Greener than Green
Not seeing the Trees for the Forest of Ideologies. A conversation with Andreas Schulte
»What times are these when / A conversation about trees is almost a crime / Because it includes silence about so many misdeeds!« (Bertolt Brecht)
What does it mean to be Greener than Green in the context of German Politics — more importantly, what can we Americans learn from the German experience in our own bid for sustainability? In our recent conversation with a German Forester, it’s evident that the German Green’s sustainability ideology strayed into the abyss of political romanticism some time ago. And it’s displaying an increasingly paternalistic, authoritarian understanding of the State. Therefore, it’s no surprise that Dr. Andreas Schulte (aka Dr. Forest,) an original Green who worked in German Development Aid for a long time, has little positive to say about this contemporary ideology - not least because its time horizon has been sacrificed to political situationism. What he tells us is that, despite preaching sustainability all day long, the German Government actually does the exact opposite, which is how they’ve fallen into the trap of de-industrialization – or as he translates it into his motto:
If Ideology is master, you reach disaster faster!
After spending time in Bolivia as a lecturer in Forest Ecology at the Universidad Mayor De San Simón, Dr. Schulte went to Indonesia, where he set up the Forestry and Timber Management Faculty at Mulawarman University before returning to Europe in 1996 to study heavy metals in Forest Ecosystems at Vienna’s University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences. Then, in 2003, he accepted a call to the newly created Chair of Forest Ecology, Forestry, and Timber Industry at Münster’s Westphalian Wilhelms University. During this time, he also started Wald-Consult Ltd., which in 2019 became SilvaVest GmbH: Sustainable Land Use Assets, which assists international investors in long-term stable and sustainable investments not susceptible to market fluctuations or political crises. This strategy resembles Jakob Fugger’s forestry investments in the late Middle Ages. While Fugger’s massive fortune may become much smaller over the passage of centuries, the inhabitants of his Fuggerei still enjoy the fruits of this foresight today (for the price of an annual rent of €0.88 and three prayers a day). In this sense, sustainability is not an empty word – let alone an ideological bludgeon to be used at will against one's political enemies. Instead, it’s linked to understanding that forest is a highly complex cultural landscape in which Economy, Ecology, and our own way of life must be translated into an intergenerational balance.
Hopkins Stanley
🎬 Here is the video (in German)
Martin Burckhardt: I’m very much looking forward to today's conversation, even though I admit I feel incompetent in your fields of Ecology and Forest Economics. On the other hand, I feel less lost about reading the symbolic world, and it's obvious in many people's minds that the Forest is like an image of Paradise Lost. So when we discuss the forest, we're always running the risk of getting lost in the abyss of Political Romanticism – which is why, as the saying goes, ›we can no longer see the wood for the trees.‹ But before delving into the abysses of politics, let's look at your career. What fascinated the young Andreas Schulte, born in 1958 in the Hamm area of Ruhr, so much about the Forest that he studied Forestry Science1 [Forstwissenschaft] and became Dr. Forest?
Andreas Schulte: Well, it wasn’t the classic career of a son whose father was neither the head of a Forestry department nor the owner of any forest land by any stretch of the imagination. They referred to Hamm as ›the Gateway to the Ruhr region‹, which was all about coal mining and steel production at the time, not about Forestry…that says it all. Perhaps the only thing we had were the parks we were driven away from whenever we met up with friends in them to play soccer. That’s about as close as I came to touching the subject, so it’s actually not a very romantic story…It’s only because of an extremely committed biology school teacher that I became interested in it at all. His enthusiasm drew his pupils into collecting and measuring data by challenging their fascination with getting involved in Environmental and Nature Conservation back then...something I thank him for. I quickly decided to follow this path, even though I had to wait six months for my actual University placement.
MB: Interesting…
AS: I was so fascinated by it — why? It was a general course, of which I'm still an educational fan today. In other words, it’s the foundational courses that are so important in that they cover everything, so you actually do all the Natural Sciences, from Geology to Botany, Mathematics, Chemistry, and Physics first. And in the main course, after the so-called Intermediate Diploma, there was also another generalist course. In other words, we studied Business Administration, Economics, and Law before moving on to the actual Forest-related subjects, from Forest road construction to Silviculture, sustainable Forest management, and so on. Unfortunately, I realized that Biology wouldn’t get me into the Overseas Development Aid2 – it's too scientific and not practical enough – at least back then. But Forestry certainly was because it was in demand worldwide.
