An Utopia in the Dystopian World
How Green Life is Realized in Climate Camps
We often view climate camps as where direct action takes place. However, the idea of politics by practice is also rooted inside the camp, and through it a more sustainable alternative lifestyle is demonstrated.
Stopping the coal mining railroad. Blocking the entrance of a coal power plant. Occupying a oil transport pipeline. These are the most common scenes you might find on the news about climate camps in Europe.
Back in Taiwan, I have attended a very different form of climate camp, one that focuses more on training than real action. So when I participated some of these camps this year in Germany, I did expect to experience something completely different.
In some sense I did get what I expected, but not just the more active part involved during the camp.
Frankly speaking, what amazed me more was not the splendid actions that made news headline, but how the camps themselves were organized in accordance with the sustainable alternative the participants asked for.
Normal though it seems here in Europe, not all environment events I attended in Taiwan made the same attempt for self consistency (for reasons sometimes not entirely due to lack of awareness).
So, how did these climate camps set up examples of sustainable alternatives by practicing them in real life? Below were a few of which I found most interesting.
As a student in renewable energy, the power supply of the camp first caught my attention. The climate camp at Leipzig region was in the middle of a large farmland with plenty of land to use, and since it was also during high summer, solar panels plus storage systems became a natural choice for the camp. The IT group built up the system on its own, and though it was far from perfect, it did supply most electricity demand during camp.
The toilets and sanitation system in the camps also worth mentioning. In Leipzig region, all the toilet were dry toilets. Disposal were covered with sawdust, and later collected for fertilization and biogas. The detergent was of course biodegradable.
Sanitation was a big issue there because dry toilets were more vulnerable to disease transmission if hygiene was not kept well. This meant strict hygiene rules were implemented at the sink and the toilet. It was also an impressive thing to see how these rules were carried out autonomously and how the cleaning shift was voluntarily formed.
Another equivalently impressive thing I observed during the climate camps was the logistics of the event.
When we held events with similar scale in Taiwan, wasted plastic or paper cups and tableware would be inevitable. Though reusable cups and tableware are now also the trend in Taiwan, they are still not so common even in environment events.
This is why I think the achievement in the climate camps that all cups and tableware were reusable is still something deserving admiration. How the cups and tableware are deployed and later washed was, like the cleaning shift of the toilets, also something very impressive.
(The drinks were also contained in reusable bottles, but this is already a very common practice in Germany, so I was less astonished.)
The last thing I found very impressive was the diet and how meals were served during the camps.
It is common, perhaps even basic standard to go for vegan diet in the environment circles of Europe. The same cannot be said to be true in Taiwan; personal diet is not a strong emphasis (yet) in the environment networks there. I myself struggled a year or so to become a vegetarian before arriving Germany.
But the camp did far more from just providing vegan diet. It provided local, organic, sometimes even homemade food. It was also a very pleasant thing to see people donating voluntarily and letting people who haven’t eaten yet get the food first.
All in all, the climate camps in Europe showed a sustainable alternative that is self consistent and validated through practice. It demonstrated a very different politics which people around the world should seriously consider.
To make such utopia a everyday norm is of course too far a dream, but we can consider a different way of organizing large scale events from now on.
More detailed intro of the camps can be seen in:
