Spadework Against the Doomsday Clock
In this episode we will talk with two organizers from the German climate movement. We will focus on their struggle to save the planet and their fight against a pending doomsday clock. For those that don’t know, the Doomsday Clock was a cold war symbolic representation of the likelihood of human-made catastrophe, used to represent the state of affairs between Moscow and Washington D.C. Today, we want to talk about a Doomsday Clock that has developed to symbolize the relationship between capitalist society and nature. We feel it’s an apt symbol to talk about the big problem facing the climate movement today. That is, on the one hand, developing popular force and organization takes on time. Spadework – the podcast’s name – refers to civil rights organizer Ella Baker’s conceptualization of organizing as the long and difficult preparatory agricultural labor of digging, seeding, irrigating, and mending that makes a harvest possible. And yet, we are actually running out of time. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, we have until 2030 – just 9 years – to diminish emissions by 45% and reach net zero by 2050 in order to avert utter ecological catastrophe. Kim Solievna, she is a climate activist from Berlin and a spokesperson for Ende Gelände, a climate justice alliance that fights against coal mining and for carbon emission decreases. Kim was most recently involved in a struggle against the opening of a coal energy plant earlier this year. Katharina Stierl a nurse and a union activist, who became a member of Fridays for Future during her studies and currently works for Verdi’s climate campaign, aiming to connect climate and union activists in a meaningful way. Fridays For Future on Twitter @Fridays4Future Follow Ende Gelände on Twitter here @Ende_Gelaende For a helpful link on Ende Gelände’s organizing approach and practices, read here: https://interventionistische-linke.org/sites/default/files/il-klimabroschuere_english_print.pdf