Carola’s story

I am an ecologist and a social justice activist.

I was born in 1988 and studied nautical science in Germany. After graduating, I started to work on board the German polar research icebreaker Polarstern and had my first encounter with the rapidly warming Arctic in 2011 when the ship reached the North Pole. I came to understand that scientific data about the climate crisis won’t motivate political action and that the power of civil society is critical to end the age of fossil fuels. I decided to change my career and participated in a European Volunteering Service in Bystrynsky Nature Park, in Far-East Russia in 2014 before finally saying goodbye to professional shipping in 2017. A year later I finished a master’s degree in conservation management (Ecology) in the UK and upon graduating in 2018 joined the resistance against the eviction of the Hambacher Forest occupation, in German Rhineland as well as in Extinction Rebellion’s first bridge blockades in London.

From 2016 to 2019 I occasionally volunteered for refugee sea rescue NGOs in the Central Mediterranean. It was then that I was arrested (and released 3 days later) as captain of “Sea-Watch 3”, since I had to dock in the harbour of Lampedusa to fulfil my obligation under international maritime law to bring people rescued at sea to a safe harbour. The Italian Supreme Court ruled in January 2020 that my decision had been justified and I should never have been arrested. I have since been engaged in various forms of activism such as environmental protests and occupations and have worked for NGOs or doing ecological field surveys. In 2020 I joined Greenpeace for a further mission to Antarctica and in 2021 campaigned with the Bob Brown Foundation against the airport project of the Australian Antarctic Division. I engage with both environmental and social justice movements as I believe that all ecological issues have their roots in social injustices and unequal power structures. My main interest – though I constantly get derailed – is nature conservation including supporting struggles for justice and human rights within that space. In 2023 I decided to stand for election to the European Parliament, having agreed with friends from climate justice and migrant movements in Germany that this was the correct strategy.

_{^{(C) Ruben Neugebauer}}