EThere can be little doubt that the global North owes the global South something, quite a lot in fact – although the question of how to quantify this, who really has to pay and how to determine the recipients is very difficult, almost impossible is to be answered.
In any case, there have always been strong storms in the Caribbean, but there have never been as many and as destructive hurricanes as in these years. It is known that the rivers of Pakistan have always overflowed their banks. But no one can remember that, like last year, half of Punjab was under water. And there are islands in the Pacific that have been inhabited since time immemorial. But as the water rises, they will soon no longer be. And the people there will lose their home, probably forever.
No prosperity, just drought, storms, floods
On the one hand, it is evident that the consequences of climate change, i.e. droughts, storms and floods, hit hardest those who are least responsible for climate change and who have received the least from the wealth whose production has brought about this change. And on the other hand, it will be very difficult to make it understandable to those who would have to pay – as you can clearly feel in these years of crisis, in view of all the Europeans and North Americans who don't even want to save themselves, because they already see the question of whether they should change their way of life only as a restriction on their personal freedom.
And so Luisa Neubauer, the leader of the German Fridays for Future movement, had to make a lot of effort to speak with some degree of confidence when she discussed exactly this question on Saturday evening at the Berlin Academy of Arts. Especially since her conversation partner, the film director Andres Veiel, suggested that the money could simply be taken from the corporations. Or make use of the free-roaming trillions of the international financial market (which, however, are not backed by any material assets).
What does art have to do with it?
“Reparations and repair. “On climate justice, colonialism and the Capitalocene,” was the title of the symposium, and when asked why an Academy of Arts, Fine Arts Department, deals with the topic of who owes something to whom and why, a topic that is, after all, an economic, is ecological, political and historical, there is a very simple answer. Because the art world, which currently seems to have no better paradigm at its disposal, declares itself responsible for all questions of colonialism and postcolonialism.
After all, Tomás Saraceno showed “Fly with Pacha”, Miki Yui and Nathalia Favaro showed “Flux”: two films that evoked the beauty and danger of South American ecological and social systems, without, however, contributing anything to the question of compensation. And Andres Veiel said in the conversation that art, especially film, can resolve what has long been recognized as correct into a narrative and charge it with emotion. Artists who took him seriously, if they had been sitting in the audience, would actually have had to boo him.
The heating of the discourse
Of course, today's climate injustice has one of its causes in colonialism: the colonialists were interested in raw materials and not in giving the colonized the means with which they could have polluted the air and heated up the climate in the global south. But when, for example, Priya Morley of the University of California explains that racism and climate change are practically one and the same because colonialism and slave labor made the industrial revolution possible, one might argue, perhaps a little cynically, that slave labor is for the Slaves are much more harmful than they are for the climate. And that the coal and iron ore lay beneath the earth of Europe.
Since the storms, the floods and the droughts are now claiming their victims, the question of what to do now is much more urgent. The European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights is trying civil lawsuits against those responsible, with some success. The northern states will have to pay significantly more than what they recently agreed to in Doha. Meanwhile, the postcolonial discourse only inflames people's minds and will not stop global warming.
#Symposium #Berlin #Reparations #climate #change
