“It is time to normalize the existence of the climate emergency,” said Luisa Neubauer, opening her talk “Defending Democracy and Safeguarding Our Planet: A Dual Imperative.” Instead, she said, “In every single household in the country, someone is asking: ‘Are you going to the climate strike? Shouldn’t we be angry? Shouldn’t we be active?’”

As Germany’s leading youth climate activist and organizer of the “Fridays for Future Germany” protests, Neubauer presented a holistic approach to the climate crisis that stressed individual engagement in what has become a battle for how we define ourselves.

The Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies event last week was co-sponsored by the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability. George Sarrinikolaou, the institute’s executive director and assistant provost for climate and sustainability, gave opening remarks, noting that “at a time when the climate is deteriorating and … a time of war in the Middle East, Ukraine, and Sudan,” Neubauer is “mobilizing millions of people to advocate for science-based climate measures.”

Neubauer, who is a John F. Kennedy Memorial Policy Fellow at CES and author of several books on climate activism (most recently “Beginning to End the Climate Crisis: A History of Our Future”) then explained her address as a bit of “thinking out loud” about how to be “more effective as a movement.”