'The climate doesn't care how busy we are and what we're busy with — and whether we're fighting a pandemic at the moment,' says Luisa-Marie Neubauer, the 24-year-old student sometimes considered Germany's answer to Swedish activist Greta Thunberg.
Luisa-Marie Neubauer of Fridays for Future takes part in a demonstration in front of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin on June 2. The protest took place while government leaders discussed economic stimulus and other strategies in the fight against the coronavirus.Kay Nietfeld/picture alliance via Getty Images
But since the coronavirus pandemic, Fridays for Future had to cancel mass mobilizations and move most of its campaigning online. Now the movement is taking careful steps to retake the public sphere.during the shutdown, economies are beginning to rev up again. Activists are pressing for recovery strategies to take into account social and environmental concerns.
We have to make the climate a priority again. That's what we as activists have to fight for. This is only possible if we fight the coronavirus efficiently, fairly and caringly — as quickly as possible.The nature of the coronavirus crisis is completely different from the climate crisis. But you can also draw wrong conclusions from the coronavirus. We did not act in January, but we did so in March and thereby prevented the worst. We cannot act on the climate crisis once it is here — that would be too late. The need for preventive politics is essential for climate protection.
This is and was not just a problem for Fridays for Future, but for democracies in general: How can you get public attention, how can you fight injustices if you don't want to put others at risk? It makes me very hopeful that the Black Lives Matter protests did not turn out to be superspreader events and that people wore face masks. We are also starting to protest on a very small scale here, but we are being very careful, because the coronavirus crisis is not over.
We need sustainable, just and transformative coronavirus policies that take our emissions budget and the ecological costs into account. We must ensure the massive funds spent to tackle this crisis do not lead to an acceleration of other crises, especially the climate crisis.
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