GOETHE-INSTITUT ART&THOUGHT/ FIKRUN WA …€¦ · · 2013-05-29GOETHE-INSTITUT ART&THOUGHT/...

GOETHE-INSTITUT ART&THOUGHT / FIKRUN WA FANN 99 1


Editorial

Climate change and environmental pollution are among

the most urgent problems affecting the world today.

Tackling the ensuing dangers is, however, a difficult

task, and one that calls for a measure of decisiveness

humanity repeatedly fails to muster. There are many

reasons for this, and they are not only material in

Nature but also cultural.

This edition of Art&Thought / Fikrun wa Fann therefore

examines how climate and the environment are being

influenced by mankind and by our culture. It shows,

among many other things, that we need is a new kind

of we jihad – an eco-jihad!

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The Call To eCo-JihadthE islaMiC ENviroNMENtal MovEMENt

Gradually – and unnoticed by most Muslims – Muslim intellectuals and scholars have, since the late 1960s, been developing an islamic environmental theology. their aim is to examine green principles such as sustainability, environmental protection, animal welfare, and biodiversity in terms of their compatibility with islam.

By Monika Zbidi

Crude oil reserved in reservoirs in the clay soil lined with heavyduty waterproof fabric, waiting for distillation.

Bayelsa State, 2011. From the exhibition: Letzte Ölung Nigerdelta (Last Rites Niger Delta). Staatliches Museum

für Völkerkunde, Munich, 16.11.2012–15.09.2013. Photo: Timipre Willis-Amah © Goethe-Institut

Climate change and global environmental problems have not only led humans to reflect on their position in the environ-ment, they also call for strategies for preserving the earth, not least with a view to protecting and preserving the hu-man habitat. This is why many religious communities start-ed to look at what their own religion had to say about the is-sue of environmental protection. In 1967, the historian Lynn White Junior put forward a controversial theory about the origins of the ecological crisis, namely that its roots lay in monotheistic religions. Reactions to this accusation from the religious quarter triggered a new discourse of ‘ecotheology’. Although White focussed primarily on Christianity and Ju-daism in his writings, the confrontation with such an allega-tion and the perception of the ecological crisis led Muslims to turn their attention to the issue of ecology as well.

The Islamic ecotheology movement, which comprises Islam-ic ecological philosophy, Sharia-based environmental law and Islamic environmental activism, was initiated by Muslim aca-demics and scholars, many of whom grew up in a predomi-

nantly Muslim country and later lived in – or still live in – Western countries. The confrontation with environmental problems led them to focus on the position of their own reli-gion in the discourse. Since then, the ecological dimension of Islam has spread and has been applied in Muslim organisa-tions and initiatives worldwide.

Eco-islam on- and offline

The ‘Green Khutba Campaign’, ‘The Green Guide to Hajj’, ‘The Muslim Green Guide to Reducing Climate Change’, ‘Greening Ramadan’, ‘The Clean Medina Campaign’ ... one can see at a glance from the names of these initiatives, projects, and campaigns that their focus is on the link between Islam and nature. The terms ‘green Islam’ or ‘eco-Islam’ (the latter is primarily used in the English-speaking world) have become the labels of this contemporary movement in recent years. However, this is not to say that supporters of this movement are propagating what one could call their ‘own’ version of Islam: it is more the case that the term is a reference to the


esteem in which they hold the environment and God’s crea-tion, and an attempt to define a sustainable way of life as an inherent Muslim necessity. One of its objectives is to make other Muslims aware of the potential of Islam.

Important Islamic events and dates in the Islamic calendar are ideal for the promotion of these views, for example Ramadan, the month of fasting, which is considered a month of contemplation and self-reflection. Because Muslims re-frain from eating and drinking between sunrise and sun-set during Ramadan, many families prepare enormous feasts for the evening meal, which means that a lot of food ends up being thrown away. In recent years, a number of articles on a variety of blogs dedicated to the theme of Islam and ecol-ogy (such as www.theecomuslim.com or www.khaleafa.com), have in the run-up to Ramadan and during the month of fasting called for a ‘green Ramadan’, and for sustainable and environmentally-friendly behaviour. In the Western context, this means, for example, using fair-trade products, growing your own fruit and vegetables or, if that is not possible, buy-ing local products and using water sparingly during the ritual washing before prayers.

The Hajj (the pilgrimage to Mecca) and Islam’s greater and lesser feasts, (the Feast of Sacrifice at the end of the pilgrim-age to Mecca and the Feast of Breaking the Fast) offer Islam-ic ecological organisations or blogs an opportunity to appeal to the religious and, in this way, to people’s ecological con-science.

The ‘Green Khutba Campaign’ was founded by Muaz Nasir on the occasion of international Earth Day 2012. A sample Fri-day sermon on the environment was drawn up specially for the campaign, which was supported by more than 75 imams and/or organisations in North America. The aim was to en-courage mosques and Islamic institutions to dedicate the Fri-day sermon on Earth Day to raising awareness about the en-vironmental challenges faced by humankind. Muaz Nasir is a Muslim environmental activist from Canada who lives in To-ronto and is very active in the environmental sector. The principle of stewardship (khilafa), which God gave to human-kind, is the inspiration for Muaz Nasir’s blog www.khaleafa.com. In his blog, he links the Canadian and the Muslim iden-tity, both of which, he feels, have a close connection with Nature. He uses important environmental events to reflect on an Islamic view of things. Examples include the above-mentioned Earth Day, or International Pollinator Week, which inspired him to write about the role of bees in Islam. He also used Canadian Waste Reduction Week to explain why the avoidance of waste is also anchored in Islam.

The British Alliance of Religions and Conservation (ARC) commissioned Global One 2015 and EcoMuslim to write The Green Guide to Hajj, which was published in 2011. The aim of the guide was to change Muslims’ ecological behaviour, par-

ticularly during the Hajj. Pilgrims are in a sacred state in which they are forbidden to hunt, kill animals, or to fell or kill plants and trees. Because the pilgrimage to Mecca is the fifth pillar of Islam, and because the approximately 2.5 mil-lion pilgrims who make the pilgrimage every year gener-ally return home with the good intention of adhering even more closely to religious requirements, this event is ideal for touching pilgrims’ hearts and encouraging them to adopt a sustainable, more environmentally-friendly way of life. The guide contains a foreword by the Grand Mufti of Egypt, Ali Gomaa, and lots of tips and ideas: for example, how to use only environmentally-friendly products and services during the Hajj, how to reduce waste and consumption during the pilgrimage, and how to continue to live sustainably after the pilgrimage. Pilgrims should not travel by plane. If this is not possible, they should make a donation to an environmen-tal project in order to compensate for the carbon miles they ran up by flying to their destination. The Green Guide to Hajj also calls on pilgrims not to use plastic bottles, to use public transport such as the Mecca Metro, and only to make the pil-grimage once in their lives, as their religion requires of them.

Muslim Green Guide

Another brochure, published in 2008 by Life Makers UK (founded by Amr Khaled) and the Birmingham-based Islamic Foundation for Ecology and Environmental Sciences (IFEES), is the Muslim Green Guide to Reducing Climate Change. This brochure contains practical instructions for individual Mus-lims on how to tackle climate change. Everyday tips on is-sues such as saving energy when cooking or washing, recy-cling, and using public transport or bicycles are accompanied by quotes from the Koran. This brochure explains why Mus-lims should take action and illustrates that protection of the environment is anchored in their faith. Another campaign run by the IFEES was the ‘Clean Medina Campaign’, which also ran in Birmingham in 2008. The cam-paign slogan was: ‘It’s a film! It’s a campaign! It’s Jihad!’ Mus-lims recorded themselves on video sweeping and cleaning streets together in an attempt to motivate other Muslims to take similar action in their respective cities. IFEES is re-garded as the mother of all Islamic environmental organisa-tions. It runs a variety of local and international projects and was founded by Fazlun Khalid in the 1980s. Khalid was born and grew up in Sri Lanka and has lived in England since 1953. He is considered to be one of the co-founders of eco-Islam. What sets him apart from the rest is the fact that he is both a Muslim ecotheologian and an environmental activist.

There are now a large number of international activities simi-lar to the ones described here, and the Internet is increasing-ly being used as a means of spreading ideas and approaches, and for putting Muslim activists in touch with one another. In addition to information websites, there are blogs, numerous


Facebook pages, and groups that are run and used by people from a wide variety of countries. These sites and groups are used to discuss environmental themes on the basis of arti-cles, videos, and links. This is why A.M. Schwencke, in the style of Olivier Roy, speaks of a ‘globalised eco-Islam’. On the aforementioned blog www.theecomuslim.com, which is run by the young British woman Zaufishan Iqbal, the themes range from environmentally-friendly halal food (including recipes), ethnic fashion and eco-mosques, to reviews of books on en-vironmental themes and reports on national and internation-al developments. The subtitle of her blog is ‘the eco-jihadTM Enviro-news, halal living and eco-lifestyle from UK’. When she speaks of so-called ‘eco-jihad’, she is playing on Western associations with the term ‘jihad’ in her fight for a healthy environment.

the fundamentals of islamically-motivated ecological behaviour

The founding father of Islamic ecotheology is the Iranian-born philosopher Seyyed Hossein Nasr, who in 1967 wrote the book Man and Nature: The Spiritual Crisis of Modern Man. In so doing, he was well ahead of his time. Islamic environ-mental ethics are based on the Koran and the body of ha-diths. According to this interpretation, conserving nature and creation – in particular flora, fauna, and water – is one of a Muslim’s most important obligations. Water plays a very important role in Islam because it is considered to be the source and foundation of life. It is also of major significance for Muslim ritual cleansing. There are many sayings attribut-ed to the Prophet Mohammed that prove he urged people to use water sparingly, and forbade the pollution of water.

The purpose of all creation is to praise God, and all individual parts of the earth are perceived as signs of God (ayat in Ar-abic). This means that God is omnipresent, which implies that Nature should be protected for God’s sake alone. In addition, Nature is seen as the totality of mutually complementary el-ements. In addition to praising God, every individual part of Nature has a role and a task within creation that is of impor-tance for the functioning of the Earth. This means that all things are mutually dependent on one another.

Animals are below humans in the Islamic order of creation because, unlike animals, humans have reason and can differ-entiate between belief and non-belief. As proven by a num-ber of hadiths, the protection of animals is very important in Islam. The Prophet Mohammed was particularly fond of cats. It is said that on one occasion the Prophet cut off his sleeve because a kitten was sleeping on it when he wanted to rise to pray.

Plants also play an important role in Islam. They are food for both humans and animals (Sura 80, verses 24–32) and are needed by humans to generate essential oxygen. Planting a

tree is considered particularly commendable in Islam. Ac-cordingly, there is a hadith that says that every Muslim who plants a tree will be rewarded in the hereafter for every ani-mal or for every human who eats of this tree. There are also institutions of Islamic law that guarantee the conservation of nature in certain areas, for example in harim and hima areas – protected zones, like nature reserves, where water resources, forestland, and pastureland are protected.

In the Islamic, anthropocentric vision of the world, humans are at the centre of creation, which not only affords hu-mans certain rights in accordance with an Islamic environ-mental ethic, but also places specific obligations on them too. If there is such a thing as a concept of Islamic environmen-tal ethics, it is based primarily on a variety of Koranic prin-ciples that are interpreted in an ecological way. In addition to the doctrine of moderation and abstinence and the doc-trine of justice (‘adl in Arabic), the following six doctrines are the most frequently cited, and help to keep human behaviour within certain boundaries:

1. the doctrine of oneness (tawhid): The doctrine of tawhid has three levels of meaning within the scope of Islamic eco-theology. Firstly, it indicates the monotheistic unity of God, as opposed to the polytheism and idolatry of the pre-Islam-ic period. Secondly, it indicates the unity of God, as opposed to the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, which the Koran con-tradicts. Thirdly, it is an expression of the unity of God with all of creation. This unity with creation gives expression to the fact that everything in the world is part of creation and is related to everything else, which makes the entire world significant, valuable, and worthy of protection. There is also the argument that tawhid expresses the recognition of God as the one and only Lord of all created beings, which means that every single creature must be treated with respect.

2. the doctrine of creation (fitra): In the Islamic ecologi-cal discourse, fitra is understood to mean the original state of creation or the original nature of things. First and fore-most, this comprises the natural state of humans in harmo-ny with nature. From this is derived the necessity that hu-mankind protect the environment and its obligation to do so. Fazlun Khalid, for example, argues that humans used to live in a natural state of fitra and unconsciously lived with-in the unwritten laws of nature. However, this changed with the advent of industrialisation. While people in the past had the same negative and positive attributes as today, their ten-dency to do good or bad acts was kept in check by the natu-ral order of things. For example, earlier civilisations did not leave behind any pollutants, destructive poisons, or radioactive waste. This shows that humankind’s responsibility to-day is even greater than it used to be because of the very real possibility that it could destroy Nature on a large scale. One aim, therefore, is to re-establish the state of fitra and to conserve the Earth.


3. the doctrine of stewardship (khilafa): On Earth, humans assume the role of stewards or trustees (khalifa in Arabic). This means that God has entrusted humans with responsibil-ity for creation and has entrusted the Earth to humans, the Earth which God has put at their service. In other words, al-though humankind is not the owner or lord of the Earth – a position that is reserved for God – it nevertheless has an im-portant place in the order of creation. The Islamic environ-mental movement calls on humankind to assume the role of the steward and to stop subjugating Nature to itself.

4. the doctrine of responsibility (amana): Very closely linked to the doctrine of khilafa is the doctrine of amana, which stands for the fulfilment of responsibility in all dimen-sions of life. It is about the responsibility inherent in the role of steward, the responsibility that humankind assumed when God offered it to humans. The section of the Koran that is often cited in this case describes how God offered this re-sponsibility to the heavens, the earth, and the mountains, but they refused, because they were afraid to take this re-sponsibility upon themselves. Following their refusal, human-kind agreed to assume responsibility (Sura 33, verse 72). To a certain extent, the amana is both a restriction of the stew-ardship and a moral burden. The superior position of human-kind is not, therefore, rooted in its greater power and au-thority over creatures within the framework of an Islamic environmental ethics, but much more in the accountability that only humankind has towards God.

5. the doctrine of servitude (‘ubudiyya): The doctrine of servitude expresses the status of humans as servants of God (‘abd Allah in Arabic) and completes the doctrines of stew-ardship and responsibility. The role of the slave restricts the power of humankind. Muslim ecotheologians understand it to mean that Muslims, in their role as servants of God, have to obey laws, including the care of Nature and the ecosystem and dealing properly with its resources.

6. the doctrine of balance (mizan): The Arabic term mizan means balance, equilibrium, or scales. In Islamic environmen-tal ethics it is translated as ‘ecological balance’ or ‘a middle way’. This principle calls for the conservation or the restora-tion of balance on Earth, both in terms of harmony within Nature and in terms of the field of human justice and morali-ty in day-to-day dealings. God created the Earth and every-thing in it as perfect, free from fault, and in balance. How- ever, it is the task of human beings to keep it that way. In the opinion of Muslim ecotheologians, problems such as global warming, earthquakes, and rising sea levels are evi-dence that the Earth is no longer in divine balance.

an islamic way out of the dead end of climate change?

According to Islamic environmental ethics, the solution to en-vironmental problems lies in the revival of spirituality and faith. While this does not mean that they distance them-selves from science and development, they do oppose the consumer society and immoderate behaviour. Islamic ecotheology is not a monolithic structure. In view of the fact that ‘eco-Islam’ is still a very young movement, there are a large number of different dimensions and interpretations, all of which share the same goal, namely the protection of the environment and the stewardship of creation.

Finally, the theme of the environment and the protection of the Earth unites supporters in other religions, too, in the common fight to preserve the livelihood of all living beings, and it has already proven to be an important pillar in inter-religious debate. While an exclusively religious approach can-not solve the problems of climate change, it can contribute to a change in attitudes. A growing Islamic ecological dis-course is emerging in particular on the Internet, and it would seem that many Muslims have been inspired by the fact that their own religion calls for and encourages environmentally-friendly behaviour.

MoNika Zbidi is a research fellow at the Faculty of Islamic Studies at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. She is also a Deutsche Bundesstiftung Umwelt Ph.D. scholar. The subject of her doctoral thesis is Islam and ecology. She previously studied Islamic Studies, Political Science, and Semitic Philology.

Translated by Aingeal FlanaganCopyright: Goethe-Institut e. V., Fikrun wa Fann, June 2013

blog khaleafahttp://www.khaleafa.com en

the Eco Muslim http://www.theecomuslim.comen


‘WE MUst CUltivatE oUr GardEN’CUltUral diMENsioNs of Global ENviroNMENtal issUEs

the desire to have clean sources of energy, a healthy environment, and fewer emissions may often seem like a luxury at a time when so many around the world are fighting just to survive. the reality is, however, that no one can afford not to think about environmental issues. it has become evident that shaping the future of life on our planet is not only a technical and economic process, but a cultural one too.

By Susanne Stemmler

Garbage collectors beside the Solo river in Java. Fom the Goethe-Institut exhibition RiverScapes.

Photo: Budi N. D. Dharmawan © Goethe-Institut

Concern about the rampant destruction of our natural liveli-hood is also leading to a cultural quest that includes an ur-gent search for a way of life that allows us to conserve goods such as water, food and air, which are vital for our survival but are in short supply around the world. This quest is akin to a cultural revolution because in order to conserve such resources, we have to radically change our lifestyles, regardless of where we live in the world.

A cultural revolution would, for example, also entail turning our back on the way we generate power, which at present is heavily based on oil. We are approaching peak oil, the point at which the maximum rate of oil extraction is reached. Ac-cording to some studies, we have already reached this point; others expect that we will reach it in the near future. At the moment, the world’s industrial systems are dependent on mineral oil. No less than 95 per cent of all industrially-manu-factured products are made using it: e.g. fuels, lubricants, plastics, pharmaceuticals, dyes, or textiles. It is the basic pre-

requisite for the transportation of large amounts of goods over long distances. Oil-powered container ships, lorries, air-craft, and information technology are the backbone of glo-balisation. Yet oil-drilling catastrophes illustrate just how dangerous the methods used to extract this commodity, which is in increasingly short supply, are.

The oil business and our unquenchable thirst for petroleum are causing violence and misery and fostering undemocratic and corrupt political systems in many parts of the world. Many oil-producing countries are not only politically prob-lematic, but are also characterised by undemocratic condi-tions. Numerous studies use the term ‘raw materials curse’ in the context of oil wealth. The author Ryszard Kapuściński, for example, has called oil a ‘resource that anaesthetises thought, blurs vision, corrupts’. The lives of those who live along oil pipelines change forever. The Nigerian author Helon Habila describes the destructive power of oil in his 2012 novel Oil on Water.


Ecuador is showing the world one way of turning away from oil: its constitution affords equal protection to all living things. Moreover, the hope is that the UN will pay the coun-try not to exploit its oil deposits, in order to preserve the rainforest, which is vital to the planet. Industry and security policy are currently trying to adapt to the post-fossil age. While work on ‘green technologies’ continues, people fear re-cession, food shortages, political instability, and war. Will the world become smaller after this ‘tipping point’? Will agricul-ture be less globalised? Will new global markets emerge for environmentally-friendly products, sources of energy, and services? And what would that mean for the globalisation of culture, which is based on physical mobility and economic exchange? How can we survive without an everyday culture that is built on oil?

Considering other viewpoints

This example shows that if we don’t consider other view-points, there can be no communal survival on this planet. Human existence has always been the subject of religious and philosophical reflection. In the Christian religions, there are approaches that give weight to the dictum ‘I am a so-journer on the earth’ (Psalm 119:19). Islamic sources recom-mend that we deal ethically with creation. Currently, Muslim associations are increasingly calling on us to take environ-mental action.

The recognition of the other as a locus of experience is key to our ecological survival. A world consciousness that thinks outside the box must be based on such an approach. In this context, local cultural traditions and regional interpretations of reality are increasingly gaining in importance. Species are becoming extinct and monocultures use uniform seed types. All of this is impoverishing the world. With the disappear-ance of these species and seeds, we are losing a specific knowledge about how to deal with nature. A new world con-sciousness that does not end at the boundaries of our own society is barely being explored at all at present. There are certainly enough examples of how to approach this new world consciousness. A few European examples are worth mentioning here. In the mid-nineteenth century, the natural-ist Alexander von Humboldt criticised the dominance of hu-mankind over nature; his notion of the ‘cosmos’ led to the concept of the world as a single unit. The holistic concepts of nature developed by the anthroposophist Rudolf Steiner or the artist Joseph Beuys are currently being rediscovered. The ‘Poetics of Relations’ by the Caribbean philosopher and writer Edouard Glissant also takes a cosmopolitan step in this direction. Glissant not only uses elements of nature – above all islands, the sea, and water – as key metaphors, he also brings them together to create a ‘globalisation theory’ which says that everywhere on Earth enters into a relationship with everywhere else.

The question of the ‘we’ in this world society is far from being answered. Who are the players, and in what power constellations are they moving in undemocratic or dictatorial regimes, where civil society – so often acclaimed in the West

– does not exist? All too often, politics makes people prison-ers of the here and now. The urgency of the temporal dimen-sion remains abstract and has little to do with the lifetime of a parliament or multi-year plans. People find it hard to think in terms of multiple generations. It is not only the classical developed countries that are under enormous time pressure in this respect; so too are both emerging nations and devel-oping countries. Will the latter succeed in skipping the phase of resource-intensive, catch-up industrialisation? How can the errors of Western industrialisation be foreseen and avoided? It no longer seems possible to imagine the future as a form of a catch-up development, but rather as a process during which we would skip development phases that have proven destructive in the past.

the artificial separation of humankind and nature

This is where the search comes in for an ethic that applies to all living things and which is currently inspiring a lot of people. The division of things into humans, animals, plants and artefacts, into acting subjects and passive objects – a division introduced by the modern age – is now once again being debated. The focus of this debate is on the rights of other living things, and also on the way we deal with com-mon goods, such as water or air. Assuming responsibility for and developing a moral obligation towards living things that we consider to be mute – indeed, which we ourselves si-lenced – is, as the philosopher Bruno Latour has said, more urgent than ever before. Every thing and every being is de-termined by its relationship to other things and beings; this applies as much to humans as it does to stones or trees. It is not about extending morality to new beings, but about doing away with the boundaries between humans and animals, be-tween things that are alive and things that are not. Nature that is separate from humankind is a cultural construct of the European tradition of thought.

In this respect, neither the Western concept of nature con-servation nor its understanding of the environment can be transferred to all areas of the world, the reason being that this understanding puts humankind at the heart of the envir-onment. Twenty years ago, the French philosopher Michel Serres called instead for social contracts to be supplemented by natural contracts. According to Serres, creating a non-par-asitic alliance between humankind and nature is the critical task for the future: ‘Global history enters nature; global na-ture enters history’ (Serres). Air, water, and earth are all common goods that belong to everybody. What does this mean for their protection and our understanding of proper-ty? How can the rainforest, which has so many functions that


are so essential to the survival of everyone on earth, be pre-served for all of us? As a consequence of the fatal idea of property and ownership, we only have the remnants of na-ture left to deal with – remnants that we are sacrificing to monoculture. This once again raises the question of owner-ship and the balance of power. All of these questions go far beyond the ecological, and are of huge cultural significance.

One such link between nature and culture is the garden. For millennia, and in almost every civilisation in the world, people have imagined their happiness as a garden existence. For millennia, the continuation of life after death in the gar-den of Paradise was the seen as the reward for a good life. The garden, whether real or imaginary, was considered a place of refuge from hustle and bustle and commotion.

The idea of the garden can be very fantastical (such as Gil-gamesh’s Garden of the Gods or Dante’s Garden of Eden on the peak of the Mountain of Purgatory), or it can be very real (such as Plato’s Academy or Epicurius’ school, The Gar-den). It can also take the form of modern urban gardens such as the homeless gardens in New York, or the Prinzessin-nengärten (Princesses’ Garden) in Berlin, all of which are

places of refuge that were created by humans. Cultivating, preserving, breeding, keeping bees ... these things are cur-rently all the rage around the world, not only in the heart of Europe’s major cities. In an age of irresponsibility and free-dom from worries, gardening is a reflection of people’s de-sire to assume responsibility and exercise care.

Unlike in Paradise, where everything grows of its own ac-cord, we have to cultivate our garden, take care of it, and be aware of the temporal dimension of the future in the form of sowing times, planting times, crop rotation, and periods of growth. A garden that is laid out by people develops over time and through time.

When Voltaire closed his famous work Candide with the words ‘We must cultivate our garden’, it was against a back-drop of plague, wars, and natural catastrophes. In other words, the garden also has a political dimension: WE must cultivate OUR garden, where the garden symbolises the world that we share with each other. Our garden is not a gar-den of purely individual interests where one can flee reality in an escapist manner. It is a piece of earth in the social col-lective.

sUsaNNE stEMMlEr was head of the literature, science and society department at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin and is currently a visiting professor at the Berlin University of the Arts.

Translated by Aingeal Flanagan

Copyright: Goethe-Institut e. V., Fikrun wa Fann, June 2013

Über lebenskunsthttp://www.ueber-lebenskunst.org/index_en.htmlen


thiNkiNG iN thE fUtUrE PErfECtCliMatE ChaNGE as soCial ChaNGE

Climate change is forcing us to rethink our hypermobile lifestyle. this also constitutes an opportunity, and confronts us with the question of how we actually want to live. Climate change is offering us a procedure to resolve the problem of our future living conditions. looming natural disaster is forcing human beings to address the question of what kind of society they want to live in in the future.

By Claus Leggewie

Ferry for school children on the Solo river in Java. From the Goethe-Institut exhibition RiverScapes.


Climatology data and predictions give a relatively precise, regionally differentiated picture of the already irreversible consequences of climate change and those that may still oc-cur – consequences of a thing that many people claim is still not perceptible and will take place, if at all, only in the far distant future. However, anyone who has witnessed, for ex-ample, the rapid melting of Arctic glaciers – which has al-ready exceeded all predictions – or observed over a period of time the flow of the great Chinese rivers from the high Ti-betan plateau to the sea has experienced the very concrete effects of climate change – and can easily conceive worse.

What is harder to conceive is how the pillars of modern societies might be affected by climate changes such as these

– world markets and material wealth, forms and norms of so-cial coexistence, civil liberties and rights of ownership, sovereignty of people and state, and others.

