"Heimat"

I haven't been home for more than 15 days a month yet this year. July, the record month, I only spent 5 nights in Berlin. No wonder friends often ask why I bother paying for a beautiful and spacious flat. In July, certainly, staying at a Hotel would have been more cost-effective.
To me, however, the thesis that 'global' and 'local' go together (which was very fashionable in planning and geography circles when I last bothered to read that literature ...) is not mere talk. It's my reality. The fact that I am globalized makes me much more committed to the 'local' - be it my flat, my neighbourhood ('Kiez'), or even Berlin. I spend so much time on the road and in anonymous, non-descript spaces, that just coming home to a beautiful flat is a wonderful, indeed needed antidote. Even better when the weather is nice and I can cycle home from the office along the canal. Relaxation certainly starts when walking into the very bright and open living room(/kitchen) I currently live in. On a good day, it continues with looking at the flowers on the balcony and overlooking Berlin from the roof terrace. So this piece is really just an excuse to upload some pretty impressions of that reality. I can never quite explain what the German word "Heimat" means. But Kreuzberg and my flat is what it means to me - just now, anyway.

I wish I was at Heathrow ...

Like most of the travelling public, I hate Heathrow. It's overcrowded, cluttered, the queues and air keep getting worse - and, in any case, it is a huge source of noise and pollution. I once remember being in Kew Gardens trying to escape the noise of central London when I was living there. I was unlucky with the wind and hence all flights to Heathrow were flying over Kew. The trip turned out to be less quiet and relaxing than staying in an airport hotel; the most exotic bird I saw, incidentally, was a Concorde ...
So, I just don't go to Heathrow - I avoid that place like the plague. But this week, I would like to be there to join the Camp for Climate Action. Activists from all over the place are standing up to the BAA bullies and are showing the world that it is time to wake up to the impacts of aviation. Good!

Yes! King Coal falls in Bremen

Across the world, Germany is considered to be terribly green. This is mainly due to us being obsessive about our garbage, I guess. In recent years, it may also have had something to do with our wind and solar industries booming and with German leaders talking tough at international climate negotiations.
The reality is, however, that Germans emit more CO2 per year even than most Europeans. Every fifth German job, or so, depends on the car industry, and old- style industries, such as coal and chemicals, are still very important to our economy. Our fossil-fuel hungry utilities, meanwhile, have a complete stranglehold over our politicians - mainly because their bosses and our politicians tend to be chums (or, indeed, the same people ...).
Of course, it is wonderful that Germany is saying the right things, mostly, at international climate negotiations. But our record at home is - especially in that context - highly hypocritical, embarrassing even. We still expand roads and airports like there is no tomorrow. And it could all get much worse in coming months and years, as many of our energy production plants near the end of their life. Many utilities are considering replacing them with new coal plants. This would tie Germany further into fossil-fuel dependency and would make achieving our national climate targets a trifle difficult.
Now is the time to take a different path and to start a true renewable energy revolution. Luckily, local opposition - with a strength the German environmental movement has not seen for a while - is forming to stop the 27 (or so) new coal plants that are planned. And yesterday, there was the first success! Bremen's utility, swb, announced that they will not go ahead with a new coal plant. This, as the local Friends of the Earth group says, is "the right decision that shows the way to the future". Let's hope so. And let's kill every single one of those 27 plants!
P.S. The map above is taken from BUND Bremen.

A lovely evening - but what really mattered, of course, was the Derby victory!

It was a fine evening in Berlin last night. A little windy but warm enough, at last, to have dinner on the roof. Lovely people came around for a dinner of home made pesto (which Kathrin had made with herbs harvested on our terrace!) and we watched, Strip Jack, the last of the wonderful (if not at all faithful to the book ...) TV adaptations of Ian Rankin's Rebus novels. In honour of Rebus we also had a fine glass of whisky (or two).
Truth be told, though, what really made me happy last night was something I did not experience at all. It was seeing the result 'Hearts 0 - Hibernian 1' appear on my computer screen before I went to bed. Hibs did well in their first game in the season (though true to form not well enough for the coach, John Collins). And they beat local Edinburgh rivals Hearts - which is, of course, always a particular joy!
There can be no rational explanation for football fandom. But the reality is, that my mood is certainly - and sometimes considerably - influenced by how Hibernian Football Club fairs in the Scottish Premier League.
The picture above, meanwhile, shows me handing out press releases at the WTO meeting in Cancun wearing a Hibs shirt. The collapse of the trade talks had come unexpectedly quickly, so I was still wearing my fan attire rather than my suit ;-) ...

Bush saves climate, really!

It was Murphy's Law at work last Friday. For once, I had left the office early (to go for a wonderful kayaking weekend in Mecklenburg with my dad). Of course, when I am out in the middle of nowhere is the moment Bush breaks the news that he is to host a conference of the 15 or so biggest CO2 emitters in the world on September 27^th-28^th in Washington. My wonderful colleague John Coequyt in DC thankfully dealt with all the media frenzy. I was left quietly rejoicing at the first real action on climate change I have ever witnessed by President Bush. By choosing those September dates, Bush will save me an extra flight to the US. The same is no doubt true of countless others in Environment Ministries’, think tanks and NGOs. On September 24^th most of us will already be in New York, for a high level meeting on climate change that UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon is hosting. Flying being about the worst thing any of us can do to the planet, the dates Bush has chosen will probably deliver more emission savings than all the hot air announcements he has so far made on climate issues. Not flying to the US one extra time will save the emissions of several years of (average) car driving. It also means less jet lag, more time with friends, and - hopefully - more time drinking beer on the roof terrace.

