How to turn climate anxiety into action (with Luisa Neubauer) (re-release)
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You're listening to How to Be a Better Human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy, and last week we aired our first episode of season five of the show.

But in the time since we taped that episode, the city where I live, Los Angeles, has suffered multiple devastating fires. It's a crisis that is ongoing as I'm recording this. And in fact, if my audio sounds a little different than it normally does, it's because I'm recording this from outside the city in an Airbnb while we figure out if it is safe to return. Right now, I'm sitting in a little blanket fort that I made.

But it's a very surreal feeling because I'm both so grateful and I feel so lucky that my family and everyone who works on this show is safe and that we haven't lost our homes. But also knowing at the same time that so many people have, the scale of the destruction is just almost impossible to wrap my head around.

You know, it's still unclear what caused these fires here in Los Angeles and what forces made them as destructive as they've been. But as I'm recording this, I feel very acutely the power and the unpredictability of Mother Nature. And across the globe, shifting climate patterns and extreme weather events are only making the world even more unpredictable. Which is why I feel like this episode that we're going to play today, an episode from the very first season of How to Be a Better Human, actually makes a lot of sense to re-air this week.

This episode is a conversation with Louisa Neubauer, who's a young German woman who helped catalyze a global intergenerational movement called Fridays for Future. And Fridays for Future demanded action on climate change. And we originally recorded this conversation back in 2020, but I have thought about it many times since then. I feel like it's only gotten more relevant. And one thing that I keep coming back to when I think about Louisa is how relentless she is about making sure that everyone sees how this movement affects them personally.

And another thing that I come back to a lot is the way that she focuses so much on systems rather than individuals. She's so much more interested in big systemic change than on shaming individuals for their day-to-day actions. And here's what Louisa had to say about that in her 2019 TEDx talk. We need to drastically reframe our understanding of a climate activist, our understanding of who can be the answer to this.

A climate activist isn't that one person that's read every single study and is now spending every afternoon handing out leaflets about vegetarianism in shopping halls. No, a climate activist can be everyone.

Everyone who wants to join a movement of those who intend to grow old on a planet that prioritizes protection of natural environments and happiness and health for the many over the destruction of the climate and the wrecking of the planet for the profits of the few. I need you to get out of that zone of convenience, away from a business as usual that has no tomorrow.

All of you here, you are either a friend or a family member, you are a worker, a colleague, a student, a teacher or in many cases, a voter. All of this comes along with a responsibility that this crisis requires you to grow up to. Leaving the dome of convenience works best when you join forces.

One person asking for inconvenient change is mostly inconvenient. Two, five, ten, one hundred people asking for inconvenient change are hard to ignore. The more you are, the harder it gets for people to justify a system that has no future. Power is not something that you either have or don't have. Power is something you either take or leave to others, and it grows once you share it. And this is probably

Okay. Are you fired up? I am so fired up. I am ready to take myself seriously. So how do we make use of our collective power?

How do we change these systems? How do we save our planet and our species from complete annihilation? Those are the answers we are going to try and get from Louisa Neubauer today. No pressure at all. But first, an ad. At Verizon, anyone can trade in their old phone for a new one on us with Unlimited Ultimate. Which means everyone in your family could get a new phone and stay on your family plan, keeping you close. Hey mom, you seen my toothbrush? I'm done with it.

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Take the quiz at ilmakiage.com slash quiz. That's I-L-M-A-K-I-A-G-E dot com slash quiz. We're back. Today's episode is all about climate activism. Before the break, we heard a bit of Louisa Neubauer's talk. And now we've got her here live to follow up on how anyone and everyone, yes, even you and even me, can play an active role.

I feel like for a long time, there's been this sense of like, if you want to help the environment, it's all things that you are doing wrong. Like you need to take shorter showers. You need to recycle more. You need to change where you buy things. And all of those are important, like you said. But I think that it kind of shifts responsibility away from big corporations and from governments and from like these big institutional polluters that are actually making a huge impact.

Yeah, absolutely.

You know, actually, it's something that is as soon as you think about it, it's very obvious. You know, you can tell people to cycle more often, but they won't do it unless there's a good cycling infrastructure. And suddenly we're on a systemic stage.

And suddenly it's about the politics behind it, the politics who are working in favor of automobile lobbyists and not in favor of cyclists, for instance. That's a very paradoxical situation that is in. And at the same time, 100 companies are causing 71% of emissions. That is where we are at. There's a disbalance between the...

magnitude of the problems we are facing. So, you know, just opening up yourself to the reality we're facing through this crisis is kind of overwhelming and just absorbing the facts and the science that's tough. It takes energy from you.

