No, it’s not just the planet heating up. It’s a particular word – “radical” – that gets one of Germany’s most influential environmentalists a little heated. “When you think about the tremendous costs of carrying on as usual, why do we use the term ‘radical’ for people who say we need to speed up the necessary changes?” Maja Göpel says. Her indignation is in response to being asked about recent controversial court cases that have seen German climate change protesters given jail time for gluing themselves to traffic intersections.
“It’s actually radical to say we’re going to carry on taking these risks when we really are nearing a lot of environmental tipping points.”
Those tipping points include things like polar ice sheets collapsing or the demise of key biodiverse habitats such as
