Climate change is massively threatening ecosystems and societies on our planet. Nevertheless, the majority of people are not taking appropriate action against it. On one hand, this is due to a lack of information. On the other hand, there is a lack of motivation to draw consequences for one’s own actions based on existing knowledge. The facts about the global climate crisis seem to exist in a parallel world that we don’t connect with our private lives. Every day we go about our usual private routines, we are part of an enormous collective denial instead of searching for collective solutions.
We want to change that.
The Klima*Kollektiv is working on three key areas for social change: education, building alternative projects, discourse, and action.
Discourse and Action
For collective problems, we need collective solutions. If you stay at home alone with the newspaper reading climate forecasts, you risk feeling powerless and overwhelmed. Acting means organizing in groups rather than remaining in isolation.
The Climate Collective supports the networking of political groups or engaged individuals to build a social movement against climate change. We intervene in societal discourse: with campaigns that draw attention to the systemic roots of CO2 emissions, with public actions against particularly energy-intensive production and consumption practices. Acting also means: Reflecting and determinedly intervening in reality instead of being a passive bystander.
Building Alternative Projects
Acting also means building projects that create concrete alternatives to a growth- and exploitation-based economic system. With ideas and strategies, hammer and nail, shovel and seeds. Projects that make us resilient to future weather extremes and social crises. Whether these are communities creating their own social security system, agroecological forest gardens, exchange networks, repair cafés, farms working under the principles of Solidarity Agriculture, or self-organized universities. The aim is for us to become practically independent from a system we’ve long criticized in theory.
In the long term, we plan to build an educational place where people can live ecologically and learn in an autonomous, practical, and holistic way. Until this place exists, we will visit other groundbreaking places and groups or invite people who can share their experiences.
Education
We aim to raise awareness about the causes and consequences of global warming. But we don’t just want to convey facts that overwhelm people and make them apathetic. Climate education remains ineffective if it doesn’t show ways to take action. For us, education means: confrontation instead of denial, self-empowerment instead of helplessness. We want to empower people to take the steps from knowledge to consciousness and from there to action.
Action means: finding your own position and publicly representing it, building alternative projects—whether with ideas or hammer and nail—and getting involved in political processes.
The Klima*Kollektiv organizes events on topics like climate change, global justice, and political forms of action. We pool expertise on climate-specific communication, environmental psychology, and related learning methods; we compile educational materials on problems, alternatives, and actions. In our seminars, we bring people together: people with different perspectives, inspiring people, people who are searching.