But at the same time, we don't have that many answers on how to deal with that. So we are really good in communicating natural science, but we are rubbish in social science. So what does it do to your mind, to your body, to your understanding, to your understanding of life and your meaning of life?

And I think it's really that second part. So what is the appropriate answer to the problems we are facing and how do we communicate that to people? And going on to people and say, hey, we are in an existential crisis and it's complex and it's devastating. And now go and buy tofu. That doesn't make sense and it doesn't level up. And people know that. That's why they're so critical about this. And there's good reason for that. Yeah, it's funny. It's like if you were trying to tell people

that they had to be more cautious when they buy children's toys so that some of their toys weren't completely filled with poison that would kill the child. You would say like, no, no, no, that shouldn't be on what toy I choose to buy. That should just be that the poison filled toy is illegal. We shouldn't sell the poison filled toy anymore. It's kind of the exact same thing here. So for you personally, what was the turning point where you personally said, like, I have to be an activist. I have to actually take this on.

So oftentimes when I'm being asked this question, I think people kind of expect this like really big report that I once read. And it said in there that my future is going to be rubbish on a climate crisis planet. And I said, no, I didn't want that. And then I woke up the next morning and I went out on the streets and I had this poster board with me and I became a climate activist. Okay, you're telling me it's not going to be that? That's not, sorry. Sorry to spoil it here, but that's not what happened. I'm very disappointed. That was exactly what I was hoping for.

No, it's actually, I think it's not a turning point, but it's a turning process we're talking about. And in this process, one aspect of this process is definitely its knowledge about what's going on. So many people do understand that there's a climate crisis, but that's not enough because we know about many things that go kind of wrong in the world and yet we don't really feel like it's our place to fight that.

and to change that. So there's a second aspect to that, and it has to do with understanding how bad it is. So being able to differ between a crisis that we live through and that just occurs in politics and the climate crisis, which is much more of a fundamental crisis we are in.

you know, understanding how bad it is really, what the state is we're in, how many species are dying every day, how dangerous this is getting for us, understanding it's not a climate crisis, it's a crisis of humanity. You know, the climate will be fine eventually. It's just a question of how much human will be in there still. And one other really important aspect to this turning process is understanding there's no plan to change that. You know, we're in a man-made crisis and yet we act like

We can't change it. Like humanity cannot change it anymore, which is obviously paradox, which doesn't add up. We can't accept a crisis as man-made, as human-made at the same time as we deny our human ability to turn it around. But that's effectively what we're doing right now. And I think eventually, however, we need to, in this process, the moment that I think

changed my way of thinking about the climate crisis is when I understood that nobody else will do this for us, that it is up to us effectively. There is no government in the world, or at least very, very few governments in the world that have a reasonable plan to fight for 1.5 degrees, like to limit the

global warming to 1.5. So the real question is, like, if we're in a crisis, but nobody is acting like we're in a crisis, who is going to make this change that we need? And that is the point where I was like, okay, you know what? I never wanted to become a climate activist. And I don't feel like I'm the right person for that. But, you know, considering that, obviously, people are needed, everyone is needed, I'm needed too. And I will just do this now.

And that is what changed it for me. Yeah. Well, so I imagine that for many people who are listening and for myself, too, sometimes we have that same feeling of like, this is really important, but I'm maybe not the right person for this. I don't know how to be the leader, right? There's only one Greta Thunberg. There's only one Louisa Neubauer. So what about for the rest of us? How do we become climate activists? How do we actually make a difference in this if we don't feel like maybe we're

Yeah.

That's terrible. But this is the moment, you know, when you're awake in bed and you think like, oh my God, what did I get into? And then you think about like, can I still get out of it? And you just wish this day would pass and you wouldn't have to think about it twice. That very moment, that is what it feels like when you leave your comfort zone.

The good news here is there is no silver bullet. And this is so good. There's not one thing and I'm not going to give you a list of three things that everyone can do. I'm so sorry. Because there is no such thing because people are, you know, we are all unique and we all have something different to offer. Sometimes, you know, it is...

organizing and going on strikes. I think actually going on strikes is something, at least when there's no pandemic, you know, that's pretty much suitable for lots of people. But sometimes for people, it's just, you know, they work in an institution and then suddenly start thinking about what kind of institution am I working in? Are we on track to Paris? There are people who are doing photography. So are you taking photos of activists so they can be shared around the world to inspire others?