But let's talk about Romance. In Hamm, in the Ruhr region, it wasn’t very romantic except for the painting in my parent's living room of a forest path in the Sauerland, which, for the Ecologists, showed less forest and was more about the most profound Spruce Culture throughout the hinterlands. So it was a far cry from Caspar David Friedrich or Lessing or something like that. As for the Romantics, I have my own view on this. Romanticism came back when Forestry Science was at the forefront of the economy for a long time. It wasn’t just in Germany today, but in Central Europe, that we faced a natural catastrophe because there was ten percent or even less forest cover in many areas. That's hard to imagine today as the Heath is romantic today, of course…the Heathland, the Lüneburg Heath, is very romantic now, but it was a wasteland back then. So I have a different opinion. The Romantics, to whom much of our image of the Forest is attributed, had an influence, as did Grimm's fairy tales had its impact – but I believe that after WW II, there was a real jolt in the soul of the Germans, as we had large-scale forest destruction from the war, which was dramatic.
But then, after WWII ended, the so-called clear-cut reparations fell on top of the war’s destruction, which hardly anyone remembers now. In other words, the Dutch, British, and French carried out large-scale clear-cutting to rectify their damage using wood for reconstruction. It was utterly justified – and that's not the point. The point was that at the end of the Second World War and in its immediate aftermath, we had frigid winters, and Germans were faced with an absolute shortage of firewood. There wasn't any coal, oil, or gas after the War; it just wasn't there, and the infrastructure was destroyed. We had these huge, bare areas. We had shifting dunes and sand in North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) –you must imagine that. And few people know that before the Federal Republic was founded, the Allies had a ban on assembly. Logically, there were no associations, clubs, or parties – except for the German Forest Protection Association [Schutzgemeinschaft Deutscher Wald], the first association approved in 1947. The Schutzgemeinschaft Deutscher Wald pointed out how vital reforestation campaigns were and how important firewood was for the population’s development and survival.
And so we have the women planters on the 50 pfennig piece in memory of this as there were fewer men after the Second World War. So that was – above all – an achievement by women, an incredible reforestation effort in the years after the war. And then came something that shouldn't be underestimated, even if it always makes you smile.
Then, comparable to the Romantics, the longing for an ideal world again came into relief with the so-called Heimatfilms, with the Forester from the Silver Wood. Looking at the data today, these are the films that, by far, still have the most moviegoers. None of the well-known blockbusters, such as James Bond, Matrix, Man in Black, Harry Potter...whatever...were more successful in Germany regarding cinema attendance. Still, The Forester from the Silver Wood has an estimated 28 million moviegoers and is the most popular. Unimaginable! And that was balm for the German soul. Finally, something romantic again.
And the Foresters were the good guys in the movies because they were the guardians of nature. Of course, the films weren't set in any ruined towns or destroyed landscapes or on clear-cuts – they were set in Austria or the Bavarian Forest, where the landscape and the whole world were still intact. And that's why people flocked to the movies with this longing, this romantic yearning that's well documented. Back then, surveys asked what kind of husband women wanted – and the Forester was the most popular – you can see this influence until well into the 1970s when the discussion about forest dieback replaced it. But this longing to finally get out of the destroyed, ruined landscape and into the Silver Forest had a massive influence on us that was then passed on to the next generations. The history of Forestry, where this was taken for granted, is missing today – I think many Ecology students in Forestry no longer know about it because the contemporary witnesses have died. We were still lucky enough to hear from those who were actually involved in the reforestation campaigns back then. You can't imagine the vast queues of 46-47 people where a few potato peelings were exchanged for a bit of firewood; people were hungry and cold. And it was this motivation that prompted us to get to work.
MB: Yes, of course, I absolutely understand. In our previous interview, you described yourself as a primeval Green ›who was even greener than green.‹ If we come back to the fascination with Ecology, you could say that we’re dealing with an extension of the Western term of a system – where after we discover the mechanical view of the world’s limits, we immerse ourselves in a much more complex structure of meaning. Could you say it was this expanded epistemology that fascinated you so much in the Forest as a general student?
AS: Yes, I agree with that – but as I said, it started much more simply as a child, as a 12 or 14-year-old, through Biology and the Scouts. It was also linked to travel in an organized way back then…we went camping in the Finnish forest for 14 days in the summers, and, despite the mosquitoes, we had great fun romping through the Forest and learning its lore – that was a strong influence.