Will the world economy survive the ‘greatest market failure’, as climate change has been labelled? Will it press ahead with advanced forms of natural and exchange economies; will it tend towards more planning, or embed itself once again in

moral economies? Will the individual lose his scope of action as a result of natural disasters and the associated erosion of social certainties, or will this create more options for person-al fulfilment? Will societies become more individualised, or tend towards closer bonds of community? Will liberal democ-racy survive the dangers of climate change and continue to develop, or will there be a post-democratic society in which social controls are strengthened from the bottom up, and autocratic despotism from the top down? What will be the values, attitudes and mentalities that characterise a world with mean temperatures two plus X degrees higher than those that preceded the Industrial Age? Will economic and financial globalisation be more advanced, or will global inter-dependence have decreased? Will there be more cross-cul-tural and interreligious cooperation among states, private or-ganisations and individuals, or will they isolate themselves still further and position themselves in opposition to one an-other? Will nation states still exist at all in 2050, or will there be some kind of world government, however this might be legitimised? Can the civilising maxim of peaceful conflict resolution still be maintained, or will natural disasters trigger impoverishment, mass exodus, and ‘climate wars’?


The ‘great questions’ can be broken down and applied to con-crete everyday situations. How, for example, will nine or ten billion people, the majority of them living in cities, get around? How will they power their vehicles and transport goods, or heat and cool their dwellings? What will they eat, and how will they use the land? To date there are hardly any ‘soft’ scenarios for social, political, economic and normative development in the various regions of the world to accompa-ny the hard data of climatology and energy prognostication. And where these have been calculated, they are mostly just an updating of tendencies observed in the recent past. Devi-ations from the paths of habitual models of modernisation are found only occasionally in transition studies – sometimes par force des choses, because the authors see major upheav-als coming, sometimes as a voluntaristic outline of desirable futures for the sustainable and just development of world society.

New culture of participation

There are many reasons for the lack of wild imagining and substantiated predictions, starting with the ‘TINA’ dogma. With the slogan ‘There Is No Alternative’, the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (1979-1990) rubberstamped the contemporary world as the best of all possible worlds, and the neo-liberal worldview as the only possible worldview.

Another reason is the short-term nature and volatility of po-litical thinking and attention spans, which ensure that profes-sional politics is almost entirely devoid of any visionary per-spectives and limit it to what is supposedly achievable. The overwhelming realism of the social sciences is also stultify-ing. Increasingly specialised, they eschew a diagnosis of the times, interpreting the playfulness of many aspects of cultur-al studies and society as a construct and departing from ‘grand narratives’ of every kind. And there is still a general scepticism where prediction is concerned: as the old adage ascribed to John Maynard Keynes points out, prediction is very difficult – especially about the future.

Yet today it is the natural scientists and ‘energy modellers’ who are calling for intellectual, social and cultural contribu-tions to strengthen quantitative projections with qualitative narratives of possible futures, just as it is climate policy that has to introduce adaptations to climatic changes, and is con-cerned about the acceptance of possible interventions, bans and costs.

One should not think of societies exposed to the conse-quences of climate change as the mere sounding boards of technical innovation and political planning. With each inter-vention they change, and thereby change the starting point; they regularly throw up unintended consequences of politi-cal action and changes that were entirely unplanned, thus stubbornly eluding rational calculation of the technical-in-strumental future. Furthermore: without widespread volun-

tary participation of the ‘people across the country’ – with-out ordinary common sense, active citizens, and a critical mass of agents of change – regulations, investment and mo-bilisation campaigns are all doomed to fail. There will always be a lack of enforcement, abandoned projects, resistance. Currently, for example, a trans-continental energy network from the North Pole to the Sahara is being planned at the ‘green table’, the realisation of which would call for unheard-of interventions in the infrastructure, while at the same time people observe with astonishment and vexation the time it takes to complete a simple sewage pipe repair in a public square, or development projects in their neighbourhood. Every technology is moulded to its society; every innovation is dependent on context; every policy requires justification.

Containing and adapting to climate change thus entails a new culture of participation, and the kind of political mobilisation that seeks more than just superficial or resigned acceptance by civil society. Instead it should acknowledge civil society’s role in shaping a great transformation and being among those primarily responsible for its success, and should acti-vate this potential. As for the main producers of greenhouse gases, a ‘great transformation’ will come about when we have the following: individual and collective mobility of people and goods, food, and land use or spatial planning. In these fields there has to be a swift and radical change in pri-mary energy consumption, consumption patterns, value sys-tems and lifestyles, because the physical nature of green-house gases makes it imperative to make massive reductions in the very short term and limit production to minimal quan-tities in the long term, worldwide and synchronously, if we are to escape irreversible damage.

Society will therefore be altered not only by climate change but also by climate policy. The society of the United States, for example, cannot cling to its mantra of unlimited individu-al mobility based on fossil fuel energy sources; and a society supplied with renewable energies on a decentralised basis also generates other types of company and industrial cul-tures: (perceived and actual) losers of a low carbon society in particularly energy-intensive branches of production must be neutralised, compensated and integrated. Emerging econ-omies such as Brazil or India, whose CO2 emissions per capi-ta have to date been low, will now have to decide whether they want to choose more climate-friendly options, based on renewable energies, over the extraction of immense re-serves of fossil fuels. The Chinese leadership will also need to establish some other form of legitimation besides the fre-netic growth of the economy. All over the world mentalities and value systems, the logic of cooperation and planning cul-tures, civil society initiatives and social movements will de-velop, all of which will contribute to the Herculean task of the ‘great transformation’.

Considerations in this direction cannot stop at ‘great succes-ses’, like the ‘sustainable society’ that has been a focus of


consideration since the 1990s, nor can they limit themselves solely to the finer points of technical-economic reduction goals in the context of ‘decarbonisation’. One does not win support either with the extreme rhetoric of catastrophe – which generally provokes a defiant response, loss aversion and climate scepticism – or with heavily moralistic appeals that elicit either agreement, which costs nothing, or fear of failure. Anyone who presents the transformation simply as a reduction in our current standard of living and a loss of available options is unlikely to win any supporters at all beyond those groups prepared to live ascetically – just as people are unlikely to believe assurances to the contrary: that everything can remain exactly as it has always been.

For a contemporary theory and prediction of social change, this means that basic concepts like society and community, market and state, agent and system, personality and habitus, crisis and modernity will have to be reconsidered. Until now we have lacked empirical studies and synopses about the proliferation and counter-proliferation of innovations, about how knowledge acquired is transformed into willingness to act, and about possible catalysts of rapid change in social networks, institutional arrangements and political organisa-tions.

Example: the automobile society

Private automobile transport is a good example of how tech-nology adapts to society, because this sector is one of the main sources of CO2 emissions (it also contributes to soil, air and water pollution), and one in which the complex nexus of climate change, technical standards and social structure, or social change, are particularly apparent. In terms of climate history and the history of industrialisation, fossil-fuel-based traffic and transport have contributed on a massive scale to man-made climate change. They are currently responsible for up to a fifth of all CO2 emissions, and the figure is rising. If nine to ten billion inhabitants of the Earth were to demand anything like the same level of fossil-fuel-powered automo-bility as the United States, climatic collapse would be an in-evitability.

What is needed is a climate- and environment-friendly model for mobility, one that organises mobility, where it cannot be avoided, more intelligently. Until now, there has been a fail-ure to implement this, less on account of technical or eco-nomic limitations than as a result of socio-structural and -cultural obstacles and political barriers. The fact that petrol- and diesel-powered cars have become the number one means of transportation worldwide (in Germany more than half of all daily journeys are made by car, meaning that Ger-mans drive an average of 43 kilometres and spend 90 min-utes per day in their cars) is the result of a division of labour and spatial planning which, in industrial mass society, have relocated the majority of workplaces away from the office and have, in addition, spatially segregated homes, education-

al institutions, recreation areas and department stores. With-out the invention of the automobile and its mass distribution, starting in the United States, it would not have been possible for the suburbs to become preferred places of residence (over compact, urban spaces). Big supermarkets would not exist, and people would not have switched over to fast food (instead of home cooking and local supply from small shops); nor would big school centres have been built (instead of lo-cal facilities). And because this automobile infrastructure now exists, it continues to propagate further motor traffic and reinforce the individualistic pattern of movement. Today, the majority of car traffic travels between the aforemen-tioned stations of daily life, usually over a distance of only a few kilometres. Local traffic is underpinned by the global lo-gistics of goods and services.

The fact that the division of work and automobilisation have mutually reinforced each other, and that as a rule road build-ing results in more traffic, are proof of the ‘system-rele-vance’ of the automobile. In the United States and in Germa-ny in particular, car manufacturers and their associated industries are responsible for a large part of the country’s gross domestic product and serve as primary barometers of the economy and indicators of prosperity. Car manufacturers are also still an engine of the industrial relationships be-tween work and capital. Thus the exponentially increasing projections of the car and logistics industries with their Olympian maxim, ‘more, further, faster!’ are seen as laws of Nature rather than horror scenarios of over-development spinning out of control – which is what, objectively speaking, they are.

The fact that entire industries live off the advertising materi-al and medium that make up the automobile leads us to its cultural significance, which, again, is most pronounced in the United States and western Europe. The car is regarded as the leisure vehicle par excellence, ensuring individual mobility and helping to overcome limited boundaries. Road movies and car shows have made the ownership of a pair of wheels a comprehensive cultural definition that structures the en-tirety of professional and daily life, right down to dietary in-take and basic requirements. But a car is much more than this. For the personnel who work, for example, ‘with Daimler’, it is a source of identification: cities like Detroit or Wolfsburg are industrial monocultures. Automobiles still exude an en-during technical and aesthetic fascination which until now few have been able to resist.

The four wheels stand for the engineering knowhow of entire nations. The car is the primary indicator of social advance-ment, for people of all classes an unbeatable status symbol and notorious indicator of reputation. Even in our smaller, flatter world, with excellent means of communication and so-phisticated technologies for local and long-distance trans-port, the car has remained anchored in the cultural identity of Western and westernising societies like almost no other


form of technology. The market economy places sensual needs before opportunities for consumption, and cars pro-vide fun, power, distinction, freedom, comfort, fetishism, technology and sound – the ultimate in consumable sensuali-ty. The car constitutes a mental infrastructure – and all infra-structures structure not only the present, but also the sheer conceivability of the future.

how do we actually want to live?

The tough battle to save General Motors and Opel in the years since 2008 underlines the extent to which the automo-bile industry in the United States and Germany is regarded as ‘system-relevant’. Or was regarded as such? The car in-dustry worldwide is facing a massive challenge and conver-sion. Despite considerable potential for growth in many emerging market countries, it must tackle the question of global overcapacity, adjust to a further, possibly drastic rise in the price of oil, making individual mobility far more ex-pensive, and recognise the necessity of reducing CO2 emis-sions in order to avoid the uncontrolled warming of the cli-mate, and this compels it to look for alternative propulsion systems to the traditional internal combustion engine.

There are two schools of thought on the future of mobility. One holds that it is possible to implement the radical conver-sion of renewable energies at the necessary speed and to the extent needed: we can maintain our current lifestyle and still curb climate change, protect Nature, and also ensure greater fairness around the world. To be precise: people can continue to travel individually in their cars to work, go shop-ping, and commute to their homes in the countryside. They can even fly to the Maledives, because these won’t be un-derwater, not even in a hundred years. This strategy can be called (without party-political bias) ‘green growth’; it can be developed into a global ‘green deal’ that will finally reconcile the ecology with the economy.

However, the development of alternative transport infra-structures is extremely laborious and time-consuming. In the United States and in Germany, as in many other parts of the world, the electrification of motorised individual transport and the substitution of conventional fuels with biofuels is being propagated. The Center for American Progress, which sets the tone for energy and climate policy in the United States, is demanding higher efficiency standards for cars, in-centives for consumers to buy more efficient cars, and that manufacturers develop more efficient technologies, as well as incentives to increase production and use of second- generation biofuels.

These projections show us that the American way of life is to be maintained at all costs. Asked in July 2010 why there should still be cars and long-distance travel in two hundred years’ time, the American Robert B. Laughlin, a Nobel-Prize-

winning physicist, replied, ‘Because we want it.’ There are also, however, desires of a secondary nature: desires relating to what it is we want to want. The second school of thought aims in this direction. It envisages a transport infrastructure with ‘intermodal traffic’, the expansion of local public trans-port and rail services over long distances and high-speed connections, combined with intelligent city and spatial plan-ning. Here, mobility is not transferred to other, more effi-cient technologies, but is redefined and, where possible, avoided, according to normative standards of what consti-tutes a good life. With this in mind, the German President Horst Köhler wrote in the album of the engineers of the Leipzig World Traffic Forum just a few days before his resig-nation: ‘Someone for whom ‘innovation’ means only lower-emission cars is not thinking hard enough. Let us therefore also develop ideas as to how unnecessary journeys and transportation can be avoided in the first place, and how better to plan our cities. Let us consider what we like about our mobile lifestyles, and what just causes us stress and takes time: what is worth keeping and what not. Yes – let us think about how we actually want to live, what good mobility concepts contribute to that, and how we can make them at-tractive to all.’

This school of thought is more demanding that green realism. It believes it is necessary to make major changes in our life-style, and not only for reasons of climate and environmental policy: it also sees the cultural change this would introduce as an opportunity for better human development. In terms of industrial policy it represents a ‘no harm and no regret’ strategy, i.e.: we win with structural change, because we won’t really have to give anything up – because as far as en-ergy creation, mobility, food and land use are concerned, overdeveloped circumstances that are in any case in need of change, and where change would combine economic out-come utility with social and moral procedural utility, would be subject to renegotiation. Better still: we are trying to change things now, when it doesn’t cost as much, rather than later, when change will be costly, or no longer possible.

Intelligent mobility not only continues familiar patterns of mobility using other means, as with ‘e-mobility’, which is now also a favoured alternative in Germany. It questions firmly established and apparently unshakeable mindsets and behavioural patterns, regardless of their respective primary energy basis. We do not increase individual mobility ad infi-nitum; we avoid it where possible in that we once again con-centrate domicile, workplace, leisure and shopping facilities in urban agglomerations, or in abolishing senseless economic incentives (like the scrapping premium) and fiscal incentives (like the commuting allowance), instead promoting locomo-tion technologies, from physical power to super-smart elec-tricity networks. This also includes facilitating and improving the image of pedestrian and cycle traffic, the promotion of car sharing and ride-share opportunities, climate-friendly


travel guidelines, an alternative fleet management by com-panies and administrations, the widespread use of environ-mentally-friendly buses and taxis, and much more.

Anyone who also gives greater thought to the locality, sea-sonality and substantiality of human life will not, as a cus-tomer, expect to be able to have every product on Earth fresh on his table at any time of year, and will not demand that logistics companies should be able to deliver any object of desire to his house from any corner of the world within twenty-four hours. The sustainability that needs to be worked towards relies heavily on individual initiative and the self-organisation of civil society. But these can only be successful when political parties offer open networks and material and psychological incentives to lawmakers and en-vironmental administrators. Thoughtful consumers can be-come key active citizens if they acquire a sense of self-effi-cacy and a collective awareness of their strength.

there is an alternative

One idea currently under discussion is so-called ‘nudges’ – stimuli for desired changes in behaviour – and ‘default op-tions’, which specify the best solutions as standards and only offer the second-best solutions as opt-out alternatives. This mechanism leaves people at liberty to choose: the immedi-ate gratification of desire, or the considered displacement of desire to the future. Protagonists of rational maximisation of utility regard this kind of supported self-limitation as contra-ry to human nature: for them, suggesting preferences to oth-ers, even if indirectly, by way of libertarian paternalism vio-lates a fundamental maxim of a free society. This, of course, fails to acknowledge that the formation of individual prefer-ences (as demonstrated by the example of automobility) is always institutionally mediated, and that secondary desires enable people to reflect on and rationalise the vehemence of their initial, spontaneous desires.

In terms of the history of ideas, this is not revolutionary, be-cause it reflects the general principles of reflexive moderni-sation. Nor is it a political utopia: Germany has in fact im-posed curbs on itself with the smoking ban and the debt limit. Many people would like to smoke, but some do eventu-

ally stop so as not to harm themselves or others; then, per-haps, they vote in a referendum for a general smoking ban, not least to prevent themselves from slipping back into bad habits. The Federal Republic, in an attempt to tackle runaway interest on its debt, and interest on that interest, caps its ability to get deeper into debt through incremental deficit reduction.

The mechanism of rational self-regulation means that, at point in time t1 (today), societies can afford moderate and justified self-denial, even if this only takes effect at a later point in time, t2 (tomorrow). And this is precisely the payoff in the awareness of climate change as social change. People acquire a far-sighted attitude towards their possible second-best preferences in the future, and also towards these pref-erences in the long term, making themselves adaptive to better solutions. The TINA principle not only established a particular (and essentially completely impractical) economic model as a dogma, it also killed off any reflexive preparation for the future, and degraded politics to the administration of practical constraints and permanent crisis management.

The current crisis teaches us that we need to learn to think in the future perfect: what we will have to have done in ten years’ time in order for future generations to live differently, and better, in fifty or one hundred years. It is impossible to make precise predictions as to how society will be altered by climate change, but it is possible approximately to determine the courses it can take. And citizens of democracies are in a position to decide which courses they prefer.

This, then, is where change is urgently needed: because the political elites are continuing with the policy of taking small steps where determined, at times radically transformative steps are necessary (and also possible!). They are clinging to national frameworks where global problems must entail global cooperation. The instruments for a new environmen-tal, climate and energy policy are in place. We do not lack the global knowledge, capital, technologies and policies to make the transition to more climate-friendly economies. The problems lie with the political process – politics – and insuf-ficient translation of the two-degree guard rail into a manda-tory global convention, or polity.

This text was first published in the bpb magazine Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte, 32-22/2010, 30th July 2010.

Prof. dr. ClaUs lEGGEWiE (b. 1950) is a professor of Political Science. He is the Director of the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities in Essen (KWI) and co-director of the Käte Hamburger Collegium ‘Political Cultures of World Society’ at the University of Duisburg-Essen. He is a member of the federal government’s German Advisory Council on Global Change (WGBU) and director of the project Climate and Culture.

Translated by Charlotte Collins


German advisory Council on Global Changehttp://www.wbgu.de/en/home/en

institute for advanced study in the humanitieshttp://www.kulturwissenschaften.de/en/home/index.htmlen


CliMatE of thE fUtUrEWhy it’s so diffiCUlt to rEsPoNd to CliMatE ChaNGE

the concept of climate implies both effectuation and endurance – an ambivalence it shares with the concept of culture itself. is this the reason why it is so difficult to agree on concrete measures for implementing climate protection on a cultural level?

By Thomas Macho

Lake Mývatn in northern Iceland. An isolated volcanic island in the mid-Atlantic, Iceland has one

of the cleanest environments on the planet. Its water, coming from natural springs and glaciers and filtered

hrough layers of volcanic rock, is exceptionally pure. Photo: Charlotte Collins © Goethe-Institut

Questions concerning the cultural assumptions about and the consequences of climate change are currently being dis-cussed in a wide variety of contexts. Yet also at issue is what each of us can do to counter impending disasters. In ‘Over To You’, the title of the final chapter of Tim Flannery’s program-matic analysis, The Weather Makers (2005), it is precisely the author’s concrete proposals (covering a mere five pages and including suggestions such as buying environmentally-friend-ly refrigerators) that has engendered scepticism rather than inspired confidence. What does a culture that protects and preserves the environment actually look like? Hardly any-body today seriously doubts that in the last millennia hu-mans have influenced and changed climatic conditions in certain environments – at latest, since the gradual transition to a sedentary life, or ‘Neolithic Revolution’ as coined by Vere Gordon Childe in Man Makes Himself (1936) – and that most of those changes were not planned, the majority of in-fluences undertaken unconsciously.

Culture = climate?

Johann Gottfried Herder anticipated as much in his Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit [Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man] written more than two hundred years ago, wherein he developed the concept of a climate-based cultural anthropology. Climate is – like culture

– a ‘compound of powers and influences’, to which every living being contributes, and promotes in ‘reciprocating mu-tations’; man has stolen ‘fire from heaven’ and ‘has contri-buted to the alteration of climate in many ways’. Europe was once a ‘dank forest’, the inhabitants of the continent ‘have changed with the climate’. According to Herder, even Egypt would be nothing more than ‘the slime of the Nile’ without the influence of man’s ‘policy and art’. Ancient civilisation was ‘gained’ from the Nile Delta and ‘all living creation adapted itself to the artificial climate’. He considers mankind a ‘band of bold though diminutive giants, gradually descend-


ing from the mountains’, trying to subjugate the earth and change the climate with their ‘feeble fists’. The philosopher concludes with the words, ‘The future will show us how far we are capable of going with it.’

How do humans create, change or endure the climate? Her-der speaks of ‘diminutive giants’ with ‘feeble fists’ as though he wanted to underscore the ambivalence between power and powerlessness in dealing with climate as culture. Trees, swamps, and mud deserts have disappeared, Herder claims, along with the climate; the inhabitants of the forests and riverbeds have also changed. Nature is cultivated, but that goes for man as well. Did initiatives or passions prevail? Ob-viously, the term climate and the concept of culture share an ambiguity in terms of effectuating and enduring. Culture is described as what humans have produced by manipulating nature, but culture is also what is imposed on the individual involuntarily in terms of his/her historical, geographical, lin-guistic or political/religious background. Is culture a pseudo-nym for climate (and vice versa)? Is this the reason why it is so difficult to agree on concrete measures for implementing climate protection culturally?

the ‘social uterus’

Often enough, humans create a connection between the cli-mate in their concrete social environment and the earth’s cli-mate itself. This tendency is reflected in a variety of com-mon metaphors: from the curses that ‘rain down’ from a boss who’s taking it out on his employees again, to ‘dark clouds’ forming on the horizon of a bright friendship; from the ‘bolt from the blue’ when two lovers first meet, to the ‘sunny smile’ of one’s beloved, the gradual ‘cooling’ of a relationship, to two antagonists who greet each other with ‘frosty’ ex-pressions and ‘icy’ stares. Who knows, perhaps today’s de-bate on climate change is at all plausible – in terms of its ab-stract, predominately simulated metrological manifestations – because it can be mapped by experiences of social climate change, and perhaps, conversely, doubt surfaces with regard to those responsible for the global climate when the differ-ence between micro- and macro-climate can be character-ised as an ‘insulation’ survival strategy.

Hugh Miller coined this term in his book Progress and Decline: The Group in Evolution (1964). He describes insulation as the unplanned techniques of socially organised creatures to re-duce the evolutionary pressure to adapt by developing a cli-mate within a climate (internal climate) that differs sharply from the external environment. For example, when plants grow closely together, they often create a more favourable climate for themselves by providing their external environ-ment with increased shade and moisture. The plants opti-mise their conditions for survival; they advance to become

the patrons of their own evolution. Insulation processes in-crease protection; they offer the possibility of building and residing in ‘ecological niches’. According to Dieter Claessens in Das Konkrete und das Abstrakte [The Concrete and the Ab-stract] (1980): ‘During the evolution of mammals towards the niche function of a survival-friendly medium like water, to the clearer protection of the egg, lastly transferring it to the parent animal (who then becomes the offspring’s patron and develops an artificial internal climate, which is the precondi-tion for a more ambitious evolution), humans reverse the evolution to a certain extent: the uterus now becomes a so-cial space, which means nothing more than that part of the protective function (which the mother’s interior had taken over) once again shifts outwards, but this process would not be possible if such an exterior space had not previously been established: the “social uterus”.’ the climate as a cultural and aesthetic production

In other words: as specialists of social insulation, humans are also experts at producing a favourable climate-within-a- climate for their own survival. They generate their small pri-vate climate by heating their homes in the winter, for exam-ple, and in summer by providing technology to cool the climate, even if these measures affect the external environ-ment adversely. They find it hard to believe the news that a partial sacrifice in regulating their interior climate could pos-sibly help improve their chances of controlling the outdoor climate. Even if this message belongs within the canon of contemporary discourse, it still contradicts more than a cen-tury of practical living, learning and thinking about the cli-mate as a cultural and aesthetic production. While in most agrarian civilisations – from the empires of the ancient Orient to the early modern European states – people learned to study and interpret the diverse manifestations of climate in terms of being a favourable or unfavourable omen for their survival, in the era of modernising industrial and media technology the distance between the internal and external has grown so radically that even the worst predictions can only be perceived as though they were a theatre play or dis-aster film.

As Peter Sloterdijk poignantly observed in Schäume. Sphären. Plurale Sphärologie [Spheres III] (2004) we have mutated into a public environment. ‘Modern meteorology (derived in the seventeenth century from the Greek metéoros: “floating in the air”) – which can be understood as the science of “rain-fall” and all the other flashes in the sky or bodies floating up high – by means of its most successful journalistic format, the so-called weather report (informations météorologiques, Wetterbericht), has imposed an historically new conversa-tional form on the populations of modern nation states and political media communities, which may aptly be termed a


“climatologic briefing”. Modern societies are weather-discus-sing communities to the extent that an official climate infor-mation system provides its citizens with news about the pre-vailing weather conditions and allows them to engage in conversations about it. Supported by the media, weather communication transforms large communities, encompassing tens of millions of members, into village-like neighbourhoods in which people exchange comments about the weather: that it’s too hot, too cold, too rainy, or too dry for the season. […] Modern weather reports form national populations into spectators of a climate theatre in which the recipients com-pare their personal perceptions to the ongoing reports and thus form their own opinion about the current state of the weather. By describing the weather as an idea of nature, me-teorologists gather the masses into an audience of insiders under a common sky; they make of each person a climate re-viewer, who assesses nature’s performances according to his/her own personal taste.’

The theatricalisation of climate certainly envisages social weather as created weather, with climate engineers as the authors and directors of convincing stories and images. It comprehends climate and weather as the results of a strat-egy, a plan. This plan may have as its aim the improvement of one’s own internal climate, but equally it may aim to worsen that of the enemy. It is no coincidence, Peter Sloter-dijk writes in Luftbeben. An den Quellen des Terrors [Terror from the Air] (2002), that a poison gas attack counts as one of the exemplary forms of action in modern warfare: it is no longer targeting the body of the enemy but his environment, his atmosphere, his climate. According to Sloterdijk: ‘The twentieth century started in a spectacularly revealing man-ner on 22nd April, 1915, at Ypres in Northern France, when, for the first time in the history of humanity, the German army used a chlorine gas against the Franco-Canadian forces which was meant to indiscriminately exterminate the enemy. In the preceding weeks, undetected by the enemy, German soldiers had installed thousands of hidden batteries, gas cyl-inders of a hitherto unknown type, at the edge of the Ger-man trenches. At exactly 6:00 p.m. pioneers of the new regi-ment, commanded by Colonel Max Peterson, opened 1600 large (40 kg) and 4130 smaller (20 kg) bottles filled with chlorine in the prevailing north-northeast wind. Through this “blowing off” of the liquefied substance, around 150 tons of chlorine formed a gas cloud that spread approximately 6 kilometres wide and 600 to 900 metres deep.’

