At 10 a.m. this morning, at Largo della Radio, in front of the Palazzina Leone XIII in the Vatican, a Conference reserved for accredited journalists took place, entitled “Laudate Deum: voices and testimonies on the climate crisis”.
Speakers included: Giorgio Leonardo Renato Parisi, Nobel Prize for Physics 2021; Vandana Shiva, scientist, activist and environmentalist (remotely connected); Carlo Petrini, gastronome, sociologist and activist (remotely connected); Jonathan Safran Foer, writer; Luisa-Marie Neubauer, leader of ‘Fridays for Future’ in Germany; Benoit Halgand, co-founder of the French youth organisations ‘For an Ecological Awakening’ and ‘Lutte et Contemplation’; Jubran Ali Mohammed Ali, young man from Libya; Ridhima Pandey, star of the film ‘The Letter: A Message for Our Earth” on Laudato si’ (remotely connected); Alessandra Sarmentino, animator of the Policoro Project of the Archdiocese of Palermo, animator of the Laudato si’ Movement and associate of Catholic Action; Yann Arthus-Bertrand, photographer, filmmaker and UN climate ambassador (video contribution).
Luisa Neubauer’s speech is an important and timely call to action. The climate crisis is an existential threat to our planet, and we all have a responsibility to act to address it. Neubauer’s speech offers an inspiring and hopeful message for all committed to building a more sustainable future.
Intervento di Luisa-Marie Neubauer
My name is Luisa Neubauer, I am a youth climate activist from Germany. I grew up in one of the most privileged places on earth, in Hamburg in Germany. And just as my parents took care of me, I thought our governments would take care of the big problems in the world.
I grew up in a world that told me that everything would work out, that if the economy grew, step by step everyone in the world would prosper. Today I call it a fairy tale. Eventually, I found out about the fairy tale. And once I did, I started acting, and luckily, I wasn’t alone. We were thousands, we were hundreds of thousands and then millions, Friday after Friday. And for a brief moment in 2019, it seemed that things would work out. And now here we are, in 2023 witnessing how childhoods are flooded and burned.
What scares me though, isn’t the crisis alone. What scares me is our leaders’ way of responding to the crisis. Pope Francis is right in his deep worry. Some speak of governmental inaction. I do not think that is true. Governments everywhere are acting. In recent years, the vast majority of them have turned around and started doing everything they can to please fossil fuel interests and prevent real change.
Laudate Deum points out just how detrimental the current path is. While sugarcoating themselves in corporate greenwashing, fossil fuel industries still plan to expand. In East Africa, the French oil giant is still planning to construct the EACOP Pipeline, the longest crude oil pipeline worldwide – all that, while the science says clearly: Any new fossil fuel projects endangers our planetary safety limit. Laudate Deum calls it “suicidal”.
And our governments? Instead of holding those accountable, who are continuing to burn fossil fuels, governments around the globe have started criminalizing those defending land and life. They have started portraying us – as it says in Laudate Deum – as “radicalized”. And it shows: Just last week we found that in Vietnam, our friend and climate activist Hong has been charged with three years in prison, for nothing but peaceful organizing.
I used to be scared of the climate crisis. What scares me now, is how we as climate activists are supposed to keep going in the escalating climate of repression and criminalization. We see a multilateral crisis of trust emerging, as the so-called global north and the emerging economies fail to deliver on both climate and funding. The host of the upcoming UN climate conference, plans to allow democratic spaces to be suffocated by the oil industry.
Laudate Deum speaks of what I would name a crisis of culture, of humanity having failed to establish a profound relationship to our natural cradle. If we know what will be lost but we do not name what is yet for us to win and to explore, it is no wonder we lose people in denial.
And there is one more crisis, that I would add. It is the crisis of hope. It’s the despair crawling under empty promises. It is the hopelessness that emerging where privileged cynics tell us it is “ too late”. People like to tell us activists that “we give them so much hope“ and I wonder. Do you ever ask yourselves, who provides hope for us?
I used to be scared of failing in the climate crisis, now I am scared people won’t even try. And yet – there is a silver lining. Laudate Deum puts it out there.
1. At all costs, civil society and climate activists must be protected.
2. The upcoming climate conference must prove its willingness to deliver, to become a global and just break-up with our fossil fuel ties.
And I would, as a youth activist, add one further call to action: We need institutions, leaders, people of all ages, we need you to become activists. We need you not to no longer wait for hope, but become it. Pope Francis has shown how this is done.
And if the pope, with all it takes in such an institution like the Catholic Church, managed to call for a collective, cultural and spiritual revolution – I am very sure it is not too much to ask for everyone else. this is also a call for the Catholic Church, to become a true ally for those fighting the front lines, and fully divesting all assets from fossil fuels.
It is okay to be scared. I just shouldn’t stop anyone from doing what this time is asking us for. So that at some point, we will not have to tell fairy tales to our children anymore. But can tell the story of how we became the world we want them to inherit.
https://press.vatican.va/content/salastampa/it/bollettino/pubblico/2023/10/05/0698/01523.html
