'Meat is stupid': Covid-19 and the co-development of climate activism.

Abstract

‘Meat is stupid’ (Fleisch ist doof, fig.1) was my favourite protest sign at a Fridays for Future demonstration in April 2019, in Lower Saxony in the north of Germany. In retrospect, the slogan anticipated the outbreak of the Covid‐ 19 virus among the workers in the regional slaughterhouses the following year. Covid‐ 19 also interrupted my research about co‐ developing local climate activism, with a special focus on narratives of change as the missing link between science and society (Krauß and Bremer 2020). Anthropologists like developing stories and are well equipped to follow the process of how climate change turns from a global matter of fact into a locally meaningful matter of concern (Callison 2014). ‘Meat is stupid’ contains such a narrative of change, which is easily dismissed as a high school student joke, but it is much more than that. At the end of the Fridays for Future demonstration, I met an activist of an environmental NGO who had attended a public climate workshop which I had previously held in a nearby coastal village. We spontaneously decided to organise another workshop, to transform the spirit of the demonstration into sustainable civic activity. In September 2019, the event, dubbed Klimamarkt (climate market), took place in an old farmhouse in Westerstede in the Ammerland district, with about 60 people attending. We asked the participants to imagine a climate‐ friendly future for the Ammerland. What does it take to get there, what is urgently needed, what exactly has to change? We roughly ordered the contributions into categories such as health, nutrition, land use, building, mobility, water, energy and construction. For each of these categories, working groups were organised that met in the following weeks. Our intention was to stage a follow‐ up workshop in spring 2020, where the results should be discussed with local politicians and administrators. But suddenly, the outbreak of Covid‐ 19 impeded all public activities, and we had to postpone the workshop. In Germany and elsewhere, new forms of civic climate activities are urgently needed. As a matter of fact, technologies of climate governance already shape the coastal landscape with its wind turbines, the new climate‐ proof dykes and biogas tanks, and climate increasingly pervades public administration and political rhetoric. But while there are hardly any climate sceptics in this coastal area, the hidden climate costs of our way of life are still poorly represented in politics. As I learned during my fieldwork, these repressed climate issues are increasingly addressed by concerned citizens at the local level, in everyday conversations and daily routines. This is one of the reasons why Fridays for Future is such a success story, and it was the starting point for our initiative to co‐ develop new forms of climate activism with coastal dwellers.