You’re glued to the highway, believing that the end of the world is imminent. Gunnar Schupelius is reminded of the time 40 years ago when radical environmentalists predicted the end of mankind.
Last week, demonstrators blocked traffic on the city freeway. Some of them glued their palms to the pavement with superglue. Specialists from the police had to loosen the skin from the asphalt with olive oil and a scalpel. There were hours of traffic jams.
The blockers belong to the “Fridays for Future” movement and call themselves “Uprising of the Last Generation”. They fight against climate change, “against the irreversible destruction of our livelihoods,” as they write on their website (lastgeneration.de).
You are young and you see the end of the world coming. In an interview with the daily newspaper “Die Welt”, the 24-year-old climate activist Carla Hinrichs, who actually wanted to study law, says that she lies in bed at night and cries because she is afraid that her family will die, “that my grandmother will die in the summer can’t go out anymore because it’s too hot for them”.
She believes she needs to wake up everyone else who doesn’t understand that climate change means the end of life on this planet.
I can understand Carla Hinrichs and her colleagues very well. Because 40 years ago it was very similar. I was young then and fought with many others against the ecological catastrophe.
We weren’t afraid of global warming, but we were afraid of dying forests, pollution of rivers and seas, and the ozone hole in the atmosphere.
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We, too, referred to scientific findings which, in our opinion, led to no other conclusion than that the earth’s population would be wiped out. The famous Global 2000 study, for example, predicted that by the year 2000 there would be virtually no potable water. So we went out into the street to wake up the others.
We blocked nuclear power plants to draw attention to imminent “nuclear death”, or coal-fired power plants because of the emissions, or oil-fired power plants because we wanted “no blood for oil”, i.e. to prevent a war on raw materials in the Middle East. We didn’t think about where electricity and heat should actually come from.
We fought the chemical industry because they dumped dilute acid in the sea and the auto industry because they built cars. The women among us swore never to put a child into this dying world, they couldn’t be responsible for that.
That’s how it was in 1984. Yes, we were upright and honest and convinced that we were the last generation that could turn things around.
But things turned out differently. The air is almost as clean today as it was before industrialization, you can swim in the river, and despite the growing world population, the number of starving people has more than halved. And all through technical innovation. Our blockades did not contribute to this. That’s how you can go wrong.
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