Sustainability scientist Maja Göpel sees nothing radical in the actions of climate protesters and says we can all help to save the planet.
No, it’s not just the planet heating up. It’s a particular word – “radical” – that gets one of Germany’s most influential environmentalists a little heated. “When you think about the tremendous costs of carrying on as usual, why do we use the term ‘radical’ for people who say we need to speed up the necessary changes?” Maja Göpel says.
Her indignation is in response to being asked about recent controversial court cases that have seen German climate change protesters given jail time for gluing themselves to traffic intersections.
“It’s actually radical to say we’re going to carry on taking these risks when we really are nearing a lot of environmental tipping points.”
Those tipping points include things like polar ice sheets collapsing or the demise of key biodiverse habitats such as the Amazonian rainforest. As Göpel, a political economist, sustainability researcher and co-founder of Scientists for Future, has previously pointed out, those changes will be irreversible and the future unpredictable.
According to the most recent report from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, we’re well on the way to these points of no return. That’s why the description of young environmentalists as “radical” annoys Göpel so much.
“All they’re asking for is for politicians to match their stated goals and ambitions on climate change with behaviour,” she says. “It’s that mismatch that really drives people to do those kinds of things.”
It’s also this kind of mismatch that begins Göpel’s bestselling book, Rethinking Our World: An Invitation to Rescue Our Future, first published in Germany in 2020 but just released in New Zealand. It sold more than 270,000 copies in Germany and was third on news magazine Der Spiegel’s annual best-seller list. It starts with a notorious 2019 incident at Canning Town train station in the UK, when environmental activists got on top of a train and unfurled a sign saying “Business as usual = death”. The train was prevented from leaving, and footage of angry commuters viciously beating one of the protesters after they dragged him off the train went viral.
“One side wanted to save the world, the other wanted to get to the office,” Göpel writes. “One side wanted to break with old habits, the other wanted to cling on to them. Although we must recognise that both sides were basically concerned for their future and that of their children, their concerns appeared to be mutually exclusive.”
And this is where Göpel, 46, now one of Germany’s best-known sustainability researchers, would like to intercede. Her book, she tells the Listener, is not a harrowing account of how the apocalypse kicks off or an instruction manual for picking up plastic at the beach. It is a far gentler thing – an “invitation” to start thinking differently.
“I’d like to invite you to take a closer look at the world ... to rediscover what is possible,” writes Göpel, who says she mainly seeks “to understand why the specific solutions that arise do so, and why some ideas become established in society while others do not.
“Democracy doesn’t mean that all you can do is wait for election day, or that you have to be a government or a corporation to make a change in the right direction,” she continues in the book. “Changing things will take a large number of people who really want to do so, and that means everybody counts.”
Actions to words
Göpel has been active in this area for about two decades now. By 2019, she was working with the German government’s Advisory Council on Global Change, tasked with analysing international environmental issues. But she had increasingly begun to question what progress was really being made.
“You can write more and more of these reports, but I noticed that unless someone gives them legs, gives them voice and a heart, and makes them known, they’re just going to end up in a drawer somewhere.”
It was also at this stage that Göpel helped found Scientists for Future to support the Fridays for Future protests being led by schoolchildren and students at the time.
“Senior politicians had come out and said they should all go back to school and leave this to the professionals. At this stage, we felt we had a responsibility to speak up – even though that’s not a typical role for a scientist.”
Scientists for Future’s first statement said: “The concerns of the young protesters are justified.” Nearly 27,000 German scientists signed the statement, and at the March 2019 press conference to launch it, Göpel came across as charismatic, succinct, well informed and also really rather annoyed, as she explained how environmental costs did not figure large enough in economic calculations.
The video of the press conference went viral, Göpel recalls, and suddenly she was in demand to appear on talk shows. Several publishers invited her to write it all down. The result was Rethinking Our World.
Göpel’s publishers insisted that the cover feature a portrait of her, and Göpel reluctantly agreed – but only on one condition.
“I said, ‘Okay – but then we need the subtitle to be an invitation.’ It has to be in that spirit because we’re on this journey together.
“We wanted to encourage people everywhere, to invite them to look beyond some of the most common and limiting narratives we always hear and to see that this is an agenda that’s important to them personally.”
That invitation is also extended to governments and businesses, Göpel adds.
Incorporating this kind of thinking into accounting and economics competes with the notion of “short-term financial returns” and the fiscal status quo, she says. But really, businesses need to be investing in reshaping supply chains or production methods now to avoid compromising future profitability. The idea that economic growth can be “decoupled” from environmental damage also needs to be questioned.
“But how is any politician going to say, ‘Okay, I’ll be the one pulling the plug [on growth]’?” she asks. “That is why I’m hoping for much more transparency about what the high costs of maintaining the status quo are.”
Existential change
As reviewers have previously pointed out, Göpel’s book doesn’t present any wildly novel ideas. Many of the theories have been around for years or decades. For example, the idea that there are limits to economic growth because the planet has finite resources and that technology won’t save us from the worst ravages of a heating planet. But she also explains how much of the current thinking about climate change – ideas that are often victim to siloed thinking – must be better connected.
As she has said in several keynote speeches, “We don’t have an environmental problem, we have a societal problem.”
In Göpel’s personal experience, just changing the way we think has been enough to elicit change. “I got so many emails,” she says of reactions to the book in Germany.
Some of her readers said they had quit their jobs. Others described adjustments they were making as teachers, designers or town councillors. One passionate fan bought 40 copies of the book and handed them out to all the senior executives they knew.
Göpel, who has visited New Zealand, believes this country has a “huge chance” to be a leader in this area because of what she sees as the more flexible mindset of many locals, especially when compared with her more bureaucratic homeland.
“I just wanted to encourage people to consider how we talk about solutions and ask questions about why things are being said the way they are.”
Obviously, that includes the R word. “Because if you find that radical,” Göpel concludes, “it’s because you’ve waited too long to do something.”
Rethinking Our World: An Invitation to Rescue Our Future, by Maja Göpel (Scribe, RRP $37).
