The emergence of Germany’s decolonial climate movement

This article The emergence of Germany’s decolonial climate movement was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Over the last few years, in response to the mostly white — and what has been called neo-colonial — German climate justice groups, a new movement has emerged. It’s based on the concept that there can be no climate justice without decolonization, and even questions whether the climate should be central in the justice discourse at all.

This movement has accelerated since October last year when the genocide in Gaza began. Mainstream climate groups, like much of the German left, are strongly pro-Israel. This created a rift within these groups, as pro-Palestine members, many of whom are people of color, left to form or join groups with decoloniality at their core.

Groups specifically made up of Black, Indigenous and people of color, or BIPOC, have grown, such as BIPOC 4 Future, Debt for Climate and Klima4Palestina. An alternative anti-colonial climate strike now takes place on the same day as the Fridays 4 Future climate strike, and there are climate justice camps focusing on anti-colonialism.

So what does decolonial climate justice really mean and what is being done in Germany to fight for it?

Tatu Hey, a member of Climate Justice Berlin, or CJB, an intersectional climate and environmental justice collective founded in Berlin, says that climate justice is inherently decolonial. Climate justice is seen through the lens of people in the Global South fighting colonial struggles, be this in the form of extractivism, continuation of colonial gender dynamics, land struggles or educational struggles.

“For me, climate justice defines the whole fight to deconstruct or break down the colonial ethic — the perception of control, hierarchies, oppression, competition and mix of capitalism, which are destroying our homes, earth and relations between humans, and between humans and non-human species,” Hey said. “Climate justice means economic justice, gender justice, queer justice. Everything is interconnected and without the one we can’t reach the other.”

Hey says that the mainstream climate movement in Germany is “bourgeois,” made up of liberal groups begging the government, which is itself the cause of climate destruction, to change its policies. Instead, they should be demanding and fighting for true decolonial climate justice processes.

She gives the example of how long these groups have been silent about the genocide in Gaza, and how long it took them to publicly acknowledge the murder of George Floyd by police in the United States.

She blames this on a lack of understanding that racial injustice is a form of climate injustice, just like housing and mobility injustices.

Since CJB started in 2020, it has tried to focus on shortcomings of the white German climate movement. They have produced resources in the German language which talk about, for example, environmental racism, and breaking the narrative of environmental protection to focus on environmental and climate justice. It also places importance on “embracing care in struggles,” Hey said.

In September, the BIPOC Climate Justice Network held its second annual summit outside of Berlin.

The camp was attended by around 60 people over three days, individuals and activists from local and international groups including from Colombia, Sudan, Guatemala and Brazil, creating links and learning about each other’s struggles. During the camp, activists attended panel discussions, strategy workshops and inter-movement working sessions, and care spaces and a room in memorial of activists who had passed away were made available.

One of the members of the network, Minerva Figueroa says the group realized the camp was necessary after attending mainstream climate camps in Germany for several years.

“There were a lot of moments where I didn’t feel I had the space to be who I am, to stand up for what I want to stand up for and convey the voices I listened to back home,” Figueroa said. “[This] was a feeling shared by many people of color in these camps.”

White German groups lack anti-racist education, she says, and she had to be exposed to a lot of “white saviorism.” So she decided to put her efforts elsewhere and — with the BIPOC Climate Justice Network — start a camp of their own.

“At the camp, we didn’t have to be token POCs on a panel and negotiate topics and bargain to talk about what we found important,” she said. “We could just be ourselves and talk about what we are interested in and connect our struggles. We just felt freer for a little while.”

Figueroa says the growing decolonial climate movement in Germany can be attributed to the expanding community of migrants and people of color building up these movements.

To her, climate justice means to rethink the paradigm of how we think, interact, talk to each other and other living beings, as well as our relationships to water, the earth and ecosystems.

Making the movement anti-colonial means bringing social justice, gender justice and racial justice into the fight, she says. We need to understand that capitalism, racism and patriarchy are “the standing pillars of the systems that oppress us. Until we really take down all of them, we are not really free.”

Another group working on decolonial climate justice in Germany is the Hamburg-based Abya Yala Anticolonial. This group is made up of Latin American activists who have moved to Germany, and according to their Instagram page, “continue the fight against the colonial order.”

“We are not following white thinkers. We are focusing on building our political understanding not through the books of Europeans but by the experiences of our territories,” said Camilo Arrieta, a member from Colombia. “Our work is to come together and generate more networks and relationships with other collectives and perspectives, sit with other people and discuss topics. When we discuss with people of other backgrounds, we complete our understanding of the world not based on a European agenda or what they impose as reality.”

The discussions bring together voices from the Global South — usually environmental activists — to talk about resistance, do care work and try to mobilize people.

The group also holds demonstrations, like the last one, held on Oct. 12, a day it calls the Day of Decolonial Resistance. This day, also known as Indigenous Peoples’ Day, or Day of Indigenous Resistance, is mainly commemorated in Abya Yala (the term used by Indigenous peoples to refer to the United States, Latin America and the Caribbean). The demonstration walked to, and stopped to hold speeches at streets, buildings and statues with colonial names.

Arrieta believes that the decolonial climate movement in Berlin is growing, but slowly and with baby steps. It is still at the point where its critiques and perspectives on power imbalances are not always heard by the mainstream climate movement.

One critique is that the main topic on the agenda should not be climate justice, but environmental justice, of which the climate forms only one part.

“In our territories in the Global South, our people are yelling everyday about how they are dying, being displaced, their waters and lands polluted, but all everyone talks about is the climate,” Arrieta said. “In order to decolonize ourselves, we need to look beyond the European climate agenda, because that just gives them the opportunity to keep producing.”

Arrieta has seen some advancements in Germany. More and more groups are beginning to attach a decolonial idea to their discussions and agendas, which, when seen through a non-European lens is very powerful in understanding the world.

“It is crucial that the conversation of decoloniality is based on voices from the Global South and the lens of the people that have been colonized,” Arrieta added. “If the Global North colonizes the discourse, then we will lose. But as more Europeans listen to a non-European narrative, there is an opening for them to understand that decolonial dynamics are the basis of everything.”

After several years of attempting to create a decolonial climate movement in Germany, Hey has an idea of what a just future will look like. “My vision of a just climate future is a world which is based on reciprocity, care, solidarity, community,” Hey explained, “where we have a mode of production that produces things needed by the people — where people and workers decide what should be produced, there are no rich people, not this so-called democracy we have now. We will build a whole new understanding of living together.”

This article The emergence of Germany’s decolonial climate movement was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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Source: https://wagingnonviolence.org/2024/11/the-emergence-of-german-decolonial-climate-movement/