Such experiences have shaped the mentality of modern cul-tures. According to Marshall McLuhan in Understanding Me-dia: The Extensions of Man (1964), they form the appalling scenes of a collective nostalgia for the transformation of man into a ‘cosmic frog-man’. ‘Modern engineering provides a means of housing that ranges from the space capsule to

walls created by air jets’; but it has also exerted a lasting in-spiration on the philosophy of the twentieth century: from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus to Heidegger’s ‘anticipation of death’ to Sartre’s L’être et le néant [Being and Nothingness] and end-ing with Peter Sloterdijk’s Sphärologie [Spheres]. It’s no coinci-dence that Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Sartre were sta-tioned as weather observers on the eastern front and at the Ludendorff offensive during World War I, and on the Magi-not Line during World War II. They were supposed to predict the movements of wind and clouds to better assess the scope of their own and the enemy’s artillery defences.

Utopia and fashion

How should we assess future changes in the Earth’s climate when even philosophers are only able to predict the coming events during an emergency? Those who want to speak about the future must indeed distinguish between the near and distant future. Near future is in an hour, tomorrow, next week, next fall or spring. The furthest reach of the near fu-ture probably extends no further than one legislative term away, or the World Cup. Distant future, on the other hand, is the new century, an age of technological triumphs or cata-strophic defeats. The distant future is divided into eras and their catchword is utopia, the catchword of the near future: trend. Based on this distinction, we could ask whether, or not, the actual loss of positive distant future – usually dis-cussed as a crisis of utopia – focuses our attention on the near future, the interest in fashion and trends.

Only in rare cases do policymakers think within the Egyptian dream interpreter Joseph’s horizon of time: he developed a strategic plan for the Pharaoh based on forecasting the weather for more than three terms (seven fat years, seven dry years). What future is achieved using which technologies of planning and forecasting? In ancient times, the oracle was used for making decisions about the near future; however, astrology was also used for the construction of epochs and the distant future. And today? What range can be tackled by statistics? How reliable are scenarios created with the help of computer simulations? The issue of early warning systems has already signalled that today’s dominance of the near fu-ture may be connected to techno-methodological difficulties for constructing the distant future – whether in policy, econ-omy, or ecology. But then there is a great risk that we will discuss the climate of the future only as long as it belongs to the latest political controversy. A quarter of a century ago, it was opportune to imagine the impending nuclear war, while sixty years ago the good fortune of a nuclear future was being celebrated with excitement and enthusiasm; at that time even Ernst Bloch in Das Prinzip Hoffnung (The Principle of Hope) (1959) gushed


about a technologically-altered climate: ‘A few hundred pounds of uranium and thorium are enough to make the Sahara and the Gobi Desert disappear, to transform Siberia and northern Canada, Greenland and Antarctica into the Ri- viera.’ Even in the twenty-first century, we are born into cul-tures over which we have no more influence than we do over the prevailing climate – and like the climate, culture may be seen as simultaneously being one’s destiny and project. Climate change is cultural change, and vice versa. Even

radical changes in life’s climatic and cultural conditions can only hope for the flexibility that a glance at the past history of mankind shows, like the ‘diminutive giants’ in Herder’s sense. The Weimar scholar was right when he commented in his Outlines of a Philosophy of the History Man that possibly a ‘traveller’ or perhaps even a new science and philosophy could be found that pursues ‘without prejudice or exaggera-tion the spirit of climate’. This hope has not been fulfilled to this day.

thoMas MaCho has been Professor of Cultural History at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin since 1993, where he co-founded the Hermann von Helmholtz Centre for Cultural Techniques. In recent years he has been extensively involved in addressing questions relating to climate change. He also co-edited the catalogue for the exhibition ‘Two Degrees: Weather, Mankind and His Climate’ at the German Hygiene Museum in Dresden in 2008.

Translated by Zaia Alexander

Copyright: Goethe-Institut e. V., Humboldt, November 2009http://www.goethe.de/wis/bib/prj/hmb/the/kli/de5328757.htm


Exhibition: Zwei Grad: das Wetter, der Mensch und sein klimahttp://www.dhmd.de/neu/index.php?id=1318en


CliMatE, ECo, aNd GrEEN tEChNoloGyhoW ENviroNMENtal ProblEMs arE rEflECtEd iN laNGUaGE

awareness of environmental problems since the 1960s has also generated its own language in societies in which these problems are frequently discussed. German in particular has a wealth of new words that have evolved from environmental issues. our translators and readers can decide for themselves whether the other languages of Fikrun wa Fann / Art&Thought also have equivalents …

By Rolf-Bernhard Essig

La Jamais Contente, the fastest vehicle of its day, in 1899. Photo: Archive © Goethe-Institut

Linguists are a peculiar species. We cannot simply leave words and their meanings alone. Like suspicious members of the audience at a magic show we keep a very close eye on language and its sleights of hand – and with good reason, because language has its fingers in every imaginable pie! And understanding language correctly can be vital, at times even a question of survival, starting with the ability to inter-pret correctly the operating instructions of the many elec-tronic aids we use in everyday life. Someone who uses the hairdryer in the bath is likely to find the experience unpleas-antly electrifying. The importance of language and of under-standing things correctly is also increasing outside the realm of precise technical terminology. Everyday language and the languages of the media and politics all exert a powerful in-fluence on all areas of life.

They create a climate that is particularly favourable to cer-tain letters, words, and compound words, and as a result terms, slogans, letters suddenly sprout everywhere and mer-rily run wild throughout our daily lives, producing many and varied fruits in our collective consciousness.

One current example is the extremely fertile term ‘climate’ itself. It lends itself very well to being hybridised with all sorts of other words, from the business climate index to cli-mate summits all the way up to the World Climate Confer-ence. German even deems air conditioners ‘climate-regula-tion equipment’ (‘Klimaanlage’). Many people worry about the climate: some are worried about rain at an open-air con-cert, while others are thinking about a dramatic increase in global warming. Yet etymologically the word actually has nothing to do with the weather. When people in Ancient Greece referred to ‘klima’, they did not mean a combination of temperature, air pressure, wind speed, humidity and hours of sunshine: they meant the tilt of the Earth’s axis. ‘Kli-ma’ evolved from the Greek word ‘klinein’, meaning ‘to set down, to slope’. If one wished to express that the Earth tilted from the Equator towards the poles, one referred to this phenomenon as ‘the tilt’, thus: ‘klima’.

It was only in the Early Modern Era that the borrowed Greek word acquired another meaning. Clearly an understanding developed of how the Equator thing affected geography. In


the sixteenth century people started to write about how ‘klima’ had something to do with warmth and weather condi-tions.

From this point on one can only wonder how people ever managed without this word. At last travellers were able to blame their bad mood on the damp/hot/unbearably change-able climate. Gardeners had an excuse as to why a lemon tree simply refuses to thrive in a harsh climate. And employ-ees were finally able to summarise the problems they exper-ienced at work by putting them down to a bad ‘Betriebs- klima’ (working environment).

In Goethe’s time there was already a conviction that people were influenced by climate. The poet E.T.A. Hoffmann wrote: ‘Climate, fatherland, traditions… how much they effect the in-ner and outer formation of the world citizen!’ Even the spiritual condition of an urban population could be described in this way, as it was by Ludwig Börne in 1832 in his Letters from Paris: ‘The moral climate of Paris has always done me good… I quickly divested myself of all my concerns and plunged jubilantly into the fresh turmoil of the billowing crowd.’

However, the best neologism using the word climate was un-doubtedly coined by Friedrich Schiller in his drama The Rob-bers. When asked how one becomes a real rogue, the rogue Spiegelberg replies: ‘…to make a rascal you must have brains – besides which it requires a national genius, a certain rascal-climate, so to speak.’

Does Germany really have a ‘national genius’ for creating a ‘rascal-climate’? I’d rather not answer that. However, thirty years ago a pop band of the Neue Deutsche Welle (a musical genre in 1980s Germany) believed that there was a very good climate, and called itself ‘Prima Klima’ (‘great climate’). The catchy rhyme was not a new one, but it was only after this that it started popping up thousands of times in the lan-guage of daily and business life. A ‘prima Klima’ is what everyone wishes for these days. But the laid-back, irrespon-sible playfulness of the 1980s has been superseded by a seriousness, an urgency, a tone that could be described as apocalyptic.

Energy turnaround

Something similar occurred in the weeks following the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear power plant in spring 2011, albeit in a much swifter and also more concentrated form. It was almost shocking to see how – as happened in Japanese politics after the multiple nuclear meltdowns and explosions

– many public representatives and media outlets, particularly in Germany, hastily abandoned environmental positions they had been insisting for years were well-founded. Altered cir-cumstances naturally call for altered courses of action. As

the Lakota Indian saying goes, ‘If you realise you’re riding a dead horse, get off!’ At the same time, one can only marvel at what some newspapers, with grim humour, referred to as ‘standpoint meltdown’ (‘Positionsschmelze’): a pun that com-bines the melting of apparently rock-solid standpoints and the recently-acknowledged nuclear meltdown in three of the Japanese reactors.

We in Germany are witnessing an abrupt ‘energy turnaround’ (‘Energiewende’). Again. The word ‘Energiewende’ was al-ready being used publicly in 1980 – to be precise, in a report by the green think-tank Öko-Institut, the title of which re-ferred to ‘Growth and Prosperity without Oil and Uranium’. From this point on the watchword appeared more and more frequently in public linguistic usage. Today, putting the term ‘Energiewende’ into an Internet search engine will result in almost one and a half million hits. There is therefore an opti-mal linguistic and social climate for the subject of ‘energy turnaround’. How this is to be achieved is another question.

Few people will realise that this turnaround is directly linked to another word: catastrophe. Translated literally, the prima-ry meaning of the term ‘catastrophe’, which also comes from the Ancient Greek, is ‘reversal, turnaround’, or, as a technical term in theatre, ‘a change in the action for the worse, leading to the downfall of the hero’. The climate catastrophe we read so much about could also therefore be translated as ‘climate change’ (‘Klimawende’): this too is on everyone’s lips, not to mention the ‘electricity turnaround’ (‘Stromwende’). Instead of ‘turnaround’ (‘-wende’), one could also refer to it as ‘revo-lution’, since the term ‘revolution’, which comes from the Latin, literally means ‘rotation, upheaval’ and is therefore also a form of turnaround.

A revolution promises global orientation towards renewable or regenerative energy, such as solar energy or wind farms. As a linguist one turns up one’s nose at this, since both lin-guistically and technically such an expression is nonsense. In physics, the law of conservation of energy applies to closed systems, and from a certain point of entropy we can no longer use energy. It has, in this physical sense, been used up. However, the term ‘renewable energy’ has now estab-lished itself and been adopted into the language. Who’s going to want to tilt at that windmill?

‘Renewable energy’ also sounds too nice in the language of politics, lobbyists, and everyday life, as if there were a form of energy that was permanently at our disposal, created no additional CO2 emissions, spared our resources, or could defi- nitely not be used up in the next couple of thousand years. This certainly applies to solar and geothermal energy, wind and wave power. It is not quite so simple as far as hydro-electric energy from dams is concerned, and for energy de-rived from biomasses (oil, wood, coal etc.) it is sheer non-sense.


Dissatisfaction, of the kind expressed in my factual and lin-guistic criticism, is not necessarily a bad thing. It character-ises people; perhaps it is even what distinguishes them, es-pecially the technician or the craftsman, whose dissatisfaction with the weaknesses of existing systems is always prompting him to seek new solutions, or else to develop them himself.

the electric car – one hundred years ago

Might this be why Camille Jenatzy, a Belgian, called his tor-pedo-shaped electric(!) automobile ‘La Jamais Contente’

– ‘The Never-Satisfied’? On 29th April 1899, in this very vehicle, he became the first man to break the 100 kilometres per hour mark. 105.882 kph! 1899! In those days it was by no means clear that it would be the combustion engine that would win the race to become the motor of the twentieth century: e-mobiles were much faster and cleaner, steam automobiles far more reliable. What if the e-car had come out on top back then? It doesn’t bear thinking about! As it was, cheap oil and, above all, the invention of the electric starter motor ensured the triumph of the combustion engine.

Yet in 1900 electricity was experiencing an unparalleled boom all across the world. The first electric locomotive was built in 1879, and not long afterwards, in 1881, the first elec-tric trams started running, quickly acquiring a nickname they’re still known by in some parts of the world – people simply called the tram ‘the electric’.

This boom was in fact already the second e-boom, as it was based primarily on the findings of scientists in the eight-eenth and early nineteenth centuries. They made such groundbreaking discoveries that we encounter the names of these researchers at every turn. An author once aptly de-scribed them as ‘measurement people’, because units of measurement were named after them: André Marie Ampère, Antoine Henri Becquerel, Charles Augustin de Coulomb, Michael Faraday, James Prescott Joule, Isaac Newton, Georg Simon Ohm, Count Alessandro Volta and, of course, James Watt, to name but a few.

the career of the ‘eco-’ prefix

Only a radical eco-dictatorship would be in a position to ex-ecute the climate turnaround (in order to prevent climate ca-tastrophe) fast enough. We are not, however, actually threat-ened with the imposition of any such dictatorship. It is only linguistically, in Western countries and in Germany above all, that the ‘eco’ prefix has rapidly gained significance. Fifteen years ago it was a favourite term of abuse and mockery; to-day, it has established itself in the boardroom, the media, and supermarkets. In conservative circles people used to complain about ‘eco-terror’. That scarcely happens any more. Even the conservative Welt newspaper writes about the

coming ‘ecocracy’ (‘Ökokratie’) without using quotation marks. ‘Ecocracy’ sounds nicer than ‘eco-dictatorship’ (‘Öko- diktatur’), and more like democracy. Translated literally, ‘eco-cracy’ would mean something like ‘the rule of the ecos’ or ‘the rule of ecology’. That hardly scares anyone nowadays, because the Greens and people with ‘alternative’ lifestyles, also known as ‘eco-freaks’ (‘Ökofreaks’) and ‘eco-rebels’ (‘Ökorebellen’) or ‘eco-warriors’ and formerly the objects of ridicule, have become successful in business and now occupy central positions in society. What is especially important about this is that they have been able to prove that a certain ‘eco-touch’ (‘Ökotouch’) can itself be sexy. No one’s afraid of the ‘eco-man’ (‘Ökomann’) or ‘eco-woman’(‘Ökofrau’) any more. Eco is in; eco is cool; it’s even a selling point. That’s why, along with the occasional, much-reviled evil ‘ecovil’ (Ökowicht), you’ll also find the ‘eco-republic’, ‘eco-products’, ‘eco-test’, and ‘eco-farmers’ – with, of course, ‘eco-seeds’ and ‘eco-produce’ – not to mention ‘eco-nappies’. From ‘eco-foot-ballers’ to the ‘eco-zoo’ – which should perhaps offer refuge to the now-endangered ‘eco-pigs’ – not even economists are laughing these days, having themselves brought forth an ‘eco-economist’. His name is Ottmar Edenhofer, he’s the world’s first Professor of the ‘Economy of Climate Change’ at the TU Berlin, and he really was dubbed an ‘eco-economist’ by the Potsdamer Neuesten Nachrichten. When he ponders the ‘eco-house’, the linguistic cat really does start to chase its own tail: ‘eco’ (‘Öko’) comes from the Ancient Greek ‘oikos’, which means ‘house’. So an ‘eco-house’ is actually a ‘house-house’; and the economy was originally ‘house-management’ (‘Haus-Wirtschaft’), leading to the German technical terms for agriculture (‘Landwirtschaft’ – ‘land-management’) and, eventually, the study of economics (‘management sciences’ – ‘Wirtschaftswissenschaften’). All this snappy eco-fashion, on the other hand, is based on the word ‘ecology’ (‘Ökolo-gie’), invented by the biologist Ernst Haeckel 135 years ago. ‘Oikos’ can mean not only house but also habitat: so ecology became first the study of habitats, then the study of the en-vironment, addressing scientifically the interrelationships of the creatures living there and their living conditions.

Another turnaround is equally apparent in both language and reality, one that has not yet really registered in the general consciousness. Anyone joining the ecologically-aware Green Party in the 1970s had a demonstratively reactionary life-style. They wore home-knitted jerseys, ‘pacified’ army par-kas, so-called Jesus boots, or plimsolls; they lived in the countryside, in communes, experimenting with alternative ways of living. It was practically a sin to own a car unless it was named after an animal: an old VW Beetle, a old Citroen 2CV (affectionately called an ‘Ente’, or duck, in German), or an old VW bus (a ‘Bully’, like the bulldog). As understandable and reasonable as this attitude was as a form of opposition to a senseless technocracy, today’s orientation towards green technology is equally sensible and welcome. It’s not only Green politicians and Green voters who are enthusiastic


about so-called green technology: so are most citizens, who can imagine living in ‘green cities’ in the near future. Much of today’s ‘green’ vocabulary would be incomprehensible to the early Green pioneers – which in turn goes to show how the climate of a society and actual climate change are capable of altering the language in the space of just a few decades. What the natural philosopher Heraclitus said 2,500 years ago still holds true, perhaps even more so today: ‘Everything flows.’ Electricity flows, and information flows particularly

fast and efficiently, but language is also in a happy state of flux – if, that is, one is not left in the dark, and is instead both plugged in and switched on. Not every shock results in a blackout. A sudden surge of electricity can enable one to see things in a clearer light, perhaps even inducing a sudden state of enlightenment. Then neurons wildly fire off their mi-nuscule but highly conducive electrical impulses, creating a very productive spark between the areas of what is still the most complex object in the universe: the human brain.

Rolf-BeRnhaRd essig is a freelance author and journalist living in Bamberg. He is best known for his books on the history of German idioms.




rEqUiEM for thE fUtUrEWritiNG a NovEl aboUt CatastroPhiC CliMatE ChaNGE

although climate change is one of the most urgent problems of the present day, very few attempts have been made to address the topic in literature. ilija trojanow’s novel Eistau [Melting Ice] is one exception. in the following article the author explains why he took this as his theme.

By Ilija Trojanow

Thingvellir National Park, Iceland. Photo: Charlotte Collins © Goethe-Institut

I can’t remember when I first heard about global warming. It’s such a familiar subject, it feels as if it’s always been part of my life, but that can’t be true. I can’t have known about it for more than fifteen years, and it was certainly a matter of time, a few years or so, before I took it seriously. The hor-rendous consequences of desertification do form one of my childhood memories, though. One of the first things I ever wrote was prompted by a school trip to Lake Turkana in northern Kenya, an area suffering severe drought at the time and still today. It was an elegiac cri de coeur about deadly in-justice and direst poverty entitled ‘The Sadness of Dried-Up Rivers’. I could still picture the emaciated people we saw for months afterwards, and it was a long time before I could rid myself of a basic feeling of deep disquiet. At first I found it hard to visualise the concrete impact of global warming: my only picture was of a woman in northern Kenya with the flesh hanging off her bones, who had clung to my arm and insisted over and over that I couldn’t leave until we’d over-come the drought – together. One or two degrees, sixty or eighty centimetres, 450 or 500 parts per million – it was ob-vious the projected, fiercely disputed figures implied grim consequences, but I couldn’t get a sense of them, I couldn’t

see them, my imagination didn’t spark into life. As a citizen I was helpless, and as a writer I felt dependent on second-hand images.

So I probably would never have embarked on a novel about global warming if I hadn’t been troubled by a dream, or rather a nightmare. It was of a man lying prone on a scree-covered slope, surrounded by what had once been a glacier. The man was a glaciologist, and he had lost the object of his study and his lifelong passion. He seemed infinitely sad and defeated. That was my dream, and it imprinted itself all the more deeply on my memory because it hadn’t arisen out of anything even remotely to do with my life. I’d never seen the man, and, at that point, I didn’t know a single glaciologist, nor had I really had any close dealings with glaciers myself. Years earlier, I had travelled to the source of the Ganges on the Gangotri Glacier and, without dwelling on it particularly, had written, ‘In the Himalayas, the glaciers are thawing, as if humankind has left the freezer open.’ I had also quoted a prophecy in the thousand-year-old Brahmavaivarta Purana that one day, when the sins that are washed off in the Ganges have become legion, the river will hide itself away


under the earth. Incidentally, the media recently announced some good news on that score: rather than in 2035, as had previously been claimed, this won’t happen until 2050. But, other than that, I hadn’t had anything to do with glaciers when I had the dream.

I couldn’t seem to brush it off. The more I thought of the man who had lost his glacier, the deeper he seemed to spiral down into existential doubt and disillusionment about the nature of civilisation, which brought with it a thoroughgoing rejection of our economic system, way of life and structures of belief. To paraphrase Goethe:

Er sprach zu mir, er sang zu mir;Da war’s um mich geschehn;Halb zog er mich, halb sank ich hinUnd ward kaum noch gesehn.

(He spoke to me, he sang to me;Resistance all was vain;Half was I pulled down, half sank I in,And ne’er was seen again.)

So the two of us set out in search of release, or a cure, and, for a time, we found them in the place where the ice and the glaciers have so far escaped the great thaw: the Antarctic. I imagined the former glaciologist signing on to a cruise ship as lecturer, expert and guide. The Antarctic’s pristine state exhilarates him, obviously, but, at the same time, he feels tormented by the knowledge of what will become of it when humans take over. Visions of its rape and plunder are trig-gered by the slightest events: a soldier tossing away his ciga-rette butt in penguin breeding grounds, an accident involving another ship, passengers’ arrogant or thoughtless remarks. The Antarctic is the last sacred grove on earth, and the idea of it being destroyed is so unbearable to him that he comes to a conclusion: it is incumbent upon him to prevent humans encroaching on it any further.

Whereas the Arctic’s neighbours are champing at the bit to exploit its mineral resources (a state of affairs that has re-cently led to diplomatic wrangling between Russia and the USA and nearly provoked a military incident between Cana-da and Denmark), the Antarctic Treaty, which remains in force until at least 2048, prohibits all commercial exploita-tion and freezes any territorial claims to the region. People may already envisage the end of the Arctic as sober fact, but the Antarctic can still be saved. This dichotomy will deter-mine the structure of my novel, a Manichean one. As its pro-tagonist puts it: ‘“The Arctic and Antarctic, ladies and gentle-men, represent radical antitheses. One is seasonal ice, the other a continent. One is inexorably melting; the other is a sheet of ice four thousand metres deep. One is doomed to destruction; the other relatively well protected and by no means yet lost. One is a mirror of our destructiveness; the

other a symbol of our enlightenment. To summarise: bad above, good below; Hell above, Heaven below. These, ladies and gentlemen, are the twin poles of our future.”’ It’s easy having an idea. Tallying it with the facts, imbuing it with plausibility and credibility isn’t that hard either. The real difficulties start when you try to commit it to paper. Writing not only fleshes out ideas, it also throws up a host of prob-lems. How do you write about the Antarctic, which can only be visited for brief periods? How do you write about the last Terra Nullius, a land that no state owns and no one inhabits? How do you write about a landscape that has barely fea-tured in literature, humans tending to leave undescribed places they don’t inhabit? Searching through the world’s lit-erature under the keywords iceberg or glaciers, it’s amazing how little comes up. Very few authors have devoted them-selves to the Antarctic. The American writer Nathaniel Haw-thorne, for instance, was actively prevented from joining Wilkes’ famous expedition because ‘the style in which this gentleman writes is too wordy and ornate to transmit a genuine, level-headed impression of the atmosphere of the expe-dition. Furthermore, a man so talented and cultivated as the aforesaid Mr. Hawthorne will never be able to grasp the na-tional and military significance of any discoveries it may make.’ That, at any rate, was the explanation given by an American politician, since the question as to whether an au-thor should be permitted to go to the Antarctic was debated in the House of Congress. I, on the other hand, simply had to email a Norwegian shipping company.

A ship, then, as the scene of the action, a non-place in mo-tion, its destination uncertain. Ships have always been the paradigmatic setting for escalating tragedy, isolated as they are on the perilous high seas, far from life’s usual tamed rivers, closed spaces, in which representatives of humankind can indulge their folly. Sebastian Brant used the conceit in his morality-play-cum-satire Das Narrenschiff in 1494. His trenchant mixture of castigation and instruction focused on the seven deadly sins, of which only two are significant now and of relevance to the novel: pride and gluttony. Almost five hundred years later Katherine Porter wrote The Ship of Fools, a remake, which, as she explained, envisages the craft as ‘a universal image of the ship of this world on its journey into eternity’, stopping off in the – by now – all too imagin-able hell of National Socialism. The universal image is exactly the same as in Brant’s time; only the conception of eternity has changed.

And so I embarked on one of the luxury cruisers that ply be-tween Ushuaia in deepest Patagonia and the Antarctic Penin-sula in the austral summers. We sailed down the Beagle Channel, past landmarks graced with names such as Mount Misery and Cape Deceit, Last Hope Bay and Fury Island, which seemed a good sign from a literary point of view. I soon succumbed to the poetry of an unfamiliar landscape,


and sought ways to express it. ‘Waking early, I go out for a run, sixty fast laps on the weather deck in the sleepy grey light. The waters circling the Antarctic flow round me, and so there we are, the ocean and a man who’s just woken up, doing our clockwise laps together; it reminds me of the tem-ples in Ladakh over ten years ago where we used to perform the ritual circling of the deities first thing in the morning be-fore the start of another exhausting working day, not in or-der to ingratiate ourselves with the locals, as we were ac-cused of doing by narrow-minded Westerners, always quick to dismiss any desire to broaden one’s horizons as an at-tempt to curry favour, but because it seemed obvious to us we should do our own, small, bit towards preserving the cos-mic equilibrium. The water groans like magma, the waves climb to no more than a few metres – this is a relatively calm crossing. Normally you’re guaranteed to run into a storm in the Drake Passage that has to be ridden out before you can coast into the paradisiacal peace of Terra Nullius, the eye of the hurricane. I complete my laps in time with the circumpo-lar current that drives 150 million tons of water, birds glide through the half-light, cutting the cold air with their sharp wings, two laps make a figure of eight on its side, white pet-rels rise in steep arcs, black petrels fall like judges’ gavels, diving for fish in the troughs between the waves’ gleaming ridges, and I wheel on, round and round, and with each step the ship under my feet recedes further into oblivion.’

The Antarctic is not an easy place to reach or to grasp. Ad-verts featuring cuddly penguins have only been enticing tourists to visit for twenty years (roughly as long as we’ve been aware of the full danger of global warming). Before then the Antarctic was a virtually inaccessible, if not actively threatening, place, as in the Polynesian myth of Hui-Te-Rang-iora, who in the sixth century sailed further south than any warrior before him, persevering until the ocean curdled, then set hard, so hard and cold that the hero turned away with a shudder and headed home. Amundsen and Scott’s expedi-tions seem equally mythic because we can’t truly compre-hend them. For a long time Shackleton appeared a phantas-magorical creature, the Antarctic a creation of Edgar Allan Poe. Coming here, one is still confronted with civilisation’s furthermost frontier, the last genuine wilderness.