Make no mistake, though – that Bush is holding this “Gang of the Big Emitters” meeting is no change of heart. Bush remains as opposed as ever to the globally binding (and deep!) emission cuts we urgently need. His September meeting is part of the theatre Bush is putting on in order to look busy on climate issues until he finally (!) leaves office next year. That he is holding the meeting at all does show that he feels under pressure - but sadly not that he is willing to act. To the contrary! This meeting, just like the APEC one his pal John Howard is putting on at the beginning of September is in fact a dangerous attempt to divert attention away from where the real action on climate change is and ought to be: the Kyoto Protocol. At the G8 summit in June Bush was forced to claim that his meeting is a contribution to the wider UN process that must lead to a second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol, the only legally binding global treaty to cut greenhouse gas emissions. The Bush administration even had to repeat that claim when they announced the September date on Friday. The reality is, though, that they are still opposed to what the Kyoto Protocol is all about: internationally binding ceilings (called caps) on emissions. They say so quite openly and you can also see it in the language they use. They keep talking about Kyoto “expiring” in 2012, for example, suggesting that Kyoto is on the way out. This is rubbish. Kyoto’s first phase will end in 2012, no more. Kyoto will persist and the current commitments simply need to be replaced by new ones. If the planet is to be saved, this ‘second commitment period’ will have to oblige industrialized countries to cut their emissions by at least 30% by 2020. That’s what I and the rest of the Climate Action Network gang will be heading to the US in September to demand. Let's hope our flight to the US is worth it!

Shock revelation: German loves beer (but make it organic)

To say that I love beer is admittedly pretty dull. I'm German, after all, so the fact that I don't eat sausages is surely more newsworthy than my devotion to our national drink. But, so be it. One of the truths in my life is that few things can give me more simple pleasure than a good, cold glass of beer at the end of the day. In retrospect, it all started at my very first ball (and I haven't been to many since). I returned all sweaty from the dance floor and found an unaccompanied beer on the table I was sitting at before. I took a sip - and was in instant heaven. When you are really sweaty and thirsty, there is nothing better than a Pilsner. Period.
Wherever I go, I try new and local beers as much as I can. So in Canmore, Alberta, I of course returned to the Grizzly Paw Pub and enjoyed their wonderful taster sets (see picture above). I particularly liked their seasonal light ale, though sadly I can't recall what they had put in it to make it special. Their Rutting Elk Red is also quite a good impression of a Scottish ale, somewhere between a 70 and an 80.
If I had unlimited space and a partner as tolerant of clutter as my friend and fellow beer lover Red Constantino - see his beer collection here - I would probably be lugging home beer bottles from around the globe all the time. That not being the case, I have restricted myself to collecting bottles that not only contain fine beers, but also seeds of the agricultural revolution. Organic beers are one indication of how organic has started to go mainstream in recent years. Drinking the stuff used to be the preserve of greenies like me who had to buy it in more or less obsucre organic shops (ten years ago, my quest for organic beers was akin to someone collecting rare books and visiting antique book dealers around the world). Now, shop assistants know what you are talking about when you ask and you can even buy them - "no problem"- in any run of the mill beer and wine store in, say, Alberta. I thus could happily add two new bottles to my collection last week:
Fishtale is a very fruity beer, that to someone like me is almost like a "desert beer"; I think it has too much fruityness to go well with many meals. But I liked it - though I am not entirely sure I support the idea of a "wild salmon" beer (I am vegetarian after all ...). The slogan "you should have tasted the one that got away" is kind of cute, though.
Paddywhack by the Nelson Brewing Company from BC, is an all the more hard-hitting and ale-like affair. It's got above 6% alcohol and a heavy - some would probably say hoppy - taste to it. It's again not a beer I would regularly have with a meal as it has a very strong taste of its own. But it is a perfect late night, finishing off the day after a nice hike or a swim in the lake kind of affair.



I will keep you posted on other gems I find. Please, if you ever visit me, bring a bottle! Organic beers is one of those few products I could become a marketing shark for. It's all we need in one: Pleasure and Revolution (and, yes, as Emma Goldman reminds us, it has to be in that order: "If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution!")

Bumper stickers and how good is your Arabic?

I love bumper stickers, buttons, campaign and election posters - all the ephemeral signs of societal conversations, conflicts and follies. They so often sum up the mood of a moment so well. They so often express (dark) humour in a way no pamphlet or long, reasoned argument could. In short, they entertain me - to such an extent that I probably only ever finished my first marathon in 2001 because it was election time in Berlin. Making my way through town one km at a time, I was fascinated by the various posters - and by the way you could tell the socio-economic make-up of a neighbourhood simply by looking at them. Kreuzberg was plastered with posters of various lefty splinter parties, for example, many of which even I had not heard off. Yet in the leafy, boring outer west of the city you could easily get the impression that Germany only has two parties (Conservatives and Liberals) ....
Travelling, for me, is always also a chance to come across new bumper sticker gems. And so, exiting in a wonderfully relaxed, my-muscles-loved-that-hot-water kind of way from the Radium Hot Springs in British Columbia last week, this is what I found on the back of an American car:

Now please don't quibble and point out that this sticker reflects badly on Americans' ability to speak foreign languages. Please also do not point out that casulaty numbers in Iraq are nothing compared to Vietnam. Just enjoy - that's what I did.