key: cord-0805891-ae2lwzq6
authors: Krauß, Werner
title: ‘Meat is stupid’: Covid‐19 and the co‐development of climate activism
date: 2021-02-13
journal: Soc Anthropol
DOI: 10.1111/1469-8676.12993
sha: 4ce0d592c2c8bf33843bc9ddec6e1ae13eed34ab
doc_id: 805891
cord_uid: ae2lwzq6

nan

At the workshops, participants expressed their frustration (Krauß 2020). Why are coastal communities not energy independent, even though they produce so much wind energy? Why in the European Union does large-scale industrial farming still preside over diversified production of high-quality food, making a predominantly agrarian coastal landscape even more vulnerable to the effects of climate change? And what about the urban sprawl, the use of plastic, the loss of biodiversity, the disappearance of bees? Why did the municipality sell public land to an investor who builds apartments for mass tourism, in the centre of a seaside resort that prides itself for its artistic atmosphere? Is it sustainable to construct a new Autobahn that will cross marshes and pastures? There is a long list of complaints, not all of them climate relevant in the strict physical sense of the term, but in the wider sense of climate understood as the relationship between people and their material conditions of life (Latour 2018: 51). Many participants critically addressed the neo-liberal ideology of the global market and argued for a post-growth economy. Their locally informed narratives slowly turned climate change from a matter of fact into a meaningful matter of political concern. According to the visions of the participants, in the year 2030, the region will be energised by regional wind power, organic farms will spread and increasingly replace monocultures, public transport will improve, new urban architecture will end urban sprawl, people will buy regional products and support local businesses, and quality of life will improve in a climate friendly Ammerland. In the working groups, we tried to specify all these issues, to break them down onto a regional, local and personal level. It sounds like a Herculean task. There are many appeals to change individual lifestyles and consumption patterns, but how to link the individual and the global, how to make climate change politically relevant, and how to make it amenable to democratic processes? Surprisingly, Covid-19 provided further insight into the global connections that constitute local climate change. The most dramatic outbreak of the disease in Germany happened at slaughterhouses in Lower Saxony, in neighbouring districts, among the cheap labour force from Eastern Europe who are hired on a contract basis and who live packed in overpriced rental flats. The slaughterhouses are owned by a billionaire, Mr Tönnies, who controls the prices on the German meat market, together with a couple of other meat-processing industries and four supermarket chains. In doing so, they also control production patterns in rural areas, dictating the prices for agrarian products and contributing to the mass extinction of small farms while increasing production. German surplus meat inflates the African markets; pig snouts, tails and feet are sold to China. Covid-19 made the global connections explicit: soy for animal feed is produced at the cost of rainforest; foreign local markets are undermined by German meat production; the migration of cheap labour enables price dumping and intensive animal production finally heats the climate. What remains is the fact that local climate activism and advocacy for a change of lifestyle, production and consumption patterns are political and relevant. 'Meat is stupid' struck me as a poetic reminder that we urgently need more place-based narratives of change to cope successfully with the challenges of a changing climate.

How climate change comes to matter. The communal life of facts

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