My favourite poem when I was younger was The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Samuel Taylor Coleridge had never seen an albatross and nor had I at the time, but the bird with the largest wingspan of them all provided him with a metaphor that seemed incredibly vivid to me. I couldn’t forget either it or the sailor who, having killed the sacred animal, is com-pelled to carry its body round his neck, as if it were human-kind’s true cross. Now, with majestic albatrosses gliding overhead, the poem came back me, and it seemed an appro-priate foil for a story set in the present. A black crow and a white albatross. On one side: ‘“Prophet!” said I, “thing of evil! – prophet still, if bird or devil!”’ On the other: ‘“The spirit who

bideth by himself / In the land of mist and snow, / He loved the bird that loved the man / Who shot him with his bow.”’ My story would be borne up by two poems that have fasci-nated me since I was a teenager. Perhaps the most signifi-cant impulse behind any literature is a desire to recapture the passions of one’s childhood.

Standing on the weather deck, looking out, it seemed easy to forget civilisation entirely (your hearing barely registers the quiet throb of the engines): no planes, driftwood or ships’ masts in sight, only wind and waves, ancient formations of ice and rock, their shapes morphing in ways that have noth-ing to do with us, and silent birds writing ephemeral mes-sages across the monochrome sky that we have no idea how to decipher. Icebergs: storehouses containing the freshest water and the cleanest air there is on earth, locked in crys-tals thousands of years ago, which they now release by melt-ing as they slowly process through the sea. Ice began to in-trigue me more and more. It is not only the most varied of all the elements, by turns a solid, a gas or water, but also one of the Earth’s foremost memory stores. The European Pro-ject for Ice Coring in the Antarctic has already drilled bores to depths that correspond to a span of 900,000 years, and at every stage of their descent our planet’s history has been rendered visible. Gradually I felt something like affection for ice stirring in me.

Our ship pushed on through a natural channel enclosed on either side by white walls that rose as far as the eye could see, with, up ahead, only the shimmering black surface of the glassy water. The world had imperceptibly been trans-formed into a chalk drawing on a blackboard. We stood heavily muffled and crowded together on the weather deck, silent and unmoving as though we were witnessing a conse-cration. Ours was a humbled silence, the expression of a feeling of being overwhelmed that had been building for days, since we sighted our first albatross, our first iceberg, our first whale, our first jagged islands. In the Antarctic you start to feel you’re an imposition simply by virtue of being human. It is an incongruous feeling that engenders misan-thropy. Or, in the glaciologist’s case, suggests that humanism is not sufficient in itself any more. His despairing uncertainty is fuelled by the pockmarks of human settlement on the edges of the Antarctic. Ruined whaling stations, mainly, those rusted-over killing sites you find in places like South Georgia. He can’t bear such a frenzy of destruction, not even the historical fact of it.

‘The tanks of diesel are lined up in neat rows like grave-stones; it must have been like a pot that’s always on the stove, this bay; a lot of cooking went on here. A whole facto-ry for dismembering whales; now time has dismembered the factory in turn, processed it into ruins. The silence weighs down on the decrepit sheds; no skua darting about these days, they’ve moved on. In my imagination, the whale-oil


tanks still give off their reek; my chest feels tight walking around all these rust-covered instruments of slaughter. Some of the sheds’ roofs cant at a sheer angle from the corrugated iron floors to the clouds; an asbestos-contaminated area is marked off by red boards. Outside the boiler shed where they reduced the bones, three figures pull on an iron chain and lean backwards, as if they’re playing tug-of-war with an invisible whaler; giggles reach me like flakes of snow on the wind. I long to get some distance on it all, but the snow-cov-ered mountains are like distant wings flanking the flensing deck, death’s stage. Between some ship’s propellers and an-chors – out of action, all they can do is sprawl about like grotesque flotsam – a few Gentoo penguins keep watch; the mocking looks under their red bills seem like an invitation to leave. By the mole the Albatross lists, as it has done for de-cades, and its harpoons point at the land.’

‘If the Antarctic goes, the human race will go with it,’ de-clared an unattributed quote in the ship’s planner. I realised that, if it was to succeed, my novel had to convince readers to take this sentence literally and identify with the glaciolo-gist’s radical zeal (or delusion, whichever you will). Ideally they should see themselves and their destructive potential differently. Such ambition!

Kälteidiotie, ‘cold madness’, is a German medical term for de-lusional behaviour brought on by exposure to cold. When a person is freezing, at a certain point he imagines he’s hot and starts to undress, even though his body is undergoing acute hypothermia. Humanity is suffering from heat mad-ness, the glaciologist thinks. We keep on turning up the tem-perature even though the heat’s killing us. When someone freezing to death reaches the Kälteidiotie stage, they’re no longer in a position to save themselves.

I came back from the Antarctic determined to write thenovel and, for research purposes, went to visit a leading glaciolo-gist. He listened politely to my story, then asked how old my protagonist was. “Your age,” I answered spontaneously, to my surprise. In his early to mid-sixties, in other words, a sci-entist who’d spent his life researching and, over time, had started to question what he was doing. When he’d started his long-term research project on the glacier as a young gradu-ate student, he’d naturally proceeded on the assumption that if one analyses a problem correctly, one will solve it. If we understand how something lives, then we can keep it alive. Once the mediums deliver their findings, the future will re-veal itself through measurements. Conclusive proof is all that’s needed to improve the world; progress is simply a question of precise study, supporting evidence is a blueprint for how to make correct decisions. This was the start of the Seventies, when the Gaia hypothesis was the subject of fierce debate among young scientists. The same Gaia who was once worshipped at Delphi, where the future was ecstat-ically revealed. There the mediums went into ethylene-

induced trances. Nowadays we produce ethylene in enor-mous quantities; it is in our clothes, in the objects we use for our daily needs, in our bodies, and so civilisation has be-come anaesthetised against seers. Back then the glaciologist was also convinced that he and his colleagues were consult-ing a higher authority, Nature, on the basis that the more ex-act the questions you pose, the more precise the answers you get. ‘The laboratories were the oracles of the time, as far as I was concerned. And now? What is now? We sit on this ship. Have we lost our bearings? No. I say that categorically: I never lost my bearings, I just never thought of something, because I never for a moment considered it as a possibility: I never thought they’d turn a deaf ear to our warnings. What we said would have the force of law: that’s how I imagined it. But prophecies have proved stronger than projections. And now we’ve stumbled into this blind alley, all that’s left for us is to put our eyes out.’

Receiving me in his modest office, the professor showed me satellite images of the death of a glacier. It was one of the most depressing things I have ever seen in my life. Within a matter of years the glacier suffers huge losses in mass and volume. Its surface grows darker, which in turn means it ab-sorbs more of the sun’s rays – a deadly escalation, which scientists call the ‘runaway effect’ (‘point of no return’ might be more poetic). Finally the glacier simply crumbles into pieces:‘Nothing but fragments, scattered limbs, as if its body had been torn apart by a bomb. The precipice was still cov-ered but further down, in front of us, there were only scraps of dark ice dotted across the slope like building rubble wait-ing to be carted away. All the life had melted out of it. The landlord warned me: “I’ve told you this’ll be hard for you, it’s not a pretty sight.” His voice is like vapour in my memory, he said later in the evening over beer and Tafelfleisch. I got out of his car in silence and stumbled bewildered from one patch of ice to the next, as if I was drunk or blind. “I can’t help thinking of when we used to get epidemics up here,” the landlord said, “and the farmers would say goodbye to the cows that had to be put down.” I couldn’t even do that, I felt paralysed, my mind was a blank. I knelt down by one of the remnants, and under the coal dust and the soot-blackened surface it was pure ice. I rubbed my fingers over the cold end and then over my face as I always did; my ritual greet-ing. In the past I could scoop up handfuls of fresh snow, my hands would get so cold, my whole face would come alive. I licked my index fingers. It tasted of nothing, nothing.’

The professor also explained why it’s impossible to calculate disasters in advance. Models have yet to be invented which can estimate all the variables, the multiple effects that can intensify the warming process, for instance the impact of the additional greenhouse gases that will be released if the per-mafrost melts. Domino effects can’t be modelled. It’s not a linear process. Small inputs can turn everything on its head, like an iceberg’s tendency suddenly to flip over (you can see


some blurred examples of this on YouTube), which is why cruise ship passengers aren’t allowed to set foot on them. And there’s another problem: individual environmental solu-tions render the system more unstable and lead to a poten-tially infinite number of unpredictable outcomes. To use a mythological trope, complexity theory means that, having gone out of kilter, our Earth is a labyrinth in which most of the paths lead to a new calamity. As I listened to him, my re-serves of optimism melted away. It’s completely the opposite with politics: people say you have to do A so that you can get to B; problem-solving is a linear process. ‘What happens next?’ I asked him as I was leaving. ‘I don’t know,’ the profes-sor said in a calm voice. ‘But one thing seems certain. So far it’s always turned out to be worse than specialists like me have anticipated. There’s nothing to suggest this will change.’

We humans deal with probabilities and plausibilities in com-pletely irrational ways. In Aanslag op de Vrijheid [Attack on Liberty], which has just been published in the Netherlands, Juli Zeh and I argue that modern humans have lost their in-stinct for danger and risk, and are thus easy to manipulate. To give an example: it is totally absurd that we read more in the papers about terrorism than about global warming. Many of us comfort ourselves with the thought that it hasn’t been definitively proven that global warming will have cata-strophic consequences. And of course it hasn’t, but it’s plau-sible. Almost all of us have taken out insurance at some stage in our lives against fire or flood, although it’s well known that less than one per cent of people with insurance need any form of assistance. We insure ourselves because there’s a plausible risk. Often it’s the wrong risks that cause us anxiety. If we want to have a child after forty, the doctor warns us that there’s a two to three per cent chance of hav-ing a Downs Syndrome baby. We’re scared. The probability seems so high! But the same doctor will also tell us the prob-ability of our getting pregnant is two to three per cent. That frightens us too. The probability seems so low!

The glaciologist has grown up with Heaven and Hell, sin and atonement, angels and demons. He knows Genesis pretty much by heart: ‘And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.’ What if we’ve fished the oceans to extinction? he wonders. What shall we have dominion over then? He knows the Psalms as well. ‘For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour. Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet: All sheep and oxen, yea, and the beasts of the field; The fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea, and whatsoever pas-seth through the paths of the seas.’ (Psalm 8, verses 5-9). Once he attended a debate with a Catholic theologian, who mocked trendy scenarios of the world’s destruction. When it

was time for questions, he raised his hand: ‘“You must be fine with it though. You long for the end of the world, don’t you? From your apocalyptic perspective, CO2 emissions must seem like a divine handout to help us get to where we need to be.”’ That’s an outdated view, the theologian counters. If one wants a more contemporary perspective, one needs to study the Pope’s pioneering remarks on the subject. Natural-ly the glaciologist looks up the sermon in question and finds a medley of recrimination: ‘One of the first indications of a new way of looking at things appeared about the time of the Renaissance with Galileo, when he said that if Nature did not voluntarily answer our questions but hid its secrets from us, then we would submit it to torture and in a wracking inquisi-tion extract the answers from it that it would otherwise not give. The construction of the instruments of natural science was for him as it were a readying of this torture, whereby human persons, despot-like, get the answer that they want to have from the accused.’ (Cardinal Ratzinger, subsequently Pope Benedict XVI.). Not the Church but science is to blame. We need a new form of spirituality, thinks the glaciologist, one that will do away with the gulf between humans and Na-ture and the ancient, originally Persian belief in the apoca-lypse. He is sure about one thing, though. The spiritual can only consist of that which one has experienced and devel-oped oneself; it cannot admit of anything prefabricated.

‘“Aren’t you afraid of Hell?” she asked suddenly, just after we’d woken up and were still lying under the sheets facing each other, her arm stretched over the gap between the two beds so I could massage her fingers. I took a long time answering because I had to shake off a feeling that this would be the last time we woke up together. “Hell is not a place,” I said at last. “Hell is the sum total of our failings.”’

Naturally this story needs the glaciologist’s subjective voice: a furious, wounded, intransigent, radical voice. But its dualis-tic structure also allows a second level that, apart from any-thing else, will convey his sense of being a lone voice in the wilderness, a prophet unrecognised on his own planet. This level is the cacophony of the world, its excess of voices, the terrible juxtaposition of prattle and speech, the media’s un-ending pronouncements. This second level of the story must dissolve the hero’s bitter fate in a verbal stew, which will sound as follows:

‘What a body, I’d give that a 10. No one gives a damn. It’s just luck, isn’t it? Don’t beat yourself up about it, just dive in and help yourself as long as stocks last. No one’s going to call you up on it. Sir, distress signal on 406 MHz, around 15:21. What a perfect body; melt that in your mouth! Emergency radio-beacon? Yes, sir. Which ship? We don’t know yet, sir. The frescoes were restored last week; the chapel is going to be closed all summer; I’m sorry you’ve come such a long way for nothing. We need longer operating times for all the plants, an industry spokesman explained, we can’t put our-


selves under pressure. Cancelled. A question for your guest? Bishop Böhnke? Yes, for His Eminence. I’d like to ask him: what if Noah never came down from the mountain with his ark? What would that mean? It is an honour and a very spe-cial pleasure for me tonight to introduce one of our leading scientists. No one’s going to call you up on it. We have to write in all the blank spaces, there might be something lurk-ing there that could get us into trouble. I’ve got a location, sir: W 64’33 S 43 ‘ 22. All crows… I’m sick of it… under Heav-en… the felt air temperature was higher… are black… what a perfect figure… wishes are coming true here… divertimento for this dreamy afternoon, as per request… obviously it’s smoother sailing in the lee… cancelled… you’ve got to serve the fish with more butter… it’s already a done deal… the mu-seum has unfortunately been closed, water damage, the roof was old and unsound, it happens if you put off renovation… Something’s not right, sir, we’ve lost radio contact with the Hansen.’

If you work on this subject for a long time, you end up ob-sessively thinking like a specialist and parading your irrecon-

cilable realisations before you wherever you go. These are:- Catastrophe is bearing down on us faster than we think. - Small steps won’t be enough. Some of us are still debating whether to use energy-saving lightbulbs. This may help develop a critical consciousness, but it is all but irrelevant to the outcome of the crisis our climate is undergoing.

It is already too late to adapt humanely to the situation with-out there being a large number of victims. Whatever we do from now on, we won’t be able to avert certain disasters. Warming may sound cosy, but in social terms it means mass exodus, famine, war. Every living system in the world is in retreat, because we are degrading the biosphere. The prime culprit is our exploitative, disposable economy and its de-pendence on fossil fuels. Capitalism’s pathologies are called consumption and waste. The only force in the world power-ful, rich and communicative enough to change the situation is the one causing it. It’s not going to do so, so we have to pre-vail over it.

What can literature do except describe someone who resists?

iliJa TRoJanow writes in German. His novel Der Weltensammler [The Collector of Worlds] has been translated into numerous languages. His most recent publication is the novel Eistau [Melting Ice] (Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich 2011).



GardENs iN islaMa traditioN for thE ProtECtioN of thE ENviroNMENt?

in late antiquity, and the Middle ages in particular, the orient was famed for its exquisite ornamental gardens. these gardens were the most beautiful symbiosis of culture and nature, benefiting humans and nature equally. today, although ornamental gardens in the orient are under threat from urbanisation and population growth, they offer humankind numerous ideas as to how to deal sensibly with nature in the future.

By Eckart Ehlers

Scene on the streets of Java. From the Goethe-Institut exhibition RiverScapes.


For many Western tourists visiting the Islamic Orient, the re-gion’s bazaars, mosques and palaces are the main attraction. Archaeological sites (which are the expression of advanced ancient civilisations, some of which existed for millennia), the many different craftsmen’s skills that have been handed down through the generations to the modern day, as well as several other examples of an uninterrupted ethnic culture and its traditions in both urban and rural settings round off this ‘view from the outside’, which is often superficial and very simplified.

However, despite all the enthusiasm for the impressive rem-nants of what were predominantly urban civilisations and their regional and historical diversity, rarely a thought is spared for the circumstances under which they were created and the principles on which they were based. Of all the vari-ous factors involved, water is undoubtedly the most impor-tant. Apart from the countries of the great Nile, Euphrates, Tigris and Indus river basins, most of the Islamic Orient is dominated by deserts and steppes. Drought and water shortage are the most striking ecological characteristics of this region: water is the element that dominates all life. The

density of vegetation, the variety of animal life and human activity – especially agriculture and urban developments – would all be inconceivable without an adequate supply of water. In the midst of an extremely arid landscape, oases of different sizes are the crystallisation points for rural and urban civilisations. These oases take the form of extensive areas of irrigation agriculture on the outskirts of cities, of carefully planned gardens surrounded by high walls in resi-dences belonging to rulers or religious communities, of care-fully contained and intensively cultivated fruit groves in the middle of desert-like surroundings, or of modest house gar-dens and green areas with small basins of water in the mid-dle in the inner courtyards of urban residential buildings. They are oases of agricultural production, oases of peace and contemplation, and oases of relaxation. Water and vege-tation that provides shade are essential features of every one of these islands.

the gardens of islam: the koranic perspective

Given the often extreme living conditions in the arid areas of the Islamic Orient, it comes as no surprise that oases and


irrigated gardens have a very special status in the Muslim religion, the statements of the Prophet, and the holy scrip-tures. In this context, Sura 13, verse 35 of the Koran plays a very special role that is cited again and again. It reads:

‘The parable of the Garden which the righteous are promised! – beneath it flow rivers: perpetual is the enjoyment thereof and the shade therein: such is the End of the Righteous ...’ [translation by Abdullah Yusuf Ali]

Other parts of the Koran also contain powerful descriptions of the appearance of the paradise that awaits the faithful, what it contains, and the delights it holds in store. Sura 76 not only promises springs that burst forth from the earth (verses 5 and 6), but also shady groves, trees, and bushes, whose fruits are within easy reach and are just waiting to be enjoyed (verse 14). Abundance and happiness in the hereafter are the wages that are worth striving for by leading a holy life here on Earth. Faced with such promises, it is not surprising that the region’s ornamental gardens and, in par-ticular, the gardens belonging to rulers from Morocco in the West to the Mughal Empire in the East are often described as earthly paradises, a metaphor for the heavenly paradise and an auspicious precursor of a future life after death.

However, no objective study and assessment of the garden culture of the Islamic Orient, which is a major part of the ma-terial and spiritual culture of this region, would be complete without a reference to the pre-Islamic roots of this phenom-enon. Not only Semiramis’ legendary Hanging Gardens in Babylonian Baghdad, but also the magnificent gardens of the Achaemenids in Pasargadae in Persia and the other sover-eign’s residences dating from the fourth and fifth centuries BC anticipate all the elements of what would later become Is-lamic garden culture. The same can be said for the influences of the Occidental Antiquity. The Greeks and above all the Ro-mans lived their urban lives in villas with water features and lush gardens, or in country houses outside the gates of the cities. Quite apart from the fact that such residences still ex-ist in modern-day Italy (villas, villeggiatura, palazzi), the Ro-mans established and lived this way of life, which is now over 2,000 years old, in their provinces, which stretched to the banks of the Euphrates.

Naturally, the gardens of the Islamic world really only ac-quired their spiritual aspect – and consequently their unique combination of religion, spirituality, and culture – when they were made a metaphor for and used as the image of Para-dise. In a detailed commentary for a Berlin exhibition on the subject of the ‘Gardens of Islam’, the journalist Camilla Blechen described the role and significance of these earthly paradises as follows: ‘The Prophet Mohammed, the mouth-piece of Allah, mentions this heavenly place around 130 times, a place whose channels are replete with water, wine, milk, and honey, where the shade of high trees promises re-lief from the searing heat, and seas of flowers fill the air

with beguiling scents. As the place where the blessed reside, this Garden of Eden, which is planted with roses and narcissi, date palms and pomegranate trees, promises those who have been swept away to the hereafter after leading a holy life on Earth sublime pleasures of all kinds. This inventory of Paradise, which was easily comprehended by the human mind, helped stabilise the structure of the Muslim faith, which now has 1.2 billion followers worldwide.’ (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 21.1.1994, p. 35)

the gardens of islam: a typology of earthly realities

But what form do the earthly realities of these examples of Islamic garden culture, which are so impressive in terms of both art history and culture, actually take? This begs the question as to whether one starts with what can only be de-scribed as a typically ‘Western’ typology of Islamic gardens (e.g. the garden graves, palace gardens, and pleasure gardens Moynihan describes in her book Paradise as a Garden in Persia and Moghul India, London 1980) or whether one dif-ferentiates between gardens in different civilisational areas (as does Attilio Petruccioli, one of the best experts on Islamic urban and landscape design). Petruccioli highlights the dif-ferences between the Arab, Persian, and Turkish ‘concepts of nature, landscape, and, consequently, space’ and their cor-respondingly different interpretations of the Koranic para-dise and its earthly representations (A. Petruccioli, publisher, Der Islamische Garten, Stuttgart 1995). Whichever way one looks at it, water and dense vegetation that supply shade and coolness – preferably combined with fruit-bearing trees and bushes – are always fixed features of these earthly paradises.

Regardless of their function, location, and size, almost all Is-lamic gardens adhere to more or less the same design crite-ria. Both their basic framework and structure-giving central axis are watercourses in the form of artfully designed pools, channels, and basins bordered by flowerbeds and prome-nades that invite visitors to take a stroll. On either side of these promenades are mirror-imaged pairs of planted areas (lawns, flowerbeds, trees, and shrubs) arranged in geometric patterns. One widespread garden design is the so-called ‘Chahar Bagh’ (four gardens) pattern. This basic pattern – which can be modified and reproduced within the garden as often as required, depending on its size and topographical situation – can be found across the entire area where Islamic garden culture is found. Particularly charming are those in-stances where gardens are arranged in terraces and where flights of steps and water cascades connect the various dif-ferent levels. Pavilions too, baldachins made of marble, gal-leries set into watercourses, and seating were all intended for the paradisiacal well-being of the people who used the gardens. Fountains of all kinds or small artificial waterfalls also decorated the building complexes along the central axes and at their ends, thereby contributing to the intimacy of these oases in the middle of their harsh surroundings.


The golden age of these earthly representations of heavenly circumstances lasted from the early advanced Arab Islamic civilisations of the eleventh/twelfth centuries – especially on the periphery of the Maghreb and in Andalusia – to the peri-od of Mughal rule on the Indian subcontinent in the six-teenth and seventeenth centuries. It goes without saying that these gardens were created over both a vast area and a long period of time, which resulted in different styles and formal patterns of garden architecture and garden culture. General-ly speaking, however, one would not be wrong in thinking that over the years the originally contemplative religious character of the gardens increasingly gave way to a more secular need felt by rulers to demonstrate their status. In-creasingly, the gardens of Islam became gardens of the Islam-ic world, i.e. creations of art and art-historical significance that were commissioned by rulers and dynasties who were not only appreciative of art, but also hungry to demonstrate their status. As such, they were the equivalent of the Euro-pean gardens of French absolutism or the English landscape gardens of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Gardens in the islamic world: places of relaxation and the ‘green lungs’ of cities

Today’s gardens in the Islamic world have developed into earthly paradises of a very different kind. On the one hand, they are both of art-historical significance and technically impressive in terms of the water technology they feature. They have become destinations for national and internation-al tourists and are now commercial enterprises. One of the most beautiful and most famous examples of all are the gar-dens and water features of the Alhambra in Granada, with its artful combinations of buildings with filigree decorations, or-ange groves, flowerbeds, and water features of all kinds. However, the gardens of the Moroccan royal cities of Fez, Meknes, and/or Marrakesh are also evidence not only of reli-gious spirituality, but also – perhaps even more so – of the artful symbiosis of architecture, water management, and garden design. The Persian gardens, most of which were destined to be not so much places of religious contemplation as places of retreat for rulers, are also famous: the Fin Gar-den (Bagh-e-Fin) in Kashan, the gardens of the Safavid rulers in Isfahan, or the Eram Garden (Bagh-e-Eram) in Shiraz are just a few of these. Finally, the pinnacle of Islamic garden culture is represented by the magnificent Mughal creations, from Kabul and Lahore to Delhi and the Shalimar gardens in Srinagar, Kashmir. The gardens of the Mughal emperors in particular, and the fact that they were created on the shores of Lake Dal in the temperate uplands of Kashmir, show that the ultimate aim here was to ensure the earthly wellbeing of the imperial potentates and their entourage – to the detri-ment of the Mughal subjects, who had to pay crippling taxes and work their fingers to the bone. This short list of gardens, which makes no claims to being exhaustive, is one side of Is-lamic ornamental gardens in the Orient, which now uplift secular visitors and inspire amazement.

Another side is the increasing use of gardens previously used either for religious purposes or by rulers as areas that are open to the public, that can be accessed by city-dwellers and are urban recreation areas. One impressive example of this is the famous Chahar Bagh (four gardens!) Boulevard in the centre of Isfahan in Iran. This boulevard was once part of the Safavid palace precinct and its gardens. Today it is one of the central axes of the city, which has over a million inhabit-ants. Although it still features channels of water and trees that provide shade, it is now lined on one side by businesses, hotels, and restaurants. The same applies to many of the magnificent gardens in the Maghreb. Central Asia is a special case. Here, centuries-old palaces, mosques, and gardens dating from the Samani, Timurid, and subsequent eras in Bukhara, Samarkand and elsewhere, were considered exam-ples of religious feudal insignia of power during the Soviet era and were turned into public parks and opened to the public at an early stage. Generally speaking, one can say that almost all earthly paradises were once situated on the out-skirts of cities or far beyond their city walls. However, rapid urban growth in the countries of the Islamic Orient has seen many of these gardens being swallowed up by the cities, turning them into ‘intra-urban’ green areas. This means that they have become welcome, hugely popular public recrea-tion areas for today’s stress-ridden city-dwellers.

So while the gardens of Islam have a centuries-old tradition of being a symbiosis of spirituality, art, culture and nature, in today’s thoroughly rationalised world they now have an ad-ditional function to which hardly any attention has yet been paid, namely that of being the ‘green lungs’ of sprawling ur-ban areas. Modernisation, motorisation and industrialisation have turned many cities into thermal incubators with smog and a short supply of fresh air. This is particularly true of the Islamic Orient, which has always been a hot and dry area. Green areas, water reservoirs, and trees with large crowns of foliage provide cool respite and clean the air. Evaporation is the process that lowers temperatures and creates refreshing coolness. In this way, these once-exclusive earthly paradises acquire a relevance in modern-day urban areas that was not originally intended by the people who provided the money for their construction. They can safely be referred to as playing a fundamental part in the modern ‘green city’ debate and the role of green spaces for the urban climate.

Today, however, it is not only the carefully-planned parks and gardens of the past that influence city climates. Culti- vable land used for agriculture in urban areas, and even the many small inner courtyards in residential buildings, which often have nothing more than bathtub-sized basins and a meagre sprinkling of decorative plants, create microclimates that make many city-dwellers feel that their immediate envi-ronment is heaven on Earth. Courtyard houses, where the rooms are arranged around a central inner courtyard, can be found throughout the entire Orient. These houses are pre-destined to be this kind of oasis, with a microclimate of rela-


tive coolness. Depending on the social status of their resi-dents, these houses may be magnificent building complexes with considerable water reservoirs surrounded by shady trees and porches. The houses are either the residences of city merchants and traders or of big landowners who prefer life in the city to life in the country. Nevertheless, most houses fall into the first category, and have modest house and courtyard dimensions. In these cases, the water basins are tiny and are often surrounded by just a few pot plants. The inner courtyards are often so small that they are cov-ered in water-soaked sheets of cloth in the summer months to increase the cooling effect. The effect of water and vege-tation, which influences the local microclimate, also applies to the countryside and its villages. Enclosed gardens and fruit groves are not only used for agricultural production, but also as oases of peace, cooling freshness, and human re-laxation in a rural setting for villagers and for city-dwel-

lers in search of peace and relaxation who live near such oases.

Gardens in Islam – earthly paradises: for the devout Muslim, the promise of the life hereafter; for rulers, a display of their status and a place of relaxed pleasure; for modern-day city-dwellers and country-dwellers alike, oases of peace and re-laxation from the stresses of daily life! It would not be wrong to say that religious reflection and meditation hardly play a part now in these gardens, which are no less magnifi-cent than they were in the past. Instead, commerce and con-sumption have taken over the use of these earthly paradises. Above all, local, regional, and international leisure play the biggest role. It is only in the very recent past that the signifi-cance of these historical gardens for urban climates has been acknowledged. Culture and Nature are entering into a new symbiosis.

Eckart EhlErs is Professor Emeritus for Geology at the University of Bonn.




i PollUtE, thErEforE i aMthE ProblEM of ENviroNMENtal PollUtioN iN afGhaNistaN

afghanistan’s environmental problems are not much smaller than its security problems; in fact, the two are directly linked. on the one hand there are the tentative attempts made by the afghan environmental authorities to raise awareness; on the other, a low level of environmental awareness among the people, which is surprising given that afghans traditionally have a very close relationship with nature.

By Taki Akhlaqi

A woman on a motorbike. From the exhibition Augenblick Afghanistan (Snapshot of Afghanistan) at the

Staatliches Museum für Völkerkunde, Munich, 16.11.2012–15.9.2013. Photo: Nasim Seyamak © Goethe-Institut

‘My child is sick and has been for a long time. He is not get-ting better at all. He coughs all through the night until morn-ing. During the day, he is feverish. Just look at how thin he has become.’ I am being told all of this by a father who is holding his sick child in his arms. He has come to a private hospital and is waiting to ask the doctor what he can do for his five-year-old son. ‘What do the doctors say?’ I ask. ‘That his lungs are too weak. As soon as he inhales dust or smoke, this is what happens. Look at how his nose is running! It all comes from the pollution. From the pollution of the water and the air,’ he answers.

Close bond with nature

Environmental pollution is a problem that has attracted great attention and is a cause for concern, at least in Afghanistan’s major cities and in particular in Kabul. The causes of the pol-lution are not hard to identify. It is easy to imagine how life-threatening climate and environmental change are in a coun-try like Afghanistan, where 80% of the population live off natural resources. In addition, the health authorities in Af-

ghanistan announced in July 2009 that environmental pollu-tion is responsible for the death of 3,000 people in Kabul every year. Since then, statements such as these have been repeated, grabbing people’s attention and increasing their concern. They want to know what caused the recent flooding and the lowering of the water table. They want to know why the air in the cities is getting more polluted and is full of dust particulates.

Looking at Afghanistan from the outside, one might think that the challenges of climatic change are not a priority in this country, which is struggling with other, greater, security problems such as war, armed opposition groups, infrastruc-ture problems, interaction with regional and international powers, and the safeguarding of the progress that has been made in recent years. Nevertheless, none of this has caused the Afghans to forget their environment. There is a deep and cultural bond between the Afghans and their natural envi-ronment, a bond that is deeply rooted in their consciousness and has existed for hundreds of years. Even a cursory glance at some of the sayings, anecdotes and poems of this country


reveals this close bond. There are a great many sayings and aphorisms based on nature, for example:

The more fruit the tree bears, the more it bows down towards the earth(a reference to the humility of the wise).

The water is polluted at the source (used when something is wrong right from the word go).

Kabul lacks gold, but never snow.

These phrases are an illustration of how words like ‘tree’, ‘water’, ‘source’, and ‘snow’ are used. Another reference to this bond is the green tea that has been the most popular drink among Afghans for generations. Even President Karzai generally has a cup of green tea in front of him during meet-ings.

imported or genuine worries?

In the last days of 2012, the Afghan senate invited the head of Afghanistan’s National Environmental Protection Agency to attend an open session of the parliament to answer ques-tions on environmental protection. The senators asked him what was causing the concentration of particulate matter in the air, the air pollution, and the lung, kidney, and throat dis-eases. Trees are disappearing, unprecedented floods are on the rise, and everywhere you go there is rubbish. I was watching the session, and it was very clear to me that the senators’ questions were quite genuine. No one had asked them to call this session. If the Afghan senators had asked questions about the ozone layer, the habitat of polar bears in the Arctic, and the most recent developments in the Amazon, one could have assumed that the West had convinced them to ask these questions and to put on a show like this. But the session was so lively and so engrossing that it would be ri-diculous to speak of conspiracy theories.

In response to the senators’ question, Mostafa Zaher, head of the National Environmental Protection Agency, summed up the main causes of environmental pollution in Afghanistan as follows: a rapidly growing population, which has resulted in a decline in the rural population; increasing traffic density on rural roads; the burning of wood and fossil fuels such as bi-tuminous coal in houses and factories; a lack of environmen-tal awareness; and the reduction of green spaces.

He then turned his attention to the role of the state authori-ties and complained about the lack of co-operation and co-ordination between them. He said: ‘As long as environmental protection is not considered a priority in state planning, the situation will only get worse.’

The government is also constantly talking about limits and challenges and is urgently asking people to assume greater responsibility. Although people are willing to co-operate and

to assume responsibility, they say that they cannot change the circumstances. For example, underground and surface-level water reserves are always being polluted. Moreover, Kabul, which has a population of four million, does not have a sewage system. Instead, every house has a pit for its own liquid waste. The people have no choice, and the government hasn’t got the means to do anything about it. It’s a similar story when it comes to air pollution.

The environment is being destroyed at all levels. From time to time, warning voices speak out and alarm bells are rung: but nothing happens. For whom are these bells actually tolling?

farewell to the blue sky

‘The doctor says we should keep the house warm. This year, I bought a kharvar (560 kg) more wood than I did last year so that the child would not catch cold. The doctor prescribed more medicine. Maybe it will get better this time,’ he says holding the sick child even closer. His child’s dreadful cough-ing doesn’t stop. The father leaves the hospital. There is a long tradition of felling trees and using the timber as fuel in winter. People buy wood to heat their homes, thereby con-tributing either consciously or unconsciously to the destruc-tion of the forests in the process. According to a statistic from the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), about 50% of the country’s valuable forests had disappeared by 2008. I follow the man and his son and ask the father if he isn’t wor-ried about the destruction of the forests and environmental pollution. Pointing to his son, he says that he is very worried about air pollution, but that he doesn’t think about the forests.

In short, the Afghans’ concern about the environment is re-stricted to their own circumstances and goes no further than that. They are not worried about the glaciers, the rising sea level, the extinction of bears in Poland, or the depletion of the ozone layer because they don’t generally believe that any of this affects them. Afghanistan doesn’t have any coast-lines that could be eaten up by rising sea levels, there are no endangered bears in Kabul Zoo, and people have not given any serious thought to the ozone layer and its consequences.

To draw his attention to the importance of trees for cleaning the air, I ask him why air pollution has occurred in the last few years after so many trees have been felled. His answer astonishes me. With great emphasis, he says: ‘This pollution and these illnesses are new. They have come to our country together with the people from the West. No one ever men-tioned them before.’ I ask him how he reached this conclu-sion. But he doesn’t answer. A few moments later, he is gone. Such analyses and conclusions are not unusual among the traditional classes; in fact, they are widespread. If we take this as an example of the reality of Afghan life and, more generally, of other areas too, we might perhaps understand


why Afghan and foreign men of state talk at cross purposes and why they always encounter problems when they en-counter each other. Although the fate of Afghanistan de-pends on these contacts, they are constantly polluted by misunderstandings, just like the sky above Kabul, whose blue has been obscured by a thick layer of dust that hides it from the people down below.

Environmental protection, a small administrative body, and nothing else

Despite all these challenges and environmental problems, the National Environmental Protection Agency seems to be fac-ing them alone. Until the agency was set up, contemporary Afghanistan had never had an authority that focused on en-vironmental problems. The establishment of this authority in 2005 was a historic event. This was followed in 2007 by the first law on environmental protection, which regulated the task of state authorities in this area, especially the role of the National Environmental Protection Agency. This law identifies two major national environmental protection tasks:

1. The drafting of a bill2. Monitoring environmental conditions.

The text of the law, which was drafted with the help of the UN Environment Programme, outlines ways and means of protecting wild animals, water, forests, and other natural re-sources. Afghanistan has also signed up to a number of inter-national conventions and treaties. All of these things consti-tute several steps forward. The Afghans who were responsible for these achievements are very proud of them. They say that they took the first steps, and focused most of their efforts on general environmental awareness. The ex-perts recall two efforts in particular and praise the relevant initiatives:

1. The willingness of communication service providers to send environmental messages via the mobile phone network2. The collection of provisions of religious law relating to the protection of the environment.

The sending of text messages was a praiseworthy initiative. However, because of the costs it generates for the communi-cation service providers, it is not used very often. For exam-ple, the last text message that I received in this context was dated 16th May 2012. It was a Persian-language text mes-sage that read: ‘Human and Islamic ethics support the plant-ing, nurturing, and protection of trees and ornamental shrubs.’

The second initiative, which is in fact a long-term research project, began on 27th June 2009. On this day, the represent-atives of the National Environmental Protection Agency in Kabul said that, with the help of the clergy and the Ministry for Education, they intended to include the subject ‘Islamic Religious Law for Environmental Protection’ in the university

curriculum. The plan had two objectives: firstly, to teach people that environmental protection is an important theme in religion, and secondly, to create an Islamic law for envi-ronmental protection. This religious law should be taught in schools so that people begin to see environmental protection as a major part of religion.

The Afghans are deeply rooted in religion. Everyone still re-members the jihad against the Soviet armed forces. They went to war because they were told over and over again that their religion was under threat and needed the help of the faithful. I believe that Afghans remain a religious people to this day. The National Environmental Protection Agency is aware of this fact and makes clever use of it to reach its goals. The representatives of the agency claim that after three years, they have succeeded in using religious regula-tions to convince people of the necessity of environmental protection. While the destruction of natural resources con-tinues, these representatives claim that they have at least slowed down the speed of destruction. They say that the task of environmental protection has been transferred to an authority that has limited financial resources and accounts for a very tiny part of the state budget.

our city, our home

It must be said quite honestly that some of the habits and negative developments that have inflicted themselves on our culture during the war years still play a major role in the en-vironmental pollution of recent years. Afghans are capable of doing three things in public: spitting, throwing rubbish on the streets, and urinating. Although the third bad habit has been in decline since 2001, the first two are still the norm every-where. In an attempt to improve the situation, the City of Ka-bul has written the slogan ‘Our city, our home’ all over the city and on the uniforms of its employees. Afghans interpret this slogan differently. One day, one of my friends was eat-ing fruit outdoors and threw the skin onto the footpath. When I protested, he said, ‘This is my country; I am free to do what I want.’ It was as if he was saying, ‘I pollute, there-fore I am.’ With this act, he wanted to prove his existence. ‘And what about the slogan “My city, my home”?’ I asked him. ‘I do the same at home,’ he said, laughing. Many Afghans throw rubbish on the street, wherever they want, and gener-ally no one stops them. You can imagine the catastrophe that has resulted from this kind of behaviour over the past ten years. With old slogans like ‘Our city, our home’, the city will not be able to rid Kabul of its mountain of rubbish. Perhaps it needs more accurate, more effective words so that people react in a more responsible way, open their eyes, and really see how their environment is being polluted.

Mining: the dragon awakes

Despite the size of the difficulties currently being faced, it is possible that the implementation of widespread mining and


industrialisation plans, which are yet to come, will be the nail in the coffin of Afghanistan’s beautiful and unique natural environment. According to a number of studies, Afghanistan has huge reserves of iron, copper and lithium as well as huge oil and gas fields. Perhaps until now the lack of security and the high investment risks have prevented international com-panies who are interested in drilling and mining here from exploiting Afghanistan’s natural resources. The lack of security is a double-edged sword: on the one hand, it has contributed to the destruction of Afghanistan’s natural environment, and on the other, it has prevented the dragon of mining from entering the country. Nature-lovers and environmentalists are extremely worried about the dam-age and challenges that would go hand in hand with the ex-traction of resources by international companies who think only of their profits and their returns on investment.

Of course our mineral resources could make us rich, which would mean we would no longer be a burden on the interna-tional community. It could even help us foster peace, but we would at the same time accelerate the destruction of our natural environment. Our water would no longer be pure; our air and our soil would no longer be able to sustain the fruit and plants that currently grow. Our president says: ‘By in-

volving regional and world powers in Afghanistan’s mineral resources, we can ensure that they play a role in our econo-my and that we can at last live in peace.’ This would be a rare occurrence indeed in the history of independent Af-ghanistan.

Environmental activists point out that, so far, Afghanistan does not have any mining laws that would set out the rules for the industry. Afghanistan, they say, is not capable of pro-tecting and pushing through its interests in the face of multi-national economic giants. Swift decisions that haven’t been given much thought pose a threat to the historic peace for which Afghanistan yearns. These are complex conditions that will determine the future of the environment in this country. All relevant factors have been interwoven here: environment and peace, peace and the economy, peace and the economy and culture, and our lives and our future, and all of these factors at once.

The fact is that all countries in the world – from the West to the East, from the North to the South – pursue their own in-terests. It is our task to bring these different interests into line with our own so that we can live in peace. It is a Hercu-lean task that, while not impossible, is certainly very difficult to accomplish.

taqi akhlaqi is an Afghan writer and journalist who lives in Kabul.




‘WE arE all iN thE saME boat’iNtErviEW With kaziM hoMayUN

We asked kazim homayun, the head of planning at the National Environmental Protection agency (NEPa), about afghanistan’s official efforts to protect its environment and the obstacles that its environmentalists have to overcome.

By Taki Akhlaqi

A German soldier and an Afghan child flying a kite. From the exhibition Augenblick Afghanistan (Snapshot of Afghanistan)

at the Staatliches Museum für Völkerkunde, Munich, 16.11.2012–15.9.2013. Photo: Bundeswehr © Goethe-Institut

Taqi Akhlaqi: To begin with, please describe the organisation-al structure of your agency. How many people do you employ and in which provinces do you have branches?

kazim homayun: After 2001 and before the National Envir- onmental Protection Agency was set up as an independent institution, there was a corresponding department within the Ministry for Energy and Water. At the time, we employed 200 people. When the department became independent in 2005, the number of employees rose to 400. Now we have branches across the country in all 34 Afghan provinces. The number of employees has reached 850.

What are the tasks of your agency?

First of all, I must point out that this agency is not an execu-tive body. Our tasks include coordination, planning and mon-

itoring. In a variety of different ways, we are trying to heighten people’s awareness of ecological matters. We are involved in the drafting of bills, ordinances and plans, and the drawing up of lists of task priorities. At international level, we have signed up to a number of conventions and have signed protocols. We have candidate status for others.

What have you achieved so far?

I must be perfectly honest and say that, because of the country’s difficulties, we have no achievements worth men-tioning to show on a practical level. We are new to this area and have so far focussed primarily on the drafting of bills. In this area, however, we have achieved quite a lot. For exam-ple, we have succeeded in putting some laws and ordinances into effect for the first time at national level, such as the law on environmental protection. Furthermore, we have defined


specifications and standards for reducing damage to the en-vironment, for example with regard to car engines and the limits for loads. These specifications are used to define con-traventions of environmental laws. In conjunction with the Ministry of Education and the Arts, we got Environmental Protection included as a subject in schools in order to heighten schoolchildren’s awareness of the environment. Three years ago, we advised the Ministry of Higher Educa-tion to include Environmental Protection as a degree course at the Geological Faculty of the University of Kabul so that students of this subject could obtain a bachelor’s degree in it. Our consultations in this area are continuing. Our aim is for Environmental Protection also to become a course option at the private universities. At the provincial level, we are trying to use the opportunities offered by religious scholars and prayer leaders in mosques to increase general knowledge about the environment. To this end, we organise meetings and joint sessions with them. In this way, we have made every effort to really achieve something and we hope that we will soon see the fruits of our labour.

Why is the environmental situation in Afghanistan constantly deteriorating?

There are different reasons and factors that combine to dam-age the environment: a rocketing urban population, a rising birth rate, rampant poverty, and a shrinking middle class

– which could otherwise be the biggest patron of the environ-ment, democracy, and civil liberties. The poor have no choice but to cut down the tree outside their house in order to heat their home. Other reasons include a lack of urban infrastruc-ture, the absence of a culture of using natural resources in an environmentally-friendly manner, extensive desertifica-tion and deforestation – to our knowledge, 55% of the forests in the provinces of Kunar, Nuristan, and Nangarhar have disappeared since 1979 – soil erosion, and, finally, the indifference of the government. To date, the Afghan govern-ment has paid little attention to the environment. The envir-onment is not on its list of priorities. The texts of some laws do refer to the vital role played by the environment, which is directly linked to human life; but unfortunately, the attention paid to the environment is restricted to these references on paper. For example, our agency received US $870,000 from the budget this year. The budget for the presidential guard is eighty times that figure. This is an indication of the Afghan government’s interest in the environment.

What is behind the government’s lack of interest?

The first reason is the fact that the government is forever having to deal with both internal and external partners. The second reason is that some senior government civil servants have sent their families abroad and are going to follow them once their time in office has come to an end. This means that

they are not paying any attention to the environment of this country and are not even thinking about it.

Do you think the international community is interested?

Climate and environmental changes are the best evidence that we are a ‘global village’. After all, deforestation in one region also has a negative effect on other regions. This shows that we are all in the same boat. In our encounters with representatives of international organisations, we have seen that most of them are interested in common interna-tional themes and challenges such as environmental pollu-tion and the depletion of the ozone layer. On an individual level, the international community is interested in the local problems of a country such as the pollution of groundwater and the urban and industrial waste load. We have signed up to several international conventions, which allows us to find out about the obligations of the international community and the G20 in particular, and we try to use these obligations to improve our environment. Let me give you an example: in 2009, Vietnam received 970 million US dollars from the money set aside for the revival of contaminated soil. We also have the chance and capacity to get a chunk of more than 91 million dollars from this pot, especially because the effects of climate change in Central Asia are visible.

Changes in people’s behaviour

Do you think the Afghan people are interested? Are they willing to co-operate? Over the years, have you noticed any changes in people’s behaviour?

Yes, we have at least been successful in focussing the atten-tion of the people, the media, and the citizens on this prob-lem and giving them an awareness of it. We know that pro-gressive countries devote at least fifty per cent of their efforts to heightening public awareness. As far as the Na-tional Environmental Protection Agency is concerned, I must say that we devote between seventy and seventy-five per cent of our efforts to this subject. Our efforts go towards in-forming people and sensitising them to environmental prob-lems so that they will vote for the candidate who presents a special programme for the environment in the upcoming presidential election, in other words for the candidate who has a green view of things. I am convinced that the situation will continue to get worse until politics embraces environ-mental protection. We want to give people a wake-up call so that they stand up for their rights and put pressure on the government and the political parties. One clear example of this change in awareness is Jacques Chirac’s defeat at the hands of the Socialists in the presidential election. He had a tree cut down outside the offices of the city administration in Paris and was subsequently accused of being an eco- terrorist. For this reason, I look to the future with optimism.


You have said that your agency is not an executive body. How do you co-operate with the executive and co-ordinate your programmes with it?

The organs of government are sometimes more like stum-bling blocks in our path. The Ministry of Finance in particular is always criticising the size of our tiny budget and trying to restrict it. While millions of dollars are spent every year on furniture and fittings, we have difficulties implementing our green, humane, and Islamic plans, which are constantly being called into question. Under these circumstances, we set up a committee for environmental co-ordination in the capital. The heads of planning in all ministries and government or-ganisations are members of this committee. They attend the monthly meetings. We involve them in the planning and for-mation of opinions and ask them to take our green stand-points into account in their short- and long-term plans. We have also set up a commission called the Commission for the Prevention of Air Pollution. All deputy ministers, the head of the Agency for Industrial Standards, the Mayor of Kabul, re-presentatives of civil groups and Afghan trade unions are in-volved in this commission. Every month, the members of the commission come together and discuss ways and means of preventing air pollution in Kabul. After all, people are rela-tively worried about air pollution in Kabul. However, if we left these tasks to the ministries, nothing would be done. The only thing that our agency can do is keep the Council of Min-isters informed so that the ministers can make the necessary decisions. That’s as far as our influence goes: beyond that, there is nothing we can do. We once suggested setting up a ‘green police force’ to implement the environmental pro-grammes and prevent the destruction of the environment, but the Ministry of the Interior rejected the proposal, rea-soning that if they were to allow that, all the agencies would come along asking for their own police force.

Do you have the equipment and opportunities you need to do your work?

We intend to buy six measuring devices that will allow us to monitor air pollution. So far, however, we have only received one, which we are using in Kabul. We don’t have the equip-ment to measure other types of environmental damage such as water pollution or noise levels.

What are your biggest fears for the future of Afghanistan’s natural environment?

Unfortunately, air pollution is our greatest concern. In Af-ghanistan’s five major cities, the damaging levels of fine par-ticulate matter in the air are seven times higher than the world average and three times higher than in other countries in the region. According to a joint study carried out in con-junction with the Asian Development Bank, the amount of dangerous particulate matter in the air has crossed the red line and is now causing many lung diseases including lung cancer. We are worried about the low-quality leaded petrol that bureaucracy and corruption are allowing into the coun-try: it is contaminating our air and water with lead.

What precautions have you taken with regard to the exploration of deposits, their extraction, and industrial pollution?

Unfortunately, the mining industry pollutes the environment at all stages, from exploration to extraction. Experience in other countries shows that sometimes more money is spent on environmental measures related to the mining than the mine itself actually generates. We have informed the Min- istry of Industry and Mining about our concerns. Happily, it shares these concerns. This ministry is aware of the problem and has already set up a corresponding department to tackle the challenge. Our representatives read the exploration con-tracts before they were signed and made any necessary sug-gestions. We consider this to be a positive step. Neverthe-less, the widespread corruption in authorities is a major challenge that could put paid to all our efforts.

taqi akhlaqi is a writer and journalist from Afghanistan.



afghanistan onlinehttp://www.afghan-web.com/environment/nepa.htmlen, de


thE ENviroNMENt aNd CliMatE ChaNGE iN PalEstiNE aNd thE arab WorldaN ovErviEWthe environment and its problems are some of the greatest challenges facing the world today, whether at the level of people or governments. and while the world’s nations attribute varying degrees of importance to these challenges, arab countries in particular have a distinctly long list of concerns and priorities that have taken precedence over the environment and climate change.

By Ziad Mimi / Nidal Katiba

Garbage and resistance graffiti depicting the imprisoned Palestinian politician Marwan Barghouti

on the so-called separation wall between the West Bank and Israel, near the Qalandia checkpoint.

Photo: Stefan Weidner © Goethe-Institut

Foremost among these have been the recurring needs of socio-economic development plans to tackle widespread un-employment, fight poverty, and provide basic education and health services to rapidly growing populations with very high growth rates. Palestine is no exception but rather a good of example of this state of affairs. Climate change has been established as a scientific fact and there are countless illustrations and instances from every country in the world to support its incontrovertibility. These include, but are not limited to, extreme weather events such as tsunamis and floods, intensifying droughts and wildfires that have de-stroyed hundreds of millions of acres of tree-cover, cold and hot temperature extremes, as well as the general rise in sea levels that has had a devastating ecological impact on low-lying coastal areas which are often the economic power-houses of their countries. It is noteworthy that in recent years the material costs associated with record hot tempera-tures, floods, tropical storms and other environmental catas-trophes have been commensurately large.

On the international stage, many environmental organisa-tions have been set up to address the challenges involved, most notably the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP). A host of international agreements have been adopt-ed, including the core 1972 Stockholm Declaration, followed by the 1992 Rio Declaration – from which were derived three major environmental documents of our time around climate change, desertification and bio-diversity. In the in-tervening decades, there were many other international ac-cords, including the Vienna Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer and the accompanying Montreal Protocol, as well as others concerning every aspect of the environ-ment.

This highly complex subject has ramifications for every bio-logical and developmental issue in the world and this article will provide a rapid and brief overview of the challenges faced by Palestine and the rest of the Arab countries from the perspective of the writers.


Environmental and climate change issues in Palestine and the Middle East

Solid waste management, including household and industrial waste, pollution from manufacturing, ecological degradation and climate change are considered to be among the most sig-nificant challenges currently facing Palestine and the Arab region. Consequently, ministries of the environment or de-partments responsible for environmental issues have been created in most countries of the region. Such departments have led efforts to issue regulations and legislation on the is-sues involved, and they have been largely responsible for upholding the defence of the environment and related mat-ters in the face of the many other challenges before their nations.

Such ministries and departments have represented their countries at conferences and other forums on the environ-ment, both regionally and internationally. Palestine, where the Ministry for Environmental Affairs was created in 1998 and an Environmental Code was passed under Law 7 in 1999, was one of the first Arab countries to issue environmental legislation and regulations.

Without doubt, the Arab world in general and Palestine in particular have been and remain acutely and fully aware of the environmental challenges facing them. However, their national priorities have curtailed their ability to respond to the challenges and threats commensurately. Senior policy-makers may consider the environment a superfluous luxury because they remain unaware of the extent of the threat re-sulting from the lack of adequate response to the challenges involved, and do not accord these sufficient significance. That is why the two writers of this article consider that rais-ing awareness among decision-makers in the Arab world is of utmost importance, because a proactive approach toward environmental threats would save their countries enormous amounts of money that would otherwise be spent on miti-gating the impact of environmental disasters such as floods and droughts, and their consequences.

