I grew up close to a region that is heavily affected by coal mining in Germany. In 2018, there was a huge protest there. That's the first time where I got involved and I saw that there are people in the forest defending nature and defending life in general. It was so clear that the government, the police and the companies were just working against the people. So that's where I think the fire started that couldn't be stopped and that was the same time where Friday's For Future started to grow heavily and popped up in so many cities in Germany. And then I went to a protest a few months later and I saw the people organizing, and I just thought, that's what I want to do.  

I think if you work a little bit with gender justice, or even if you read the IPCC report, or the Climate report, released by the UN, you see that there's a heavy influence of discrimination in the effects of the climate crisis. So whenever people are structurally discriminated in several forms, the crisis evolves. If you dig a little bit deeper, and think further than the natural aspect, and interpret the climate crisis as a social and economical crisis, you see that we need to fight the structural oppression of so many people to actually achieve anything that is close to climate justice. 

I never thought I would have less opportunities than men. But there's just a pattern that you cannot unsee once you've seen it. That you know you're being interrupted in discussions or that people don't take you seriously or that you're being looked down upon [because of your gender]. I was in these spaces with a lot of people who think they just own the power without ever being questioned, while realizing that I am questioned every day. I started to look deeper into why this manifests and also what we can do against it and begun organizing with other experienced activists to fight against the patriarchy. 

I think something very powerful that we can see in the Fridays For Future movement is the international kinship that we build. People have come together to create their own space for organizing and to create actual bonds. We need to learn what solidarity means. And that it doesn't mean to just symbolically raise a flag or to post something on social media or to go to a panel and say, yes, I stand for human rights. It means to actually look at the people and what people need, and then work to build structures to support these needs.  We need  to shift resources from basically here in Germany, or in general, industrialized, rich countries, towards whoever is on the frontline of the climate crisis, which can be in a flooded area in Pakistan, but it can also be poor people in the Global North who are fighting against forest degradation. I think it’s key to act locally, but at the same time, to learn from a very personal perspective what it means to fight internationally.