Alle reden vom Krieg, wir reden vom Klima – Buchvorstellung und Gespräch mit Dr. Bernhard Kegel und Mara Kleine (FFF)

In the organizer's words:

In our series "Nothing makes sense except in the light of evolution", we naturally also look at the rolling climate catastrophe from an evolutionary perspective: over the last 12,000 years, oxygen-producing plants and breathing organisms maintained a stable carbon dioxide cycle, which guaranteed an equally stable climate. The Holocene, the home of human civilization. Then our fossil famine threw the planetary CO₂ balance out of kilter: In just 200 years, we also catapulted the CO₂ that primeval forests and primeval algae had filtered out of the Earth's atmosphere for hundreds of millions of years, now abruptly back into it. Over 80 % of this in the last 30 years. Currently, 40 gigatons too much CO₂ are being released back into the atmosphere every year. From the perspective of evolutionary deep time, this is like a CO₂ explosion.

We still lack the technology to get it back out of the atmosphere, although we are feverishly researching how to artificially mimic the miracle of photosynthesis. Until we perhaps succeed in doing so, large parts of our continents will be devastated and become uninhabitable for mammals. And this will happen in the foreseeable future. We have long since entered the sixth mass extinction, also known as defaunation: Over 1,000 animal species disappear every year. Humans now make up 35% of the earth's animal biomass. Our farm animals and pets make up 58%, or more than half, of all vertebrates. The proportion of wild animals on land and in the ocean has already shrunk to 5%.

We were smart enough to let nature's material cycles collapse, but are we smart enough to let them recover?

The solutions to the climate crisis are there: energy transition, heating transition, transportation transition. But unfortunately, implementation is stubbornly failing due to a lack of political will. With gas lobbyist and Economics Minister Katherina Reiche, many hard-won successes of the climate movement are currently being rolled back. What is needed now? Is there still reason for hope and if so, why, when and how?
We ask these questions to Dr. Bernhard Kegel, author of the book Mit Pflanzen die Welt retten - grüne Lösungen gegen den Klimawandel and Mara Kleine, who has been an activist with FRIDAYS FOR FUTURE since 2019. In conversation with Matthias Polte, Bernhard Kegel and Mara Kleine explore the possibilities that Kegel lists in his book and that the young generation of FRIDAYS FOR FUTURE is currently highlighting.