It is also worth noting that Arab countries enjoy a unique po-sition in international environmental negotiations, and espe-cially in climate change talks, where both Saudi Arabia and Egypt have a significant presence. The Saudis have an im-pressive and highly competent delegation, whether in terms of their experience or their negotiating ability, and many Saudis have acceded to high positions in international nego-tiating bodies. This is perhaps an indication of the impor-tance of these negotiations and their outcomes for the econ-omies of the kingdom and other oil-producing countries, especially those that form the Gulf Cooperation Council. For these countries, the stakes are high because their economies are founded on the very fossil fuels that international agree-ments seek to limit since they are the biggest culprits in global warming.

Arab states were present from the very outset and at all stages of climate change negotiations, both as a regional bloc and as part of the G-77, which now groups 133 developing countries. They played a prominent role in the wording of the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) with its emphasis on equity and the princi-ple of common but differentiated responsibility (CBDR) be-tween developing and developed nations, which affirms the urgent need of developing countries for sustained economic development and combating poverty.

The environment, climate change and the Arab-Israeli conflict

An internationally-accepted principle is that the environment knows no borders. Thus Israeli actions negatively and direct-ly impact the environment on both sides of the conflict. It is indisputable that throughout its rule of the Palestinian terri-tories it occupied in 1967 Israel methodically neglected the Palestinian environment, leading to extensive ecological damage. Even though the Palestinian Authority took over control of the Occupied Territories in 1994, Israel’s incursions on and violations of the Palestinian environment have con-tinued unabated, and have if anything intensified since the Oslo Accords and the establishment of the Palestinian Au-thority. These violations include but are not limited to the following:

- the theft of Palestinian water sources, such that 82% of all these have been depleted;- the systematic devastation of the environment in and

around the areas traversed by the separation wall built by Israel, as a result of which vast tracts of land have been bulldozed and over 1.5 million trees are estimated to have been uprooted, many of them ancient. This is in addition to the trees that were stolen and replanted within the 1948 borders or in Israeli settlements erected on Palestinian land;

- the dumping of toxic industrial waste on Palestinian lands;- the discharge of raw sewage from Israeli settlements into

streams, leading not only to their pollution but to the con-tamination of aquifers which constitute Palestine’s basic water supply;

- the assault on Gaza in 2008, followed by the latest attack in the winter of 2012. Several UNEP studies have been conducted on the environmental impact of the Israeli oc-cupation of Palestinian territories, especially following the dismantlement of settlements erected in the Gaza Strip and their demolition by the Israeli army, including an as-sessment of the environmental damage caused by the as-sault on Gaza. The Palestinian Ministry for Environmental Affairs has also published a study on the impact of the wall on the environment in Palestine.

In addition to all the above, the occupation has greatly in-creased the pressure on resources resulting from Israel’s


domination of 62% of Palestinian lands classified as Area C under the Oslo Accords, that is, territory under full Israeli civil and security control. Furthermore, the Palestinian Au-thority must obtain Israeli permission for any local environ-ment-related projects to go ahead, such as the establishment of landfills or waste water treatment plants.

All in all, numerous studies have been carried out, all of them pointing to the importance of climate change and its consequences for security in the region. Conducted by vari-ous European research centres, these studies have clearly implicated the occupation in the worsening climate change situation, which affects development, as well as food and water security in Palestine and the region as a whole. Limit-ed water resources, in particular, are of great concern, as es-timates predict another 20% drop in rainfall by 2050. Aver-age temperatures are predicted to rise by between 2.5 and 5.6 degrees Celsius by the end of the current century, when it is expected that the River Jordan will have almost com-pletely dried up.

As mentioned in the introduction, Arab states are taking many measures to adapt to the consequences of climate change, specifically with regard to limiting air pollution. The reports submitted by these countries to the UN Emergency Secretariat on Climate Change summarise their efforts on that score.

At a regional level, several summit meetings of the Arab League have agreed on the need to establish a united Arab position at international climate negotiations. The League has issued an ‘Arab Plan for the Management of Climate Change’, which was drawn up in cooperation and consultation with Arab climate change experts. The plan is considered a model of its kind and it is hoped that it will be fully implemented on the ground.

The voice of Palestine

Until November 29th 2012, Palestine held observer status (officially known as ‘observing entity’) at all international cli-mate change convention meetings, including the fifteenth round held in Copenhagen, where Palestine was represented by Prime Minister Salam Fayyad and a delegation including including representatives from both the foreign and environ-ment ministries, and from the water authority. It was there that Palestine unveiled its climate change strategy plan. The Ministry for Environmental Affairs is the liaison with the Convention and with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Since the UN General Assembly upgraded its status from non-member observer entity to non-member observer state on November 29th 2012, Palestine has been represented at regular meetings of the UNFCCC as an observer with the right to take part in negotiations and deliberations. The Pal-

estinian delegation cannot, however, vote on decisions or take part in the deliberations of subsidiary bodies such as working groups and ad hoc committees; nor can it benefit from the tens of billions of dollars available from some twenty international funds that exist to help developing countries with climate change adaptation, under the pretext that Palestine is not a party to the Convention – even though Palestine is a full member of the G-77, which is considered amongst the most significant blocs in international climate negotiations, representing most developing countries along with China. For over two years now, and in coordination with the G-77 countries and China, Palestine has been attempting to obtain the agreement of the Parties to the Convention (i.e. full signatories) for it to benefit from international climate change adaptation funds, in order to implement national cli-mate change plans and strategies to execute adaptation pro-jects to mitigate the negative consequences of climate change. It must be borne in mind that Palestine has never been a polluting state responsible for world climate change, but is actually a victim suffering from its many consequenc-es, especially as concerns water resources and food security, given the preponderant role of agriculture in the Palestinian economy. Despite full support by the G-77 and China, Pales-tine has not succeeding in obtaining the parties’ agreement due to the opposition of the United States, which has blocked the initiative.

Traditional knowledge and climate change

There is no doubt that the importance of traditional know-ledge in the region results from its historical experience of environmental challenges, in particular climate change. Pal-estine and the region as a whole have known periods both of aridity and of floods, which have provided society there with experience that can be built upon. In this regard, I would like to note the story of the Prophet Yusef (PBUH). The Holy Koran recounts how Yusef successfully managed seven years of drought, and there are many other similar ex-amples. It is also worth noting here that much traditional knowledge is taken into account in international circles when planning for climate change adaptation.

Reckless behaviours are considered to be one of the prime causes of ecological catastrophe and climate change: on the one hand the excessive depletion of resources, fuelled by poverty and famine, including over-grazing and deforesta-tion; and, on the other, excess consumption among the wealthy nations of the region.

Patterns of consumption among wealthy countries are unar-guably among the leading causes of climate change and en-vir-onmental degradation, given that they entail the reckless use of natural resources such as fossil fuels, most of which are non-renewable, which leads to environmental degrada-tion and aggravates climate change. Of particular concern are patterns of food consumption, when we know that it


requires 15,000 litres of water to produce one kilogramme of meat compared with 2,500 litres for one kilo of rice and 1,500 litres for one kilo of wheat.

The concept of a ‘water footprint’, which appeared in 2002, takes into consideration both the direct and indirect uses of water by both producers and consumers. The water footprint of an individual, group, or institution is defined as the total amount of fresh water needed to produce goods and services. The water footprint of the average US consumer is

about 2,840 cubic litres annually, while the equivalent figure in Japan is 1,280, and in China, it is 1,070. Here it should be noted that, according to an independent British study pub-lished at the beginning of 2013, as much as half of all global food production is lost as a result of poor harvesting, stor-age and transportation practices, as well as market and con-sumer wastage. This ultimately means that gigantic quanti-ties of water, as well as other resources and production inputs, are being wasted, on top of the pollution that results from the production process.

dr Ziad MiMi is an Associate Professor in the faculty of Civil Engineering at the University of Birzeit, Palestine. He specialises in integrated water resources management. Nidal katiba teaches at the University of Birzeit.

Translated by Maia Thabet


institution of Mechanical Engineers: Global food reporthttp://www.imeche.org/knowledge/themes/environment/global-fooden


CliMatE aNd laNdsCaPE ChaNGE iN thE oriENt:thE iraNiaN hiGhlaNds

Climate change poses less of a threat to the wealthy countries of the North than to those in the south and the Middle East. yet we know little of how exactly climate change will affect the regions most at risk. the following article illustrates the threat by taking the highlands of iran as an example.

By Eckart Ehlers

It has become a commonplace that the climate and the envir-onment are changing on a global scale. The indicators of this transformation are well-known and are cited repeatedly. Gla-ciers are melting at the poles, in Greenland, and in high mountain ranges all over the Earth. Sea levels are rising. Devastating storms – hurricanes and typhoons – are ravag-ing the coasts of low-lying tropical regions, their towns, vil-lages, and arable land. Both floods and droughts are claiming ever more victims among populations affected by these oc-currences.

For almost twenty years the Intergovernmental Panel of Cli-mate Change (IPCC) has been recording the changes in the global climate and the associated transformations of natural

landscapes and the biosphere. Quite apart from the fact that these observations are used in the development of climate models and ecological future scenarios, it is growing increasingly apparent that man is becoming a decisive agent of climate change and, in addition, of en-vironmental changes that can be seen all over the world. Scientists point to man-made CO2 emissions as one of the main causes of the rise in temperature and its consequences. It is already under discussion that we should designate the current age a discrete geological era and term it the Anthropocene.

Closer analysis of the scientific literature, however, shows that sources and data for credible climate scenarios on Earth are very unevenly distributed. They originate primarily in the dense network of observatories and measuring stations in the technologically-advanced industrial countries of the North. This is also where the big research centres and labo-ratories that analyse these findings and data and are located. It is no surprise that these results are then generalised and projected as a global standard. Meanwhile, however, it seems that findings generalised across-the-board and global predic-tions are less and less suited to reflecting the reality of re-gional or local developments in climate or landscape change. This is also true for large parts of the Middle East, in particu-lar for the crisis-ridden regions between Lebanon to the

Mountains drowning in their own rubble: This aerial photo-

graph of the central highlands of Iran shows the talus cones

mantling the mountains, as well as recent drainage channels

indicative of precipitation. The image is evidence of the

effects of both geological and contemporary climatic events.

Photo: Georg Gerster. From Paradise Lost: Persia from Above

by Georg Gerster © Phaidon, London 2008


west and the Hindu Kush to the east. Their observation and measurement networks are thinly spread. Their analyses tend to be incomplete, and there is often a lack of trained personnel to interpret collected data and incorporate them into international discourse. In short: we know very little about climate and landscape change in large parts of the Is-lamic Orient. We are largely dependent on indicators and sporadic observations, or on research findings that are pre-sented piecemeal.

a key region for research into climate and landscape change

The Iranian highlands and their peripheral regions play a key role in future research into climate and landscape change in the Middle Eastern region. Why? One reason is that Iran’s dry, arid highlands, the centre of which is around 1000 me-tres above sea level, are in an area that is climatically almost ideally suited for collecting data on temperature and rainfall fluctuation. Secondly, the surrounding mountain ranges – the Zagros system in the west with peaks of up to 4,200 metres, and the Alborz in the north, including the Demavand (5,671 metres), the highest point in Iran – constitute highly sensitive ‘registration plates’ that react to every little alteration in the ecological balance of the region. This potential is also in-creased by the fact that individual mountain massifs in the Iranian highlands rise to up to 4,500 metres, and thus hold additional information relevant to climate change. Thirdly, and finally, Iran has the scientific infrastructure and profes-sional competence potentially to conduct this kind of sys-tematic research and thereby become an important link in the chain of climate research worldwide. However, at present this potential is very far from being realised.

For the Iranian highlands and its peripheral areas, there are three examples that could serve as evidence of historical and contemporary transformation of climate and the natural environment: geological and palaeogeographical findings; re-cent changes in the water balance and groundwater resourc-es; current research results on the basis of local field studies.

Geological and palaeogeographical findings

Climate change and the associated changes in rainfall, tem-perature, vegetation and the animal world, as well as in the processes that shape the landscape, are phenomena that have characterised the history of the development of the Earth over millions of years. In the Iranian highlands the great salt lakes, in particular those in the Dasht-e-Kavir (Great Salt Desert), but also other lake basins with no outlet to the sea as well as dry valleys where rivers once flowed bear witness to this permanent state of flux. Furthermore, ancient terrace systems in many lake basins and alongside numerous highland rivers indicate earlier, higher water levels

and the correspondingly greater amount of water the rivers used to carry. The great alluvial fans and the rubble that en-velop the mountains and mountain ranges right across cen-tral Iran are particularly impressive. These are referred to by the collective term ‘foothills’. ‘The mountains are drowning in their own rubble’ is a phrase one frequently encounters to describe these processes of erosion, which must have taken place under wetter conditions than those of today. Naturally, these processes of transformation are still going on today. As a rule, however, they take place so slowly that it is impossible to observe them directly. Occasional extreme weather, such as very heavy rain, constitutes an exception to this rule.

recent changes in the water balance and groundwater resources

The dramatic changes in the water balance in the Iranian highlands and their peripheral regions present themselves as directly and strongly influenced by human activity. This can be seen, on the one hand, by human intervention in the natural discharge conditions of the few rivers that carry water either periodically or all year round. Dam building and the diversion of river water for irrigation purposes reduce the natural discharge conditions to such an extent that many of the watercourses, which are in any case diminishing, scarcely reach their estuaries.

The problem of diminishing water resources is even more se-rious where the country’s groundwater is concerned than with regard to surface run-off. The ancient cultural technique of qanat irrigation, which dates back thousands of years and constitutes the backbone of intensive oasis agriculture in the Iranian highlands, is on the point of collapse as a result of cli-mate change and human over-exploitation of underground water reserves.

Qanats and the foothills mentioned above are inextricably linked. Qanats (also known as foggara in north Africa, or ka-rez in Afghanistan) are man-made underground galleries which serve to collect the groundwater that circulates in the foothills of mountainous regions. These deposits, fed by rain and melt water, are accessed by ‘mother shafts’ which de-scend up to a hundred metres into the rubble cloaking the many mountain ridges, and are then gradually conducted to the surface via the underground galleries, some of them up to seventy kilometres long. Qanat technology, which was de-veloped in the pre-Christian era in the northwest of Iran, was of great economic significance – and to a certain extent it still is. Up to the Second World War qanats were important not only for the irrigation of fields and gardens but also for supplying many villages and towns with drinking water. There were estimated to be more than 35,000 qanats alto-gether. Today, there are presumably far fewer than 10,000. Human (over)exploitation of the natural groundwater flows


on the one hand, and on the other the drilling of motorised wells, for irrigation purposes or drinking water, which have led to a drop in the groundwater table, but above all the re-duction in rainfall in the mountains, which guaranteed the replenishment of groundwater reserves – all these are un-mistakable indicators of a process of desertification. Deserti-fication as an expression of ongoing climate and landscape change: these phenomena can be observed everywhere in the Iranian highlands. It is particularly true of many oasis settlements in the central highlands. Deserted villages, shrinking arable land or dried-up date tree groves, fruit and vegetable gardens that were once used intensively but are now covered in desert sand – these are phenomena one en-counters everywhere. The desert is spreading!

Current research results based on local field studies

To date, very few scientifically exact proofs of climate change in Iran have been recorded. One of the few excep-tions is a recently completed study of climate and landscape change in the northwest of the country and its effects on the mountain nomadism of people in this region. Taking the example of the 4,740-metre-high Sabalan Kub in the prov-ince of Azerbaijan, analysis of climate observations and measurements made over a long period of time – more than forty years in some instances – provides evidence of greater extremes of temperature, both in summer and in winter, and increasing dryness as a result of diminishing rainfall. In the months of June to October in particular, clear increases in average temperatures accompanied by a decline in rainfall lead to evidence of the desiccation of the nomadic pastures, as was also recorded with the qanats. Here too, in the area on the periphery of the Iranian highlands, which has the cli-matic advantage of higher rainfall, we see evidence of deser-tification processes as phenomena controlled solely by Na-ture. A decline in the reproduction of vegetation in pasture areas, both in the high mountains and the lowlands, has pro-found repercussions on nomadic pastoralism, which is al-ready in a delicate state. The nomads, who are very familiar with and sensitive to their natural environment, are highly aware of these changes. A reduction in grazing potential on the high pastures in summer as well as in the winter pasture grounds of the foothills is one handicap. Another is the in-creasing limitation of alternative pasture grounds through conflicts with the settled farming population: they too keep cattle, and they also turn pastureland into agricultural fields. These and other factors show the extent to which climate and landscape change are not only a natural and scientific phenomenon, but also have profound repercussions on the everyday culture of the people and on the economy.

The dramatic sedimentation processes taking place at Lake Urmia, not far away, point in the same direction as the meas-

urable changes in climate and landscape balance at Sabalan Kuh. This salt lake of more than 5,000 square kilometres has no outlet to the sea and very high concentrations of salt. Like Lake Aral, it too is now in danger of drying up. The level of water in the lake dropped by around seven metres be-tween 1995 and 2011: a clear indicator of climate change. The 40 mm. reduction in rainfall between 1997 and 2006 in the drainage basin of Lake Urmia is another unmistakable indica-tion. Here, however, there are strong human influences in-volved, namely the diversion or blockage of inlets to Lake Urmia for irrigation purposes.

the Middle East: a future ecological powder keg?

The trends we are seeing in the Iranian highlands and sur-rounding areas and the incontestable proofs of higher tem-peratures, less rainfall, and an increase in extreme occur-rences such as droughts or flooding also apply to its neighbouring regions, both in the West and in the East. There too the climate is teetering on the brink. There too mankind is increasingly both the cause and the victim of cli-mate change, and also of landscape changes that make a lasting difference to our livelihoods. So will the Middle East of the future be not only a political but also an ecological powder keg?

The model calculations and future scenarios of the Intergov-ernmental Panel on Climate Change referred to at the start of this article point unmistakably in this direction. In its most recent report, published in 2007, it says of Asia as a whole, ‘All of Asia is very likely to warm during this century; the warming is likely to be well above the global mean in central Asia …’ (2007, vol. I, p.879) – the Middle East being included as part of central Asia. As far as rainfall is concerned, the findings for Iran are projected into the future, confirming that ‘summer precipitation is likely to decrease in central Asia’ as well (ibid.) This trend will have devastating conse-quences. For example, in their analysis of the effects, adap-tation strategies and vulnerabilities of the affected societies in west and south Asia, with particular reference to Iran and the surrounding region, the authors conclude that: ‘Cereal yields could decrease up to 30% by 2050 […] In West Asia, cli-mate change is likely to cause severe water stress in the 21st century’ (2007, vol. II, p. 481).

This and other prognoses consistently point to such grave environmental changes in the Middle Eastern region that the conflicts that will determine their future will no longer be just about ideologies and mining resources like oil and gas. Already, arguments about the essential and determinant fac-tor ‘water’ in Turkey, Syria and Iraq are indicating that they have the potential to develop into international conflicts. Many experts and political analysts see in ‘water as the po-


tential for conflict and war’ one of the greatest challenges of the twenty-first century. Meanwhile, the reduction in natural rainfall on and over the Iranian highlands can be expected to have a tremendous and immediate influence on the precari-ous situation of national food production in the face of a steadily increasing population. This is equally true for fruit and vegetable farming and for nomadic cattle farming, with its production of corn, meat and/or milk. It is however also true with regard to the adequate supply of clean drinking water and water for both domestic and industrial use to

swiftly-growing populations in towns and in the countryside – not only in Iran.

Climate is one factor shaping the culture of the Islamic Orient and its inhabitants, and this has been identified using meth-ods that are great testimonies to human intelligence and hu-man technology. In the future, climate and climate change will be, above all, a technological challenge – thereby ex-tending the common understanding of the term ‘culture’ to include the technological dimension.

ECkart EhlErs is Emeritus Professor of Geology at the University of Bonn.




rEal ENErGy WorldthE dark sidE of bUsiNEss as UsUal

oil is the engine of and a key resource for our economic wellbeing, and at the present time it appears to be irreplaceable as the fuel for industry. but the real price is paid by others, for example the people in Nigeria who live close to the oil fields exploited by Western companies.

By Eva Ursprung

During the last one hundred years, approximately one billion barrels (one barrel is the equivalent of 159 litres) have been used. The demand rose from approximately ten million bar-rels per day in 1945 to 89 million in 2011, an increase that is expected to continue.

Our mobility is important to us. Roughly half the oil extract-ed is used in the field of transport. According to the Fed- eral Department of Transportation, Germany alone had 50,902,131 automobiles of all kinds in 2011, of which approxi-mately 42.3 million are private vehicles.

Thus, if you talk about the consumption of oil in our region, most of the time you will hear complaints about rising gaso-line prices. As a rule, the conditions under which oil is ex-

tracted are of little interest, and the media, too, only ocus on the disaster that oil production causes in a few of the producing countries. People prefer not to look at Africa, especially if we happen to profit from the catas-trophe.

Oil drilling has been going on for more than fifty years in the Niger Delta, and the same poorly-guarded pipe-lines still crisscross the land. Gas flares hiss day and night, sometimes less than three hundred metres away from settlements. Gas flaring is the cheapest method of clearing the oil of the gas associated with its extraction. The inhabitants have no choice but to live with the

noise, the constantly flickering light, and the soot which set-tles on their skin and their mucous membranes, as well as on the fields and in the water, thus entering the food chain with severe consequences for the health of the population: cancer, miscarriages, babies born with birth defects. The average life expectancy in the Delta is now forty-one.

The traditional food supply from agriculture and fishing is no longer feasible, made impossible by constant acid rain and the oil pouring out of the rusty or sabotaged pipelines. The fish are dying in the contaminated water. Livestock – cows, goats and sheep – have to be imported from northern Nige-ria. There are no paved roads leading to the oil region; by and large the population lack access to electricity and cannot afford to buy oil. To gain access to fuel, the pipelines are

A young man at a protest rally on Isaac Adaka Boro day,

which commemorates the late activist for minority rights in

the Niger delta. Kalama, Bayelsa State, Nigeria, 2005. From

the exhibition: Letzte Ölung Nigerdelta (Last Rites Niger Delta).

Staatliches Museum für Völkerkunde, Munich, 16.11.2012–

15.9.2013. Photo: George Osodi © Goethe-Institut


tapped, resulting in far from infrequent explosions and people being wounded or killed – sometimes by the explo-sions themselves, but also by the military, seeking to prevent the theft. Gas stations are often closed: the oil-rich Niger Delta, as well as the rest of Nigeria, experiences frequent gasoline shortages.

These conditions exert migratory pressures. An infertile soil and contaminated waters, the lack of (legal) paid work, an arbitrary and repressive police, the military and the oil firms’ paramilitary units are driving people, especially young men, to a Europe that lures them with its promises. Women re-main behind, with the responsibility of raising their children in unreasonable conditions.

the struggle against disaster

Some international press photographers are working in the Delta with a strong commitment to showing the background to oil production. These images tend to reach international media when rebels kidnap foreigners. Then, for a short peri-od, you will see post-apocalyptic landscapes carpeted with oil, blazing gas flares, pipelines running right through the middle of villages, masked rebels amongst an entirely impov-erished population.

The history of the people’s decades-long resistance has be-come the focus of world opinion, not least since the writer and human rights activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, who founded MOSOP (Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People), and eight of his fellow activists were executed in 1995 after a highly-publicised show trial.

In 2002 and 2003 thousands of women occupied a vast ex-port terminal of Chevron Texaco and several oil production facilities. They threatened to go naked: the use of the naked body represents a minatory curse in this culture, and an ulti-mate weapon in the struggle between life and death.

The conflicts are becoming increasingly militant. The Niger Delta is plagued by sabotage and abductions, as well as by government reprisals. Residents of the oil region – even chil-dren – are increasingly being victimised in attacks by the se-

curity forces, especially the Joint Task Force, which was created in 2004 to protect the oil firms.

The militant »Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta« (MEND) became active in 2006. Its attacks on Royal Dutch Shell facilities have had a marked effect on oil produc-tion. Between 2006 and 2008 more than two hundred for-eigners were abducted, most of whom were released un-harmed once a ransom was paid. Because of the permanent conflict, Shell withdrew from the western part of the Niger Delta in 2006.

Going underground

Not only Shell but also the other companies working in the region, like Total, Agip, Mobil, Chevron or Nigeria’s Conoil, are increasingly transferring their production offshore as a result of the constant unrest. There the catastrophe becomes – at least for a short period – invisible again. ‘Clean’ oil platforms, high-tech facilities, and highly-qualified workers from the in-dustrialised countries are the image that is now presented: and these workers live in securely-guarded compounds, cut off from the rest of the population behind barbed wire and high walls in their single family homes with swimming pools, while all around the neighbouring slums still lack clean drink-ing water.

Offshore drilling occurs miles underwater. It is pitch-dark there and cold: you can only orientate virtually, and the drill-ing is steered from the platform, which calls for extreme precision. The oil, which is boiling hot as it is extracted, is cooled on the way up, releasing aggressive components which corrode the pipes. This creates leaks that are fre-quently discovered only after the fact. However, these are not the only contaminants the water has to endure: North Sea oil extraction, for example, pumps roughly a million tons of chemically contaminated ‘production water’ into the sea per day. The oil firms’ advertisements emphasise their worldwide ecological engagement; their marketing claims that they use environmentally-protective extraction proces-ses and ‘clean’ technology. In light of the destruction being wreaked in our region, the question arises whether anything of the kind is even feasible.

Eva UrsPrUNG lives as a freelance artist and curator in Graz, Austria. Together with Hans Nevidal she has conceived the exhibition Last Rites Niger Delta. The Drama of Oil Production in Contemporary Photographs at the Staatliches Museum für Völkerkunde München [Munich State Museum of Ethnology]. The exhibition can be seen at the branch of the Museum in Residenzschloss Oettingen until September 15th 2013.



MaN or NatUrE?thE idEa of thE aNthroPoCENE

the haus der kulturen der Welt in berlin has turned its attention to the idea of the anthropocene, the geological era of human beings, in a wide-ranging series of exhibitions. Nature and climate are no longer natural in the original sense of the word, but man-made. What does this signify for our concept of ourselves? alem Grabovac attended the opening of the exhibition in berlin for Fikrun wa Fann / Art&Thought.

By Alem Grabovac

Jan Zalasiewicz and the cat Philou, 11.1.2013 Photo: Sebastian Bolesch © Haus der Kulturen der Welt

The British geologist Jan Zalasiewicz has brought a cat with him. Zalasiewicz is a senior lecturer at the University of Leicester and a member of the Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London, a group of scientists who play a prominent role in the analysis of the Anthropocene phenomenon. The cat sitting on the table in front of him is black, and she’s called Philou.

During his talk at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Jan Zalasiewicz circles Philou, giving her tidbits. For him, he says, this cat symbolises the Anthropocene Era. He explains that, of all the biospecies on Earth, the house cat, felis silvestris catus, emerged as one of the winners of the epoch in which humans started to master geological events on the surface of the Earth.

Philou, the centre of attention, starts getting restless and de-manding food. Zalasiewicz strokes her, gives her something to eat, and continues speaking, unperturbed. If you consider the biomass of all terrestrial vertebrates, he says, humans now constitute one third of this total mass. The largest per-

centage of the remaining two-thirds is made up of the ani-mals we farm for food: cows, sheep, pigs, goats. The number of actual wild animals has sunk to under five per cent. Zalasiewicz states that we are looking at a biological take-over, the like of which has never been seen before in the history of Earth.

Philou relaxes and listens to the lecture. The house cat, he says, occupies a position between domestication and the wild. Cats are kept by people all over the world and are very good at reproducing. Some 250 million cats are now kept as pets. By comparison, leopards and tigers are the big losers. Zalasiewicz concludes his lecture by remarking that the do-mestic cat is therefore one of the few creatures to profit from the Anthropocene.

the geological epoch of humans

Anthropo... what?, some readers will be wondering. What sort of term is that, what does it mean, where does it come from? The term Anthropocene was coined by the Dutch


meteorologist and Nobel Prize winner Paul J. Crutzen at a congress in 2000. Two years later he substantiated his thesis about the ‘human epoch’ in an article entitled ‘Geology of Mankind’ in the science magazine Nature. Geologically speak-ing, Crutzen explained, we are living in the Holocene. This epoch began around 11,500 years ago and follows on from the Ice Age, the Pleistocene. However, the Nobel Prize laure-ate believed humanity had changed the Earth so radically that it was appropriate to declare a new geological era: the so-called Anthropocene.

Crutzen locates the beginning of the Anthropocene at the close of the eighteenth century. This was when the invention of the steam engine led to the start of industrialisation, a process that has fundamentally changed the world. Among the consequences of this fundamental transformation are a rise in the production of greenhouse gases, the destruction of the ozone layer, deforestation, the overfishing of the seas, the exploitation of raw materials, and an undreamed-of in-crease in the global population. According to Crutzen, all these factors, caused by human activity, call for a different approach in our dealings with the Earth. He writes: ‘Unless there is a global catastrophe – a meteorite impact, a world war or a pandemic – mankind will remain a major environ-mental force for many millennia. A daunting task lies ahead for scientists and engineers to guide society towards environmentally-sustainable management during the era of the Anthropocene.’

This task, as formulated by Paul J. Crutzen ten years ago, was at the heart of the Anthropocene Project’s four-day event in Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt. A huge number of events took place within this framework, at which philos-ophers, geologists, artists, anthropologists, sociologists, cul-tural scientists, physicists, literary scholars and climatolo-gists discussed the manifold implications of the Anthropo- cene. Questions were raised in trans-disciplinary environ-ments over the course of several days: Is it even still pos-sible to work with terms like ‘artificial’ or ‘natural’? Does ‘Na-ture’ still exist in its pure form? To what extent are we in a position to be able to estimate the consequences of our ac-tions in advance and evaluate them? What does the term An-thropocene signify for topics like sustainability and modern judicial systems?

The event was opened by the Australian chemist and climate researcher Will Steffen. In his lecture ‘The Anthropocene: Where on Earth Are We Going?’ he addressed the question of whether the human race was currently in the process of de-stroying itself. According to Will Steffen, we are already in a critical decade, following the great acceleration after World War Two. This was the starting point for many things we now refer to as globalisation. Steffen showed a series of alarming graphics about species extinction, the overfishing of our oceans, the increase in global warming and the associated

natural disasters caused by climate change. If we continue as we have to date, Steffen warned, we will not manage to limit the rise in mean temperature to two degrees. The next ten years, he said, will determine whether or not we stand any chance at all of survival.

However, after this prologue from Will Steffen, the question already posed itself of what exactly was new about the idea of the ‘Anthropocene’. In 1972 the Club of Rome had already published its study ‘Limits to Growth’, in which it warned that the current global population increase, the rise in envir-onmental pollution and the exploitation of natural raw ma-terials would soon lead mankind into economic and ecologi-cal disaster. The global changes certainly weren’t ignored by the humanities, either. To give just one of many examples, in his 1986 book Risk Society Ulrich Beck described the man-made threats and self-endangerment of the modern industri-al age: ‘It is no longer a question [only] of the utilisation of Nature, of releasing people from traditional constraints, but […] essentially of the problems that result from technological-economic development itself. The modernisation process it-self “reflexively” becomes both a topic and a problem.’ So it is not the diagnosis of the times that is new, only the term ‘Anthropocene’.

New term, old reality

At the conference the scientists explained that one of the main premises of the Anthropocene was that Nature no longer existed, that everything was now man-made. But is this really a ground-breaking realisation? The event took place in the Haus der Kulturen, in the middle of the Tiergar-ten in Berlin, a piece of landscaped nature that has been a feature of the Berlin townscape for almost five hundred years. In 1740 the landscape architect Georg Wenzelaus von Knobelsdorff was commissioned by the Prussian King Frie-drich II to turn the former royal hunting grounds into a public park along the French model. Knobelsdorff embellished the park with neat avenues, ornamental hedges, extensive waterways, late-Baroque labyrinths and figures from ancient mythology. For centuries, then, Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt has been completely surrounded by nature that has been shaped by man.

On the roof terrace of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, be-fore a view of the said Tiergarten, an ox was being roasted on a spit over a fire. The artists’ collective raumlaborberlin had constructed five stations in the foyer where ox meat and side dishes were being prepared. The metabolic kitchen was intended to epitomise the connection between man, na-ture, animal and machine. The individual stations looked like futuristic laboratories, in which people in white coats were filling little tubs with food. A hundred portions, which had to be heated in microwaves, were handed out to the guests. The author of this article is unable to judge the tastiness of


the beef, as even before the diagnosis of the Anthropocene he had already become a vegetarian.

And what were the individual lectures like? The philosopher Akeel Bilgrami from Columbia University attempted to dem-onstrate in terms of the history of philosophy that denial of morality and moral values by the natural sciences needed to be superseded by a new ‘Being-In-The-World’. Erle Ellis, Pro-fessor of Geography and Environmental Systems at the Uni-versity of Maryland, explained that man has already re-shaped more than three-quarters of the land surface of the Earth. Ursula K. Heise, Professor of English at California’s Stanford University, gave a lecture on the Amazonian green-cheeked conure, a parakeet that has all but disappeared in its native habitat, Mexico, as a result of slash-and-burn clear-ance. However, the trade in parrots has meant that the green-cheeked conure, which managed to escape from some households in California, has been breeding there very suc-cessfully. In the San Francisco area there are now more than a thousand of these parakeets, which are now officially de-scribed as ‘birds with an immigrant background’. Elizabeth Povinelli, Professor for Anthropology, took as her example a tribe of Australian Aborigines, and posed a provocative question: Is all life equally valuable? Which creatures and which species of being are privileged, in the Anthropocene Age, to lay claim to life or the Earth’s being-processes? The cultural scientist Christina von Braun of Berlin’s Humboldt University raised the point that the call for mutual responsibility also always carried the risk of new ideologies. The sociologist Aldo Haesler prophesied an ‘Age of Singularity’, a shrinking social world in which a small elite lives in gated communities and the greater majority simply waste away as human flotsam. Emma Marris, a journalist and non-fiction writer, called for a new transnational management of the Earth by some form of trust, and the media art collective Smudge Studio from New York addressed places and mo-ments in which the geological meets the human. They had brought with them a piece of rock from a Finnish nuclear

waste storage facility, which is intended function as an ally of humanity by containing radioactive waste for millennia.

The age of the cat

As interesting and informative as the individual lectures were, they told us hardly anything new. It would have been good also to have heard what political and economic deci-sion-makers, who unfortunately were not represented at this event, would have had to say about the Anthropocene. For one of the crucial questions in future will be how to imple-ment the insights of Anthropocene research in the self-refer-ential systems of politics and the economy. But at least the Anthropocene Project in the Haus der Kulturen tried to cre-ate an interdisciplinary awareness of the dangers and risks of humanity. And that’s not the end of the project, either: over the next two years the Haus der Kulturen der Welt will be working together with the Max Planck Institute and the Deutsches Museum to explore the Anthropocene hypothesis further, in workshops, research initiatives and pan-institu-tional cooperations. And who knows: perhaps the term An-thropocene is sufficiently forceful to set in motion a process that, on the strength of the collected insights and research results of the individual disciplines, will in the future prevent the worst from happening?

If this should not succeed and if in the course of the man-made age of the Anthropocene humans actually eliminate themselves, said Jan Zalasiewicz (that was the one with Philou the cat), cats and some less well-loved creatures like the common rat would continue to be represented in large numbers. The house cat, he said, would once again become a wild cat. Its descendants would develop further and change and at some point in the distant future they would once again take over the ecological realm that the long-vanished lions, tigers and leopards left behind. Philou purred content-edly as he spoke. This future scenario seemed very much to her liking.

AlEM GrAbovAc is a freelance writer and journalist living in Berlin.



The Anthropocene Projecthttp://www.hkw.de/en/programm/2013/anthropozaen/anthropozaen_76723.phpen


‘WoMEN arE MorE vUlNErablE’ aN iNtErviEW oN GENdEr aNd CliMatE ChaNGE

Climate change affects women to a much greater extent than men. as the coordinator of the ‘Gender CC – Women for Climate Justice’ network, Marion Rolle is committed to establishing gender justice in the field of climate politics. this is a discussion on differences and local solutions.

By Sonja Peteranderl

In the oil town of Afiesere, in Warri North district of the Niger delta, local Urohobo people bake ‘krokpo-garri’,

or tapioca in the heat of a gas flare. Since 1961, when Shell Petroleum development Company first opened this flow

station, residents of the local community have worked in this way. The life span of these people is short, as

pollutants from the flare cause serious health problems. From the exhibition: Letzte Ölung Nigerdelta (Last Rites Niger

Delta). Staatliches Museum für Völkerkunde, Munich, 16.11.2012–15.09.2013. Photo: Ed Kashi © Goethe-Institut

Sonja Peteranderl: Ms Rolle, why should climate change be approached from a female point of view at all?

Marion rolle: It is above all poor people who are affected by climate change. People who have no infrastructure or re-sources at their disposal to help them adapt – and 70 per cent of the world’s poor are female. Women often have little or no access to income and resources, such as land and power, and also no participation in decision-making process-es. Due to the roles society has constructed for them they are responsible for such climate-sensitive domains as food, water and energy supplies. Barriers like meagre involvement in political decision-making, inadequate access to informa-tion and lack of education have led to women becoming more and more vulnerable, as well as to a limiting of their options for taking action.

What effects resulting from climate change do women particularly have to deal with?

As women are most commonly affected by poverty, every effect hits them hard – especially those that entail them paying out more money, like increased food prices caused by failed harvests. Even women in Germany, like single mothers, feel the crunch, too, as their financial resources are limited, too. Money is not the only problem. In Tanzania, for example, women are responsible for securing the family food supply. When the soil deteriorates and the rains do not come, they are the ones who have to work longer and harder to make sure their families get enough to eat. This in turn puts a huge strain on their health and reduces the amount of time they might have for other things, like education or involvement in politics.


Gender equality in climate politics

What would have to be done to draw more attention to the needs of women?

What we need is gender equality in the field of climate poli-tics, both on a local level as well as on a national and inter-national level. This will only work if people are made aware of the existing inequality, triggering a reaction that would motivate people to do something about it – among the peo-ple affected, among the perpetrators of climate change, among politicians and among non-governmental organisa-tions. It is important, however, to find out in what ways women are differently affected from men, so that different measures can be taken to put an end to these inequalities

– instead of exacerbating them.

What does that look like in concrete terms? For example, what has the GenderCC pilot project in South Africa been doing?

So far, ten workshops have been held and the main objective was to make sure people were informed about climate change. Many people notice changes in their environment, but are not able to put it into context because they do not have the knowledge. In the workshops discussions take place on how climate change affects people’s everyday lives and what the differences are when it comes to the ways women and men are affected – no way can gender realties be changed without involving men. This then forms the basis for drawing up possible measures to be taken. It’s all about em-powerment: the people are encouraged to want and be able to take action themselves and to organise their lives them-selves, as well the political processes they are involved in.

What effects have these workshops had?

The people develop solutions to their problems; they go back to their villages and pass on their knowledge. Furthermore, the results arrived at in the workshops are then integrated into political processes. Our regional coordinator is involved with workshop participants and other NGOs in developing national strategies.

Men tend to look for technological solutions

So do women in fact have a different approach to problems from men?

The differences start with the way climate damage is caused. Surveys have shown that men eat more meat and drive cars more than women, meaning that they consume more energy. Women in industrialised countries question their behaviour

more and are more willing to change the way they behave: for example, eating less meat. They start by tackling the way they live; men tend to look for technological solutions. Poli-tics is a male-oriented domain – that is why coal-fired power plants are simply fitted with filters, dams are built, and CO2 is to be disposed of in the ocean.

In other words, the women’s point of view is neglected?

It’s often the case that large-scale projects do not improve the situation at a local level, as there is a lack of infrastruc-ture – above all in rural areas. For women the most impor-tant task is to make sure everybody is taken care of. Devel-opment aid projects have revealed that they tend to look for solutions in their immediate vicinity, maybe develop a com-post to revitalise the soil rather than campaign for a big tractor. Ideally, useful large-scale solutions and local ones ought to complement each other. Women and gender experts must be consulted so that all kinds of different ideas are in-cluded in the package of measures.

How open is climate policy to gender?

Compared to the first conference on climate we have achieved a lot. Ten years ago nobody would have thought gender would play an important role when it came to climate change and its effects. On an international level there are definite signs that gender is now being taken into considera-tion – especially in the context of the United Nations Climate Change Conferences. Women’s groups and gender groups have now been officially recognised as observers, just like other NGOs. There is also a growing interest in gender-spe-cific subjects that is beginning to be reflected in negotiating documents, such as those on adaptation measures for cli-mate change.

But?

Only a handful of governments are prepared to really change anything. When it comes to actual measures being imple-mented, they are particularly thin on the ground. On top of that, gender – or women, as the case may be – is not an is-sue when it comes to such important fields as finance, tech-nology transfer and climate protection. The more decisions are taken, the fewer the number of women involved – just as the case is in companies, too. The percentage of women act-ing as members of government delegations is still less than 30 per cent; the share of female chief negotiators is even less – a mere 15 per cent. Lower down the list, for example women taking part in climate conferences as members of NGOs, things become more even. In the end, however, it is still the heads of government who make the decisions.


sonJa PeTeRandeRl studied Social and Business Communication, and is a freelance journalist focusing, among other things, on climate politics.

Translated by Paul McCarthy


genderCC – women for Climate Justice http://www.gendercc.net/en

gerd Johnsson-latham: a study on gender equality as a prerequisite for sustainable development http://www.gendercc.net/fileadmin/inhalte/dokumente/actions/ecological_footprint__johnsson-latham.pdfen

United Nations framework Convention on Climate Changehttp://unfccc.int/2860.phpen


thE NEEd for aN iNClUsivE PErsPECtivEiN PraisE of razaN zaitoUNEh, WiNNEr of thE ibN rUshd PrizE

in November 2012 the syrian human rights activist razan zaitouneh was awarded the ibn rushd Prize. Udo steinbach gave the laudatory speech explaining the global political background to razan zaitouneh’s work and the reasons why she was awarded the prize.

By Udo Steinbach

A member of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) from the platoon Uweis al-Qurani runs through the debris in Sheikh Said, a poor neighbourhood in

the south of Aleppo. Mohammed Rias kiru, 37, known as Sheikh Na’aimi, is the commander of the platoon. Eight of his brothers fight in the

same unit. The scene shows the neighbourhood twenty minutes after an air strike that missed the platoon as they were close to Syrian army

positions. The plane dropped just one bomb, which pulverised two buildings in a neighbouring street. This is the collateral damage from the

bomb. Syria, January 2013. Photo: Kai Wiedenhöfer © Goethe-Institut

Razan Zaitouneh is unable to be with us tonight. This is not the first time that the recipient of a prize has been prevent-ed from accepting it in person. Usually this is a symptom of a conflict between the prizewinner and repressive rulers. So in honouring this evening someone who is forced to remain in hiding we take the opportunity to honour all the women and men of the Syrian uprising. Her name is well known to us, and we also know what she stands for: the struggle for human dignity, freedom and justice in her Syrian homeland. At the same time we also see her as an activist of the rebel-lion in the Arab societies that have risen up since the 17th December 2010 to shake off the yoke of repression and in-justice. In an interview in October 2011, on being awarded the Anna Politkovskaya Prize, she said: ‘This prize is like a prize for all Syrians and their revolution.’

the three arab uprisings

There are many points of reference for the Syrian uprising. One is the Arab peoples’ aspiration for independence and

freedom since the end of the Ottoman Empire. This first Arab uprising, which in the 1920s also encompassed Syria, was suppressed by the imperialism of the European powers. The second Arab uprising began with the takeover of power by the Free Officers in Egypt and the fall of the monarchy. For almost two decades it changed the political landscape of the Arab region between Algeria and Yemen. Eventually the pro-tagonists became entangled in the snares of their excessive desire for political power, of the East-West conflict, the Is-raeli-Palestinian conflict, the autocratic exercise of power, and a development policy that led to self-enrichment and crony capitalism as well as to a dramatic intensification of economic and social differences.

The third Arab uprising picked up where the failed protago-nists of the second left off. When Mohamed Bouazizi set fire to himself in the bleak little town of Sidi Bouzid, in despair at his humiliation, it became a beacon to millions of people, urging them to redefine the position of Arab societies in the twenty-first century. At the same time it also proved that


the uprising draws its significance and its justification from history itself, and that this awakening is irreversible. The en-tire Arab world was caught up in the movement.

Another aspect of the Syrian uprising is to be found in Syria’s own recent history. When the Ba’ath Party seized power in Damascus in 1963 – in the middle of the second Arab upris-ing – there seemed for a moment to be the promise of a new Syria. But the way the takeover was achieved – by the mili-tary – already cast a shadow over this promise. It was clear at the latest with the coup by Hafez al-Assad in 1970 and the passing of the constitution of 1973, which enshrined in law the supremacy of the Ba’ath Party, that there would be an ir-reconcilable opposition between the ‘socialist’ path of devel-opment and the implementation of human and civil rights. Resistance to the dictatorship in the late 1970s and in the early 1980s was brutally suppressed. Bashar al-Assad in his turn has held fast to the principle that places the violent ex-ercise of power above democratic legitimation.

Almost a decade before anyone would even dream of the third Arab uprising and the turbulence that has spread across Syria, Razan Zaitouneh had already started to resist the regime – first by defending political prisoners, and later as a co-founder of human rights organisations. Appearing here this evening would probably have cost her her life.

Western inaction

But where do we stand amid these historic events? Our com-mitment here this evening is in all too obvious contrast to the inaction of Western politicians. We hear and see little more than empty words, carefully-expressed diplomatic eva-sion, and questionable analyses of the ‘special nature’ of the developments in Syria. Sanctions are not really an effective measure; they are just window dressing. They are intended to give the impression that something is being done. In reali-ty, of course, almost nothing is being done.

And yet – a crass contradiction – doesn’t Europe effectively believe that it invented the concept of freedom? Indeed, many have reflected on the right to freedom and on rebel-lion against tyrannical power: the list includes writers and philosophers from Friedrich Schiller to Albert Camus, to name but two. ‘What is a rebel?’ asks Camus in his superb essay L’Homme révolté [The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Re-volt]: ‘A man who says no.’ Millions of Arabs have said ‘no’. Schiller too, in the play William Tell, which I consider to be the drama of the will to freedom, says ‘no’. ‘No, there are limits to a tyrant’s power / When the oppressed man finds justice is denied him, / When he can bear no more, then he will look / To Heaven at last with bold assurance, / And claim from Heaven his eternal rights, / Which hang there like the very stars themselves, / Inalienable, indestructible.’ There is no need for us to draw parallels with the outbreak of the Arab uprisings: they are all too apparent. Razan Zaitouneh, along

with many others, set out to claim these inalienable rights, which are nothing other than human rights, for her own – Syrian – society. More than 50,000 people in Syria have since discovered that this can only be achieved at the price of their own lives. ‘As a last resort,’ wrote Camus, ‘he is wil-ling to accept the final defeat, which is death, rather than to be deprived of the personal sacrament that he would call, for example, freedom. Better to die on one’s feet than to live on one’s knees.’ In William Tell, the phrase is: ‘And sooner die than live in slavery.’

common cultural foundations

Why this digression? To show that, for all our differences of history, culture and religion, we in the European and Arab countries are standing on common ground. For decades ‘the West’ looked down on ‘the Arabs’, ‘the Muslims’, with a mix-ture of arrogance, pity and pseudo-expertise. They were deemed more or less genetically incapable of democracy. The smarter ones among us said the Muslims needed to un-dergo their own ‘Enlightenment’: only then could they catch up with the modern world. The Arab revolutions, the Syrian uprising, have set us straight: we all share a commitment to the values of humanity. Freedom is the conditio sine qua non. The ideas of philosophers and authors like Friedrich Schiller and Albert Camus therefore occupy the same ground as the ideas and conclusions of Arab minds like Rifa’a Rafi’ at-Tah-tawi, Mustafa Kamil, Abd ar-Rahman al-Kauwakibi and many others. This understanding must be the basis upon which we meet in future. It is the foundation for the prospect of a new mutual appreciation. The accepted clichés here concerning ‘the Arabs’, ‘Islam’, or ‘Muslims’ belong in the same dustbin as the potentates and autocrats who were toppled by their ‘subjects’. And as we sit here, hundreds of thousands of Egyptians are rising up – the majority of them, according to deep-seated Western prejudice, ‘Muslims who are not in fact capable of liberal democracy’ – and demonstrating against the establishment of an Islamic dictatorship in Egypt.

We are confronted with a question that cannot be ignored: what should we do? How we should support this event which is, in a historical context, the culmination of many things that have happened in the past? If the Arab uprisings as a whole and in Syria in particular are viewed in the same context of freedom and human dignity that we in the West claim as our inalienable right, we cannot run away. The failure of Western politics in accepting the slaughter in Syria and doing almost nothing about it – slaughter of which, unfortunately, more and more people are guilty of perpetrating the longer it goes on – borders on cynicism: all the more so if one compares the conduct of the international community with its oft-cited ‘responsibility to protect’, which would provide easy justifica-tion for NATO intervention in Syria. Sanctions are being used as an alibi for forceful action. Here is a quotation from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, dated 16th June 2012: ‘The EU banned the export of goods to Syria that could be used to


oppress the population … Now it has presented the list of goods affected. These goods included caviar, truffles and ci-gars with a market price of more than ten euros, wine and other alcoholic drinks with a value of more than fifty euros, as well as leather goods worth more than 200 euros and shoes costing more than 600 euros, the Commission advised.’ Syria is not Libya and a military intervention like the one in Libya should not – for numerous reasons – be repeated. However, as Razan Zaitouneh demanded in the interview to which I have already referred: ‘Syrians must be protected; new alternatives and solutions must be found to protect the Syrian people and bring an end to the regime.’ As things stand, though, protection cannot be provided by words alone, nor by sanctions that do not really hit the regime. Pro-tection means getting involved, or providing those who need protection with the means to protect themselves.

We know that many people in Syria are hesitant to join the uprising, that they are afraid of the future. There are many reasons for this. Albert Camus assigned a particular respon-sibility to ‘man in revolt’, but he also knew that not every man is born a rebel. ‘Actual freedom has not increased in proportion to man’s awareness of it. We can only deduce from this observation that rebellion is the act of an educated man who is aware of his own rights. But there is nothing which justifies us in saying that it is only a question of indi-vidual rights. (…) it would rather seem that what is at stake is humanity’s gradually increasing self-awareness as it pursues its course.’ For Camus, rebellion becomes a ‘first piece of evi-dence’: elementary, in the same way that ‘thinking’ (cogito) is the basis for self-awareness for Descartes – ‘I think, there-fore I am.’ Modifying this elementary assertion, Camus writes: ‘I rebel – therefore we exist.’ Man in revolt, then, is also acting on behalf of others: his protest goes beyond the individual, himself. This is how we understand Razan Zai-touneh’s comment that I quoted at the beginning: ‘This prize is like a prize for all Syrians and their revolution.’

determined fighter for freedom

Razan Zaitouneh’s resistance did not start with the outbreak of the rebellion. She was a committed human rights activist long before the protest became a collective action in March 2011. But it is this shift from individual to collective protest that constitutes the mysterious essential core of the uprising in Syria, and in the other Arab countries where people have rebelled against oppression. Repeated reference is made to the importance of social media in this regard. This, of course, does apply. But these media are merely the instrument through which a deeply powerful resolve articulates itself in order to overcome an antiquated order that can no longer be endured. It is the certainty that an era has come to an end, even if those in power are trying at all costs to turn back the clock.

However, unlike the upheavals of the 1950s and ’60s in Arab countries, which were initiated by individuals and/or specific groups, especially the military, the recent rebellion is a people’s movement. ‘We are the people’: this now familiar motto has united men and women, people of all denomina-tions and all ethnicities in protest. What binds them together? What gives them the strength to oppose rulers who are determined to use all the instruments of repression with the utmost severity against the people? Razah Zaitouneh has provided us with the answer: ‘There is no doubt that the protesters and the revolution will ultimately be victorious. If we did not believe that we will win, we would not be able to continue against the brutality of the regime. We would not be able to bear all these crimes against our people. I am sure that each and every person in Syria believes that the revolu-tion will, in the end, claim victory.’ The people sense that his-tory is on their side. Their struggle has grown from individu-al protest to become a common cause.

Here too we must ask the question: have we – by which I mean Syria’s European neighbours – acknowledged the mo-mentousness of what is happening in the neighbouring Arab countries? I have already pointed out the common origins of our pursuit of freedom. What new form of encounter be-tween our neighbours and ourselves would correspond to this insight? History is not encouraging. Ever since Europe and the Arab peoples confronted each other in the late eighteenth century in the context of European expansion, there has been a name for this encounter: ‘the white man’s burden’, or ‘la mission civilisatrice’. Even after the First World War, the Arab peoples had to be – in the eyes of the Euro- peans – protected or mandated, in order to conduct them from the dregs of civilisation to the height of the European standards of the modern age. The Mediterranean politics of the last few decades deteriorated into fearful maintenance of the status quo. The preservation of the existing regimes was prioritised over supporting the forces of democratic change. In Palestine Europe stood by and watched as the rights of the Palestinian people were persistently ignored and violat-ed. Just forty-eight hours before [Tunisia’s] Ben Ali was top-pled, the French Foreign Minister offered him the assistance of ‘tried and tested’ French security forces. The people of the Arab countries who have rebelled since 17th December 2010 did not turn to Europe: they did it without Europe’s help. If they had turned to Europe and asked for support, their request would have been dismissed out of hand. Re- establishing our credibility is therefore a first important step towards redefining the way we encounter one another. Is the West now squandering this chance in Syria, as it continues to do in Palestine?

Certainly the most recent confrontation over Gaza is also fostering doubt as to whether the transitions in Arab socie-ties have increased Europe’s resolve to renew its relation-


ships with its neighbours on a basis of credibility. It is almost beside the point who started the shooting and killing in the last few days. And it is self-evident that a state is entitled to defend itself if it is attacked. If, however, politicians emphati-cally state that Israel has ‘every right’ to defend itself, they must then state in the same breath and with the same em-phasis that Israel has every obligation to respect the rules of international law and humanitarian imperatives. Not only has there been no progress in this regard over the years; instead, the practices of occupation and land appropriation and the contempt for the people of Palestine displayed by the set-tlers, defended and supported by the current Israeli govern-ment, have become increasingly systematic. Once again Europe has looked the other way.

Violence, however, begets violence. Hopelessness and degra-dation were the breeding ground for the rebellion of Arab youth from Morocco in the West to Yemen and Bahrain in the East – as they were in Syria, too. Hopelessness and de-gradation are also the breeding ground for the violence of Palestinians against a power that respects justice as little – or, to be more precise, as selectively – as the Arab auto-crats. The fact that there is link between the struggle against autocratic oppression and violent occupation by a foreign power is something Friedrich Schiller showed us once and for all in the introduction to his History of the Revolt of the Unit-ed Netherlands Against Spanish Rule: ‘The despairing citizens, to whom the choice of deaths was all that was left, chose the nobler one on the battlefield. A wealthy and luxurious nation loves peace, but becomes warlike as soon as it becomes poor. Then it ceases to tremble for a life which is deprived of everything that had made it desirable.’ It is shameful that the government of Germany, of the people of Friedrich Schil-ler, is not actively supporting the Palestinians on the only path to freedom and statehood that remains open to them: the path of approval by an overwhelming number of states throughout the world in the plenary assembly of the United Nations. This is a blemish we will carry with us in the eyes of all peoples and societies who strive for freedom, not least in our predominantly-Muslim neighbouring countries.

The significance of the award

We are awarding the Ibn Rushd Prize to Razan Zaitouneh. Are we doing this – as is so often the case with political prizes – primarily in order to reaffirm to ourselves our noble motives? In order then to scuttle away, our pathetic naked-ness concealed by the figleaf of having bestowed a prize? If a prizegiving has any significance at all, it can only be as deeds, not just words: if we commit ourselves to act accord-ing to the principles of both prize and prizewinner. If we honour Razan Zaitouneh, then we ourselves must want to be Razan Zaitouneh. It will then be just as impossible for us to stand apart from either the Syrian people’s efforts to end

illegitimate government, or from the struggle of the Palestin-ian people to end illegitimate occupation.

How can Europe win back credibility? The answer is: we have to change perspective. What is needed is an inclusive perspective, meaning: we must recognise that the future of the Arab societies and our neighbouring countries in the Middle East is part of the future of Europe. Europe’s status in the international system of the twenty-first century will de-pend substantially on the quality of its relationships with the new orders that are coming into being in the Arab region

– including Palestine. We have for long enough allowed our-selves an exclusive perspective: the Arab people were the Other. Our interaction with them has been shaped by our phobias: of instability, irregular immigration, violent Islamic extremism, militancy against Israel. The resolution of the Palestinian question fell by the wayside. The new – inclusive – perspective requires the orientation towards and dialogue with those who legitimate political leaders, i.e.: the people. For too long now we have cultivated relationships with those who lay claim to legitimacy – without, or in opposition to, the will of the people.

As far as Syria’s immediate future is concerned, everything depends on the current regime quickly coming to an end. Every further day of its rule not only increases the number of dead, it also deepens the growing rift and hatred between different elements of the Syrian population. We condemn the sordid agenda of those who, in the name of freeing the Syri-an people, are tormenting this same people with bloody acts of terror. But they will not determine the course of history. The people of Syria need the prospect of a new order in which they can rediscover themselves, together. Reconcilia-tion must go hand in hand with the establishment of this or-der. To return to the poets, Friedrich Schiller wrote in William Tell: ‘Let every man control his own just rage,/ And nurse his vengeance for the public wrongs; / For he whom selfish in-terest now engage / Defrauds the commonwealth of what to it belongs.’ Reconciliation is the essential prerequisite for a new beginning.

It is our hope this evening that the people of Syria will prior-itise ‘public’ need and ‘the commonwealth’ over ‘selfish inter-est’. We are pinning that hope on people like Razan Zaitouneh, whom we honour tonight. For much of her life she has placed the ‘the commonwealth’, the common good, the right to human dignity and freedom, over concern for her own person. She cannot be with us tonight because her fight for the common good has forced her into hiding. When she comes forward – and with her all the others who have also had to go into hiding – it will be a signal: that a new era in Syria has begun. But also that the future, for all of us, will fi-nally be based on the same indivisible fundamental values, which we are all equally bound to apply.


This is the text of Udo Steinbach’s laudatory speech given in praise of Razan Zaitouneh on 30th November 2012 in Berlin.

udo sTeINbach is a member of the editorial board of Fikrun wa Fann / Art&Thought, and was for many years the director of the German Orient Institute in Hamburg. He is currently Director of the Governance Center Middle East / North Africa at the Humboldt-Viadrina School of Governance in Berlin.

Translation: Charlotte Collins


Ibn rush fund for freedom of Thoughthttp://www.ibn-rushd.org/en

Governance center Middle east / North africahttp://www.humboldt-viadrina.org/eng/en


froM thE EMotioNal oriENt to thE distortioN of islaMoN GErMaN traNslatioNs of ClassiCal islaMiC litEratUrEWhy does classical oriental poetry still sound so ornate to German ears? blame the German translations. these are still following the model of the eighteenth century, when the myth arose that islamic poets were sentimental geniuses in the realm of emotion and romance.

By Stefan Weidner

Does anyone still remember the supposedly ancient Gaelic epic allegedly written by the legendary Ossian? The real au-thor was the Scottish writer James Macpherson: he simply passed himself off as the translator. Yet it was precisely this deception that led to the Poems of Ossian achieving phenom-enal success in the eighteenth century. It’s an interesting case, because here the translation is revealed to be that which, potentially, it always is: the extremely questionable claim to have privileged access to something Other, some-thing foreign, something new. Taking the somewhat naïve un-derstanding of translation as dressing a foreign literary body in new linguistic robes, in the case of Ossian all we have is the robe.

Let us remain in the glorious eighteenth century. The French Orientalist Antoine Galland, who worked for many years at the French embassy in Istanbul, returns to Paris. In his luggage he has with him the manuscript with the tales of The Thousand and One Nights. Galland translates them in the literary style of his time – a form of translation that was later decried as belle infidèle, a beautiful, unfaithful woman.

The Thousand and One Nights was a kind of Ossian. The tales owed the phenomenal success they enjoyed all over Europe to the time-bound style of the translation. If Galland had presented a translation of The Thousand and One Nights that was as sober, as fidèle, as the one published by Claudia Ott in 2004, we can be sure that The Thousand and One Nights would never have been noticed at all – just as today the translation practices of

Galland and the majority of his successors, about whom Borges writes so vividly in his essay on ‘The Translators of the Thousand and One Nights’, are no longer to our taste. However, the question of which translation is better misses the point of what, above all, a translation has to offer.

the magic of poetry

Linguistically, The Thousand and One Nights is a relatively simple text. Needless to say, literary fashions and linguistic expectations play a far greater role where translations of poetry are concerned. We may therefore assume, by analogy with the translations of The Thousand and One Nights, that in

Oriental reality echoes the Western Orientalist

dream: Tombs of the Saadian dynasty in Marrakesh.

Photo: Stefan Weidner © Goethe-Institut


Western languages Oriental poetry, too, was made readable in a manner that had less in common with the original than it did with the context of the target language. And it is no coin-cidence that the upturn in the literary reception of the Orient begins in the same period and with the same protagonists who were so strikingly deceived by the Ossian fabrication. Both mark the beginning of a rebellion against the disen-chantment of the world, against the devaluation of emotion in favour of reason.

‘Empathy’ is the magic word coined by Herder in this context. Herder believed he could sense the same originality of genu-ine feeling in the poetry of the Bible as in that of Ossian. For poetry was, according to a famous phrase by Johann Georg Hamann, the ‘mother tongue’ of humankind. In this respect the people of the Orient were considered to be sources of unparalleled authenticity. In a commentary on his collection of traditional folk songs Herder expressed it thus: ‘There is more poetry and a greater poetic treasure trove in what are called the prejudices of the common people, in the madness, the mythology, the tradition, the language, the customs, the peculiarities of any savage, than in all the poetics and ora-tions ever written; and if anyone were to collect these forms of madness, fiction, these fantasies and prejudices even somewhat efficiently, I am certain he would be rendering to human understanding a service that ten logics, aesthetics, ethics and politics most likely will not render it.’

The emotional orient

The anti-Enlightenment attitude of this statement is unmis-takable. There are two sides to it. The prettier side is that Herder here defends all foreign poetry against rationalistic or otherwise narrow-minded criticism. He is thus establishing a space in which the foreign poetry is entitled to reside, re-gardless of how strange or abstruse it may appear to some of its readers. Even a prejudiced poetry could and should now be collected without prejudice. This is nothing short of the beginning of the end of ethnocentrism. But there is a price for this openness, a darker reverse. Any form of poetry that does not originate in the European cultural realm runs the risk of being labelled along with all the ‘forms of mad-ness’ as soon as it enters the space Herder opened up. For-eign poetry is thus welcome on the one hand, but at the same time excluded from participating in the future of the Occident. The Occident is responsible for Reason, while the Orient is responsible for Emotion.

From this we see that Herder found material for his attacks against the rationalistic ‘logics, aesthetics, ethics and politics’ in almost arbitrary places. Emotion could be just as much the responsibility of the Bible as of the ‘savages’, or of the yet-to-be-unmasked Ossian, i.e. the Celts. The ‘Emotional Orient’

had become a metaphor, the metaphorical quality of which, however, often remained hidden. It is still popularly con-fused today with the actual meaning of the word ‘Orient’: that of a concrete geographical and cultural location.

The ‘Song of Solomon’ was now regarded as the paradigm of Oriental poetry and the mother tongue of the male sex. In Herder’s translation it was elevated to become the absolute epitome of Oriental poetry. This is probably the origin of the floweriness still imputed to Oriental poetry to this day. ‘Per-haps this sigh,’ writes Herder in his commentary, ‘was sent accompanied by a languishing flower, a fragrant morning rose,’ for ‘we know from the Montague letters and elsewhere that the Orientals send each other such messages and letters of love in gifts of flowers’.

To gain some idea of the kind of mischief of which Herder’s ‘empathy’ was capable, let us recall that the ‘Song of Solo-mon’ was written sometime between the eighth and sixth century before Christ, but that the good Lady Mary Wortley Montague, to whose ‘letters’ Herder refers, died only in the 1752 – not to mention the fact that the passage in question refers to a Turkish love letter from the so-called ‘Tulip Peri-od’ in Istanbul in the early eighteenth century when every-one went mad for flowers.

Flowers do indeed feature in the ‘Song of Solomon’, and this would probably be sufficient to anchor the prejudice about the ‘floweriness’ of Oriental poetry – later generally under-stood to mean language rich in imagery, wallowing in meta-phor – deep in our general consciousness. For Herder, of course, this is not enough. His commentary on the ‘Song of Solomon’ paves the way to an entire Interflora service: for, as we know, not only poetry but Nature too was called on to serve the anti-Enlightenment literature.

Translating in the spirit of the times

So if Oriental-Islamic poetry is not flowery, what is it? At the time when people in central Europe started to become inter-ested in it, this poetry already had a thousand-year-old his-tory in three great cultural langauges: Arabic, New Persian, and Ottoman Turkish. You don’t need to have read a single line of it to know that it would be senseless to try to sum up in a couple of words literary phenomena written over such an extensive period of time and in a geographical area stretching from Spain to New Delhi.

In order to explain this in more detail, let us simply take the example of Hafiz. For the most part, our knowledge of him is limited to Goethe’s West-Eastern Divan, even though, a few quotations aside, there is actually nothing of Hafiz in there. Even someone who has at some point read an actual Hafiz


translation (of which there are many, but none that is really well-known) is hardly likely on that basis to claim to know Hafiz. If he does, he is a fool. Without an understanding of Persian it is only possible to approximate an understanding of Hafiz by comparing several translations in several lan-guages and from several different periods. If you then com-pare Hafiz with the literary movements that paved the way for his reception, the result is astonishing.

Is Hafiz sentimental? A ‘Sturm und Drang’ poet? A Romantic? There is no apparent overlap between the aforementioned literary movements and either Hafiz or the few other exam-ples of Oriental poetry translated in Germany in that crucial century between 1760 and Friedrich Rückert’s death in 1866. There are more similarities between the poetry of the medie-val Islamic period and the poetry from which our writers of the time were seeking to distance themselves, namely the Baroque and Mannerism. Oriental poetry, particularly that of Hafiz, is neither sensitive nor sentimental. Its concept of the subject or lyrical identity has nothing in common with what has distinguished our poetry since the eighteenth century.

Germanicised foreignness

In comparison with poetry from the Sturm und Drang and Romantic periods, classical Oriental artistic poetry, of which Hafiz is the culmination, constrains the poet within a corset of conventions. Poetic genius is not expressed through exu-berance and individualism but by the poet moving so skilful-ly within the given parameters that it is as if this corset did not exist. Until well into the twentieth century the poetry of the Islamic languages conformed to a poetics of strict rules which Herder had rejected in his invective against ‘poetics and oratorios’ quoted above – at almost precisely the same time as this poetry was discovered. Furthermore, we find lit-tle in classical Oriental poetry indicative of innovation, a break with tradition, or literary revolution, however much the translations suggest this, or were interpreted in this way.

The compatibility of Oriental poetry in general and that of Hafiz in particular with German literature between Sturm und Drang and late Romanticism is down to two factors, neither of which have anything to do with the original. One is the cultural deracination of this poetry. Because its origi-nal contexts are barely known, it is inevitably particularly open to interpretation. We can do with it and read into it what we will: it is unable to defend itself.

The second decisive factor in the reception of Hafiz and Ori-ental poetry as a whole is the translation itself. The fact that it was received into the context of the aforementioned liter-ary movements, and thus fell precisely into the dichotomy Herder created between reason and emotion, continues to

this day to have very serious consequences for the reception of Oriental literature, and indeed the whole Islamic cultural realm.

It was unavoidable that the few translators of Oriental litera-ture should attempt to make the material they were trans-lating acceptable to the readership of their age, their linguis-tic community; to adapt it and, as it were, dress it up for them. It would be ahistorical to blame the translators for this adaptation. On the contrary, we must be grateful to them for having translated Oriental poetry in the spirit of their times. If they had attempted to translate it as, for example, Hölder-lin did the Greeks, their work, like Hölderlin’s, would not have provoked the slightest response. The space Herder opened up for Germanicised foreignness – a part, at least, of the incommensurable, would never have been populated.

Poorly interconnected?

It is true that our simple and often distorted image of Orien-tal poetry dates back to this period. However, responsibility for the fact that this image did not change and become dif-ferentiated, like that of Shakespeare, for example, lies with the subsequent generations of literary figures, translators and Orientalists who failed to achieve that which distin-guished the first translators: reaching the pinnacle of their age, and mastering the lyrical language of their period. If it is possible to translate Hafiz in the manner of the Sturm und Drang or Romantic movements, it is equally possible to translate him in the Expressionist manner, or in that of New Objectivity. Hafiz is a poet who would also have been ideally suited to the Viennese avant-garde; his wordplay can best be compared in German with that of H.C. Artmann or Reinhard Priessnitz. There was no such reception for the simple rea-son that none of our post-war poets had mastered an Islamic language. Furthermore, none of our Orientalists has even at-tempted to adapt the poetry to our age and our mother tongue, let alone been inspired by it themselves.

Yet, as is very apparent with Annemarie Schimmel and Jo-hann Christoph Bürgel, these translators and Orientalists had good reason to be guided by their Classicism- and Romanti-cism-influenced predecessors. The style of translation devel-oped at that time is the one in which they encountered Ori-ental poetry in German – and this was, in fact, the form in which they encountered all poetry. Surely the formal stric-ture of Oriental poetry was a justification for seeking to base it on our own classics and masters of form? Didn’t the age of this poetry necessitate its translation into an older classical language?

Of course, the supposedly classical language into which older Oriental poetry is still translated today is for the most past


merely a lifeless clone of the language of our Classicism and Romanticism. Proof of the kind of aberrations that can result was offered to us a few years ago in an anthology of Orien-tal love poetry whose ‘flowery’ tone is already apparent in the title: Gold on Lapis Lazuli.

No one should be blamed for believing, on reading antholo-gies such as these, that there is no reason to be interested in Oriental literature. The anglophone and francophone

worlds have long since demonstrated that it is possible to write modern translations of classical Islamic poetry. If, however, there are no longer any contemporary and representa-tive translations of this poetry in the German-speaking world, it can only be the fault of translators, Orientalists, and faint-hearted publishers. It also shows us how poorly inter-connected philology, vibrant literature and intellectual curi-osity are in our country today – unlike in the age of Clas-sicism.

stEfaN WEidNEr is the Editor-in-Chief of Fikrun wa Fann / Art&Thought.




sNaPshot of afGhaNistaN:fEar aNd yEarNiNG iN a ravaGEd laNd

the exhibition Augenblick Afghanistan (Snapshot of Afghanistan) will run at the state Museum for Ethnology in Munich until 15th september 2013. its curators have succeeded in putting together a sensitive portrait of afghanistan that creates entirely new perspectives by juxtaposing the everyday impressions of German soldiers and those of afghan photographers.

By Nouria Ali-Tani

For the first time ever, a German museum is attempting to look at the subject of Afghanistan from the point of view of German soldiers deployed in the Central Asian state. Al-though soldiers could be regarded as having always also been cultural mediators, bringing foreign countries closer to home through their letters, reports, and the objects they brought back with them, they have rarely been given the chance to speak out – at least where Afghanistan is con-cerned.

Following lengthy internal discussions, the curators at the State Museum for Ethnology in Munich decided it would also show the soldiers’ point of view – a courageous step, espe-cially given that museums for ethnology rarely focus on con-temporary issues. Recordings, official photo material, and personal objects provide surprising insights into the life of soldiers on a combat mission.

afghan photographers

But there is more to the exhibition Snapshot of Afghanistan than this. The impressions of the foreign soldiers are appro-priately complemented by the perspectives of young Afghan

photographers. In the early twentieth century, mem-bers of Afghanistan’s genteel elite were fascinated by photography and took photographic portraits of one another. Abused by the Soviets for political propaganda purposes and banned altogether by the Taliban, since 2002 photography has once again been gaining in pop-

ularity. By setting up media institutes and organising festi-vals, workshops and exhibitions, foreign foundations are contributing to the improvement and dissemination of pho-tographic material. For example, the photographs exhibited in Munich were taken for a photo competition that was run in conjunction with the Goethe-Institut in Kabul in early 2012. The aim was to get young artists to capture their day-to-day experiences in photographic form. Exhibition visitors primed by mass media images of Afghan misery and the devastation caused by war will be surprised by these images too.

Snapshot of Afghanistan is not about analysing, politicising, and explaining; it is about raising questions and expanding horizons. Using a balanced mix of the various educational formats available to museums, the State Museum for Ethnol-ogy presents Afghanistan in the year 2012 and brings it to life for visitors. The layout and design of the exhibition, which is based on the colours of Afghanistan and its differ-ent landscapes, invite them to feel their way into the ma-terial, which is at times confusingly complex. Key words are emblazoned on the wall in large letters in an attempt to create order and aid comprehension.

Girl on a swing during Nouruz festivities in Kabul. From the

exhibition Augenblick Afghanistan (Snapshot of Afghanistan)

at the Staatliches Museum für Völkerkunde, Munich. 16.11.2012

–15.9.2013. Photo: Najibullah Musafer © Goethe-Institut


compelling, despite some problematic aspects

Given that the exhibition catalogue was published by an in-stitution devoted to ethnology, a little more gender sensitivi-ty in the choice of authors and themes would have been welcome. All too often, the living situations of Afghan women are used as an argument for the foreign combat mis-sion and to help legitimise it. These women deserve more qualified and more nuanced attention. On this level, some of the captions are also deserving of criticism, namely those that seem to aim to correct the Western image of Islam, and to draw a clear line between this and the abuse and misogy-nist perversion of Islam by extremists. However, some of the

formulations were ill-chosen, and this has drawn fierce reac-tions from some visitors.

That said, the exhibition works. It opens up new vistas and allows for balanced and nuanced reflection on a country that truly does have more to offer than chaos and war. Afghani-stan: a country of contrasts and uncertainties, a country of cultural wealth and breathtaking landscapes. The intention is for all foreign combat troops to be withdrawn from the country by the end of 2014. After that, Afghan society will have to show whether it is ready to embark on the road to inde-pendence, responsibility, and peace. Then, at the very latest, it will be time to take another ‘Snapshot of Afghanistan’.

The exhibition Augenblick Afghanistan – Angst und Sehnsucht in einem versehrten Land [Snapshot of Afghanistan: Fear and Yearning in a Ravaged Land] runs at the State Museum for Ethnology in Munich until 15th September 2013. The eponymous exhibition catalogue is published by Tobias Mattern and Christine Stelzig..

Nouria ali-TaNi is a political scientist and expert in Islamic Studies. Her main focus is contemporary issues in Arab / Islamic societies, and her main research topic is the realities of women’s lives.




bEforE thE talibaN CaMEThe Pakistani writer Jamil ahmad portrays the unknown world of the Pakistani tribal areas in his stories from the 1970s.

By Stefan Weidner

Jamil Ahmad Photo: Fauzia Minallah © Goethe-Institut

There is such a thing as the curse of literary asynchrony. The best books often lag years, even decades, behind the events they portray. Others appear too early: the novels that ex-plain the Arab revolutions, such as those by Alaa al-Aswani, were published long before 2011 and for years went almost unnoticed in the West.

Jamil Ahmad, born in 1933, a Pakistani pensioner unknown in literary circles, has managed to escape this curse. His trick: write before, publish afterwards. If his stories had appeared forty years ago, at the time when they were written, hardly anyone would have paid them any attention. Now, however, they have become an international bestseller.

the end of the world

For the end of the world that Jamil Ahmad describes, the Af-ghan-Pakistani border region, where the author once worked as a civil servant, has since become the retreat of al Qaida and the Taliban. The Wandering Falcon, as this belated debut is called, is a sort of garland of novellas that tells us how the people in the region once lived, loved and thought. In this way it succeeds in making the persistence of today’s con-flicts there at least partially comprehensible; and it does so

by refraining from judgment, something that would hardly be possible today.

A man kidnaps his lover. Fleeing their pursuers, the couple settle near an army outpost in an inhospitable region and have a baby. When, years later, the parents are found and murdered by their pursuers, the boy is left behind beside their bodies. This child is the falcon whose path through the stories provides the book with its leitmotif. The real heroes, however, are always the others who find the boy and take him in: the Baluchis, for example, who rebel against a state which, contrary to tradition, wants to dictate to them who should be their chief.

As men of honour, they believe a leaflet that promises them free passage. On arrival in the town, they are subjected to an outrageous trial and condemned to death. ‘There was complete and total silence about the Baluchis, their cause, their lives, and their deaths. No newspaper editor risked punishment on their behalf. (…) No bureaucrat risked dismiss-al. (…) What died with them was a part of the Baluch people themselves. A little of their spontaneity in offering affection, and something of their graciousness and trust. This too was tried, sentenced and died with these seven men.’


depiction of an ethnocide

This commentary by the narrator, which is, incidentally, the only one in the whole book, is equally revealing of the moti-vation behind both Jamil Ahmad’s writing and his years of si-lence. The Wandering Falcon is also the depiction of an ethnocide, of a people who, prior to this book, have never had a voice, a narrator, have carried no weight. The idea of a national state, which we inevitably regard as a civilising achievement, here once again reveals its totalitarian flipside. The state borders defined in the twentieth century for the first time between Afghanistan and first British India, then Pakistan, arbitrarily carve up the region where the nomads live. For as long as they can remember, we learn in the story entitled ‘The Death of Camels’, they have roamed about in the rhythm of the seasons. They have never had any official papers. Now, all of a sudden, they are supposed to show their passports at the border. When they simply keep mov-ing, they are mown down along with their animals. After reading this, it will be no surprise to anyone that these people’s descendants rebel against any form of control and welcome anyone who will support them.

Not all the stories end as tragically as ‘The Death of Camels’. There is even one tale of roguish deeds at the time of the

First World War, in which the Germans and the English, who were both paying a lot of money as they vied for the alle-giance of the clans, are played off against each other. But the world described here is threatened with extinction – and this knowledge resonates in every line. Jamil Ahmad in no way glamourises the harsh life of nomads in the Pakistani border region; but neither does he subject it to a hegemonic human rights discourse checklist. Tradition, honour and patriarchy define this society more strongly than Islam. And yet, as merciless as the prevalent code of honour may appear, it is one of consummate transparency and reliability. Everybody knows what is good and what is evil, what is right and what is wrong. There is an almost aesthetic quality to the un- equivocal ethos with which the book confronts us post- modern relativists.

Jamil Ahmad writes in a simple, unpretentious style. Its charm lies in the narrative perspective, which maintains pre-cisely the right distance: just sufficiently removed to ob-serve this dying world from the outside, yet close enough never to allow this distance to become an internal one or the characters to become alienated from the reader – as alien as they are. One can therefore predict that Jamil Ahmad’s book will still be being read when, one of these days, there is peace again along the Pakistani border.

Jamil Ahmad: The Wandering Falcon, first published 2011 by Riverhead Books (Penguin). The German translation by Giovanni and Ditte Bandini has now been published by Hoffmann und Campe Verlag, Hamburg (2013).

sTefaN WeIdNer is the Editor-in-Chief of Fikrun wa Fann / Art&Thought.




IMPRINT ART&THOUGHT / FIKRUN WA FANN52. (13.) year,no. 99 (Nr. 24),July – December 2013

Publisher:Goethe-Institut e.V.

Editor-in-Chief:Stefan Weidner

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Editor’s Office:Stefan WeidnerArt&Thought / Fikrun wa FannPralat-Otto-Müller-Platz 650670 KölnDeutschland

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