There are people who work with industries who are, you know, denying the climate crisis. So are you telling them the truth of what we are in and what they're causing there? So there are just like one trillion different things that, you know, people can give to this, that people can add to this crisis management that we need. Yeah, I think and I think that even if

One of the things that you say in your talk that I find really resonates with me is like, even if you don't have a specific concrete skill, right? It's always also about learning. Like, I learned to be a climate activist. I had no idea how to register a strike somewhere or to organize a microphone or those things. You know, I know now more about...

the electric infrastructure in central Berlin than I ever thought I would because I know where to plug a microphone that is something I learned because I had to so I think it's also you know when we think about how can we you know deal with this crisis how can we become a climate activist we think a lot about the status quo so what am I now and what can I do about it but we

We rarely think about who will I be, who am I becoming in this, and what does it offer to me, what else is there that I can learn and pass on. Yeah, it's beautiful. It's also characterizing the climate crisis in such a matching way. So the climate crisis...

it easily isolates. So you suddenly find yourself in the supermarket and you just desperately want to buy something that's not really harmful for the planet. And you understand it's really difficult to find. It's possibly impossible to finance. And then you kind of go home and you think about all the other products that are being bought by someone else and you feel like I'm not making a difference here because the plastic is up in the ocean anyhow. The plastic is being produced anyhow whether I buy it or not.

And that's isolating and it's depressing the experience of things over and over again. Yet when you're on those strikes, when you're on a climate strike or on a mass demonstration that is really demanding political powers to act accordingly, it matches somehow. It's turning this collective crisis into a collective movement.

experience that we are making there together with everyone else. I think about that, what you're describing in the grocery store. To me, I think about that as the peanut butter problem. It's like I'm done with the jar of peanut butter and it's plastic and I know I should be recycling it, but it is so hard to clean the inside of it out. And I'm doing the work on this and I'm like, there are so many people that aren't spending 20 minutes cleaning

cleaning the inside of a peanut butter jar. They just throw it away. I wish I wasn't washing this peanut butter jar. But then you go out and you realize it's not just me doing this. It's not just me taking the minimal effort to try and clean things so I can recycle them. And also there's all these people who are making way bigger change. We're all together trying to ask for bigger change than just scrubbing the inside of our peanut butter jars so they could be recycled, which maybe they aren't even recycled. I don't even know.

Well, it's a really matching story. And I think that is also part of the problem that, you know, in a very neoliberalist setting, you tell people, please go and wash your peanut butter glass.

It's not even a glass. It's a plastic, you know, a little plastic jar, plastic thing. And so seriously, you're taking my very bad metaphor, but it's a real experience. I'm joking. But it's like, you know, it's so inappropriate to individualize such a collective crisis to a level that people, you know, wake up in the morning and they feel drained by the thought of, you know, not being able again to act accordingly, as you know it.

And that is why it's important to provide answers that are bigger, you know. And it's great if people, you know, start cleaning and recycling and do all those things.

Yet, if that is the act that is taking away your energy that you would need to go to a strike, don't do it. Like, you know, it should give you energy. It's like cycling. It's like eating healthy, meat-free, vegan, whatever food. That should give you energy. It's something that, you know, should enrich your life because you know you do something good for your body and the planet. And that should give you energy. And that is the energy you should have.

to actually then fight for a ban of plastic in your town or the extension of the infrastructure for cycling lanes or the end of fossil fuel subsidies, those things. What's great about Louisa is that she doesn't just stop at we should all be climate activists and then rely on everybody to figure out what that means for them personally. No, Louisa's movement is based on the idea that there are concrete steps that each of us need to take according to our own abilities.

Here is Louisa's talk again. The night before first strike, I was so nervous I couldn't sleep. I didn't know what to expect, but I expected the worst. Maybe it was because we weren't the only ones who had been longing to have a voice in a political environment that had seemingly forgotten how to include young people's perspective into decision making. Maybe. But somehow this worked out.

And from one day to the other, we were all over the place. And I, from one day to the other, became a climate activist. Usually, in these kind of TED Talks, I would now say how it's overly hopeful, how we young people are going to get this sorted, how we're going to save the future and the planet and everything else, how we young people striking for the climate are going to fix this. Usually. But this is not how this works. This is not how this crisis works.

Bad news first, if you thought I would hire you now to cycle more or eat less meat, to fly less or to go secondhand shopping, sorry. This is not that easy. But here comes the good news: You are more than consumers and shoppers, even though the industry would like you to keep yourself limited to that. No.

