Luisa Neubauer
Luisa Neubauer is a climate activist and author. She was born in Hamburg, Germany and currently lives in Berlin. The year after graduating high school, she worked for a development project in Tanzania and an organic farm in England. Then, she went on to the University of Göttingen to study geography, did a semester abroad at the University College London, and earned scholarships from the German government and the Heinrich Böll Foundation. She earned her Bachelor of Science degree in 2020, and is studying resource analysis and management as a graduate program at the Georg-August University in Göttingen.
Luisa has been active in multiple different climate organizations. She has been a youth ambassador of the organization ONE since 2016, and has been active with the Foundation for the Rights of Future Generations, 350.org, the Right Livelihood Award foundation, the Fossil Free campaign and the Hunger Project. IN 2019, she gained fame as a leading Fridays for Future activist, referred to as the “German face of the movement.”
Luisa published her first book in 2021, titled Noch haben wir die Wahl [We still have a choice] written with Bernd Ulrich. In 2022, her next book Gegen die Ohnmacht [Against powerlessness] was published, and she co-authored Beginning to End the Climate Crisis: A History of Our Future with Alexander Repenning in 2023. She hosts a podcast on Spotify called 1.5 Grad [1.5 degrees].
Excerpt from “Sunsets, Anger and Activism: On Youth Leadership in Urbania” by Luisa Neubauer
My hometown owes its story to a massive glacier that covered the entirety of northern Germany during the last ice age. When the glacier melted, the meltwater formed a river, the river Elbe. My river. Beside and on this water rose the city of Hamburg, powered by its harbour, by national and colonial trade, by the good fortune of being the last European mainland stop before the North Sea. Growing up, the riverside was my playground. The sandy beaches, the lighthouse, the laughter, the horns of the gigantic container ships passing just a few hundred metres away—all of that on repeat made up my childhood summer days.
But we never swam in the river. And we didn’t ask why; it was just not allowed. Much later, I learned about the pollution, the bacteria and the toxins in the water, washed into the river from Hamburg’s overfertilized farmland after rainy days. I learned that the container ships operating in the river caused deadly currents, which increased with the growth of globalized container shipping. It was much later, too, when I learned how the uphill battle between my hometown’s ecology and its economy was manifested in my childhood playground. We, the children, didn’t matter in this struggle.
There was another thing we noticed that was a bit odd. The vast majority of the kids at my school would cycle to school each morning, sweating on the last hilly part of the journey. There wasn’t a bike path, though, so we would find ourselves trapped between a busy sidewalk on the one side, and honking school buses and rushing cars on the other. We would sigh with relief as we arrived at the school gates, our hearts racing. We adapted over time: sometimes we would walk our bikes for the most stressful parts of the journey, sometimes we would get to school early to avoid the worst of the traffic. Hundreds of those mornings passed before we considered that maybe it was the infrastructure, not us, that needed to adapt.
Links
- “Climate as Culture: An Interview with German Climate Activist Luisa Neubauer.” Harvard International Review. 24 October 2024.
- “Why you should be a climate activist | Luisa Neubauer.” TED, Youtube. 4 October 2019.
- “‘Make The Climate A Priority Again,’ Says Germany’s Student Activist Neubauer.” NPR. 3 July 2020.