,” she continues “to push their ideology. Most people who tend to right-wing opinions harm the environment less than those liberal activists,“ another student added. The class was called Psychology for Filmmakers — I know, I see the irony. Reactionary opinions are coming in strongly lately. This regression to traditional values and flirtation with reactionary beliefs looks down upon the sort of civil disobedience climate activist practice. Everyone in this room I disagree with is in their 20s, which makes the climate crisis less of a generational divide, but more one of those who wish to regress and those who want to transform. It’s oversimplified, but this was the sentiment I took back home from class with me on this day when I stumbled over a headline in the subway:
Die Untergangs-Ultras sind zurück“ (The Doom-Ultras are back)
Why do they make The Last Generation sound like a post-punk band or like biblical prophets haunting the streets of Berlin?
Mean girl, tv-host and subway headline seem to share the perception of the apocalypse being merely a narrative created and imposed upon us- which “degrades“ people like Fred from Just Stop Oil to tale-tellers.
3.1 Fred is not a terrorist
I’m grateful for being in the position of imagining things and being paid for it, but if I praise the actions of my fictional characters if the storylines I script are driven by action and constant transformation, why not praise real-life climate activists taking radical action?
What does it mean to be radical? And how does it differ from being an extremist? This is a question that I need to be answered, and for this, I went to Fred, the same guy who will die like a polar bear, who also recently took part in the environmental activist group Just Stop Oil, leading non-violent direct action and civil disobedience. He prefers to appear here under a pseudonym.
“My activism never felt radical to me. And it will be non-violent until the end, whatever the end means. I do feel subversive, especially the sneaky time before a protest starts. I’m aware that if there are only a few thousand people doing Last Generation in Germany and I’m in that sphere, I can be considered radical in that sense, but I do think it’s a pretty moderate response to what is happening in the global south,“ Fred reckons. “When I hear the phrase “I can’t wait for ecoterrorism to be a thing“ it usually comes from people who would rather do nothing in the present and just wait for things to get really bad. It angers me so much”, Fred adds.
The Last Generation has been compared relentlessly to the first members of the 70s leftwing-terrorist group, by politicians in parliament, in the news and initially by Alexander Straßener, who set the tone for this speculation. Straßner is well-known for his investigative research on RAF, a West-German far-left Marxist guerilla group in the 70s: The third and last generation of RAF, was thought by many to only be a phantom, constructed by the authorities to justify their own intelligence actions. Straßners’ primary motivation was to counteract this conspiracy theory of a phantom and to assist the authorities’ counterterrorism measures. According to him, the Last Generation resembles a cult with its absolute claim on truth and entitlement to speak for a whole generation.
I’m all for debunking harmful conspiracy myths back in the 70s, but framing someone like Fred as a terrorist should have not made it into the 2020s.
4. Zoe has glue on her skin
“There is nothing radical about stopping traffic for 20 minutes, nothing radical about glueing myself to a busy highway,” says Zoe, climate activist and member of The Last Generation. “We usually wait for the police to arrive and then quickly glue our hands to the ground. The police forces are obliged to protect us from violence inflicted by other civilians, especially the drivers stuck in traffic jams due to us blocking the street,” Zoe takes me through the steps of their street blocking. The police use culinary oil to remove their skin from the pavement.
I want to ask Zoe if her hands smell of sunflower oil.
“I understand the driver’s anger and frustration”, Zoe admits. They can get really worked up. But the small disruption we create is nothing compared with the future fatalities caused by natural disasters,“ Zoe adds.
The image in my mind is of a future where people shout at a huge wave of wastewater rising up from the river to the highway, telling it to grow up and get a real job.
And then she says something, she must have said plenty of times, there is an emphasis on her words, which might have been twisted before by others: “If the majority of people don’t get behind what I’m doing, sooner or later I will stop. I can say, in the broadest sense, that the government is inflicting structural violence by not acting accordingly to the climate crisis, but I would never react with violence to their lack of action. At the same time, I don’t believe in civil disobedience solely working when it’s a symbolic act. We want to change but we want to work with the tools of the current democratic system. There is no time to establish a new system.”
Symbolism is where art is traditionally located and exhausts itself, it mirrors the system without participating in it. Art is an outsider, that is why we love it and why we romanticize the artists who reside outside of the system.
The way Zoe imagines it, (civil) disobedience is another word for participation.
Climate-Crisis is not a stranger to us, not a far future apocalyptic event to be afraid of, we are already familiar with it, it’s so close that it distracts us from the thought of it. A call for radical action is also a call for radical acknowledgement of its existence in our lives and emotional frameworks.