Me and you, we are all political beings and we can all be part of this answer. We can all be something that many people call climate activists. We're going to take a quick break, but we will be right back with more from Louisa Neubauer. What happens when the global climate crisis needs a global pandemic and so much more. We'll have that right after this.

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Learn more at paloaltonetworks.com slash cortex. We're back. Okay, so you've been talking about these mass demonstrations and these big movements where you really feel community with other people who are in the movement with you. Obviously, COVID has affected that. So I wonder how the pandemic has affected your personal approach to climate activism. Well, that was obviously a very interesting experience because until COVID, the climate crisis...

at least where I'm from, was considered to be the biggest present crisis there is. And the way we kind of

achieved that was by organizing mass marches. And suddenly the most pressing crisis for many wasn't the climate crisis anymore, but the COVID crisis. And then we changed our behavior because we were in a crisis. And that is a really important lesson for many people. If we want to, we can take a crisis seriously. And that also obviously shows that we never took the climate crisis seriously on a governmental scale. And the other thing is...

Obviously, since we were in a corona crisis, we adapted as climate activists. So we moved to the internet a lot. We did lots of digital campaigning. We did lots of like background work, organizational work. And that is also, you know, one way of dealing with a crisis. It's, you know, managing what is there, managing the resources, and then, you know, focusing, getting on with it.

looking that everyone is good and healthy and safe and then we just do the work because it needs to be done and in that sense I totally agree that I think corona tells a bit of a very weird and I think surprising story about some very deep edges of society where people engage in extraordinary conspiracy theories that is the one story to that but obviously yes

If we can take a crisis seriously and we can act like we're in a crisis and we can solve crises. However, I think for that, we need to accept that the Corona pandemic is also a result of a very, very mixed up world.

awkward, unhealthy relationship between nature and human. So the real cause why there is a pandemic and why it's so much more likely that we have more pandemics coming up in the next decades and centuries, that is a different one. And we haven't solved that one yet. You've talked about possibleism as opposed to optimism. Can you explain what you mean by that? So I'm asked a lot whether I'm an optimist because I think people think that I necessarily need to be an optimist because I do things.

And that is obviously a very kind understanding of what motivates me. But in fact, I think optimism and pessimism are both very passive. So it's a very passive understanding of what is changing. So either everything will be fine or everything will be good, but you don't take part in this. Things just happen.

So the active, the more engaged alternative towards that is possibleism, which a Swedish philanthropist, Jakob von Uxkull, came up with. And possibleists see what is possible, but we understand that we need to fight for the possible and that we need to make things possible in order for them to become possible. So that is, you know, putting us in the center of what is, you know, what can change.

And that for me is the much more hopeful, but also much more honest approach to this because things don't just happen. We make them happen, whether we let them happen or engage or so. We are, in the larger sense, if it's systemic changes or smaller stuff happening around though,

You play a part in that inherently. You know, there's been a lot of talk in the last couple of months about this idea of doom scrolling, of like reading the news and just getting deeper and deeper into this hopelessness and everything is so scary. Do you ever do that late at night? Or I kind of imagine that like you start doom scrolling and then you like throw your phone against the wall and are like, I'm planning another protest. So for six years now, I've been studying geography. So I'm engaging with the science every day anyhow.

And then there's obviously the news, which can be very, well, threatening, even though we are also in a media crisis. And, you know, we have an issue with communicating the climate crisis. That's a side note. But obviously, I do scroll and I do read and I do, you know, usually then call the people that wrote this article or that were interviewed. And I said, can we talk about this quickly? Because that sounds really bad. And then we talk about it.

I do also feel devastation at those moments. I do also feel overwhelmed and I do feel anxious about what I read.

But I think that is nothing bad. That is actually really good that we allow ourselves to feel, to breathe this crisis, to let it touch us. That is so deeply human and part of the crisis that we stop kind of feeling those things and that we don't allow ourselves to feel the loss of the ecosystems that are dying every day. And we don't allow ourselves to feel sad about the devastation that we're causing.

But that is the starting point from where on we kind of, you know, can take so much energy and power to change the things then. So I think I try to acknowledge this moment and I say, okay, Luisa, that's great because you're feeling human and you allow yourself to open up yourself to those informations, to that science.

And then I just leave it, you know, thinking and maybe I call a friend and then an hour later or a day later or a week later, you know, I think about that and I think, you know what, we're going to do something about that. And then I go on and I do something about it. So one of the things you've done about it is Fridays for Future. And Fridays for Future, it started with students and with school walkouts.

But who else do you think is missing from the wider environmental movement? Possibly the most important story of Fighters for Future is that the climate crisis is in fact not a

crisis of the climate, but of the people and those at the front lines mostly and the young generation, the children, the young people. And it's really easy to ignore the icebergs on the Arctic, which is melting. And it's really easy to ignore the forests that are currently burning, but it's kind of impossible to ignore the future of your own child or your grandchild. And that is what opened up this whole potential of intergenerational change making.

So I don't think there is someone like missing or so, but I think obviously there's so much more potential of people getting engaged with this and understanding that it's now the time to get involved. And if you ask this question about who's missing from the strikes on a geographical sense, obviously there are loads of parts of the world where climate activism is much more edgy than it is here, where it's really a mainstream thing to do.

Well, I'm actually so maybe starting from the other side, I think I'm so surprised and so overwhelmed in a positive way by what is happening in many parts in Asia right now. So there's so much mobilizing and organizing going on in Southeast Asia, a lot in South America, in many, many African countries.

And that is incredible. And even in like places like Russia and China, where, you know, you would kind of think that demonstrations wouldn't be, you know, very possible. They still do it and they get into trouble and they do it because I think, OK, we need to do this. It is obviously I think many people around the world are, how would you say, irritated, I think a bit.

by the role of the US in the climate arena. Because, you know, there is so much climate crisis going on in that country that, you know, oftentimes when I talk about the climate crisis happening here now, I refer to US America. And, you know, people see the flames in California and the floods in Louisiana and so on. So that is... And it's interesting how people, you know, experience those extremes and then...

don't organize in a way I would expect them to organize. I think effectively it just shows that we are really, you know, that we're very able to ignore a reality, even if it's just in front of our eyes, if we don't like it.

So that's I think maybe a band idea. Yeah. Well, so I'm really curious about that. So let's say that we are let's say that I'm someone I'm listening to you talk right now and I'm convinced. OK, I got to be a climate activist. And how do I become a better climate activist? What can I I do to improve my activism so that it is effective? And I'm taking this unique territory.

terrifying situation that we're at in the world. And I see these things around me and I want to make urgent change. What would you tell me? So oftentimes I think it helps a lot when you talk about your reasons and your motivation to, you know, to be concerned about the climate with people that you know, that you, your friend, your family or so on. And you, you know, you use that situation to brainstorm about what you want to do. What, what would you like to change? Where do you think you belong in that sense? And,

And I think it's something that makes it much easier for people to kind of get engaged is to go somewhere where they're somewhat familiar. Is it your local community where you know people already or you bring a friend or you work around something that you're really, you know, you're already like really excited about?

I first got involved with divestment because I read about it and I found a really interesting idea to divest from fossil fuels. So I started with a divestment group in the town where I studied back then. And that was amazing because I knew the concept. So there was some familiar aspect to that. But the first step is, I think the most important thing to do is the first step. And that is you ask yourself very honestly, how do I feel about this? And many people say,

when they are really, you know, allowing themselves to answer this honestly, they are concerned about the climate crisis and they are concerned about their own future or the future of their children. We feel that we have that in us.

In that next step, you can ask yourself very honestly, okay, am I doing everything I can or am I doing anything I can to change the situation? And we're having this discussion right now because many people around the world have asked this question and they have made the decision that they want to make a change. That is Fridays for Future. That is how Fridays for Future happened. And so take that as an example of how

much of a difference you can make as an individual person if you just turn up. And that's the third thing, you know, leave your comfort zone and turn up, whether it's an organization that already exists or one that you found, whether it's a ecological party or a institution that you think does good work.

you know, get out of the status quo and turn up. It's just 80% of things, good thing that's happening are just about showing up. Thank you so much for your time. Honestly, this has been an incredible conversation. I've learned so much. And thank you so much. This was a pleasure to me. Thank you so much for having me on your show.

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of How to Be a Better Human. That is our show for today. Thank you to our guest, Louisa Neubauer. You can hear more on her podcast, 1.5 Degrees. If you speak German, that is. The podcast is in German. Or if not, maybe it's a good way for you to learn German. Either way, now you know. As for this podcast...

I am your host, Chris Duffy. This show is produced by Abimanyu Das, Daniela Balarezo, Frederica Elizabeth Yosefov, and Karen Newman at TED, and Jocelyn Gonzalez and Sandra Lopez-Monsalve from PRX Productions. For more on how to be a better human, visit ideas.ted.com. We'll see you next week.

We'll see you next time.

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