You mentioned the Greens. I was an original Green, but back then, it was hard to decide if I wanted to join them, probably because back then, there was a connection to pedophiles.3
I couldn't relate to the 1980 manifesto, which called for the far-reaching legalization of sex with children – it was hard to figure out where they were going at the time. I was actually more involved in Environmental Protection and Development Aid, which at the time was covered by the SPD (German Social Democratic Party), by Willy Brandt, and then Erhard Eppler, the last Federal Minister for Economic Cooperation, who was really competent and knew what he was talking about, and was very committed. So that's where I gravitated to, even though I wasn't in the SPD either. The turn towards epistemology, as you said, came during my studies – and then again through professors. There was a failed attempt to study Philosophy simultaneously as I’d imagined it was something different, but it wasn’t possible alongside my Forestry studies. The philosophy course, propositional logic, was very demanding in the first semester.
MB: But there are Heidegger's wooden paths, for example.
AS: It becomes difficult if you already have 30 or 35 semester hours of Forestry per week. There were also dead ends, such as the dead end of Behavioral Research, which I was very interested in. But then I came to Ecosystem Theory, which had something to do with Forest Ecosystem research and the hot topic of forest dieback at the time. And that was also the subject of my diploma thesis and then my doctorate.
MB: Before we delve further into your professional career, let's look back at contemporary history. The 1980s weren't only the decade of the nuclear and peace protests at Wackersdorf and Pershing II, but it was also the time when the first, we could say, moral panic broke out. Forest dieback was on everyone's lips. It is one of the rare words that has taken on a meaning beyond the country's borders – Le Waldsterben, as it's called in French. How did you experience these discussions? How did this apocalyptic narrative fit in with your specific involvement with the Forest? It was completely different because the story you have just told is the story of reconstruction.
AS: I have to say that it worked very well, scientifically anyway. That was when the Attention Economy began — but we had a considerable advantage as social media and the internet didn't exist yet. This meant there wasn't confrontation with the press or private public television. And the magazines were much more straightforward than they are today, even with politics. My doctoral supervisor, Prof. Bernhard Ulrich, Doctorate honoris causa mult, head of Forest Ecosystems Research Center at the University of Göttingen, was an outstanding, world-renowned expert at the time; he received the Markus Wallenberg Prize — which is considered to be the Nobel Prize for Forest Ecology — the Federal Cross of Merit, and so on, and he taught us back then not to participate in Attention Economy. That means looking strictly at the data and the facts to distance ourselves from attacks, which we also had at the time, usually from industry representatives who said we should go to the GDR (German Democratic Republic) or whatever the slogans were.
But what I wanted to say about the forest dieback [Waldsterben] and how we could deal with it so well was that science had formulated an obvious hypothesis with a conditional proposition. Our working hypothesis was that if acid and heavy metals deposition into forest ecosystems continued like this, forests in Central Europe would die off completely. And, at the time, the media, such as Der Spiegel, made a somewhat hysterical claim that the German forest was dying.
But we never said that – that was the difference. If conditional sentences are omitted, it naturally impacts scientific output critically. That's what we were experiencing with COVID-19; that's what we're experiencing now with climate change: the forest didn't die because we were wrong, but because hundreds of thousands of angry citizens on the streets forced politicians and industry to act.
In other words, now I could put up graphics showing that sulfur dioxide emissions have fallen dramatically due to street pressure, and you could show that heavy metal emissions have also dropped significantly. Undeniably, that's why it was possible to avert the forest dieback underway. No hopelessness, fear, or panic was involved – which I thought was great as the aim was to come up with concrete, practicable solutions. This is what I'm missing in the current climate change debate.
So what did we propose? Based on data, unleaded gasoline and catalytic converters for cars. Now, naturally, it was a considerable discussion back then because it was being said that ›the German automotive industry would die if unleaded gasoline requirements were introduced.‹ Flue-gas desulphurization systems instead of towering industrial chimney stacks. That’s so concrete; it reminds me of when I went to the library and opened a book from 1902 for my dissertation – the pages were still glued together; nobody had ever read it before. A soil scientist had predicted that if the chimneys got taller, instead of installing flue gas desulphurization systems, the air in the industrial areas would improve, and the forests in the cities would recover — but the forests further away in the low mountain ranges and the rural regions will die on a massive scale. So everything was known. Forest floor liming was also a tangible known measure. We also had measures like this for CO2. But at that moment, the hysteria of pandemic alarmism prevented us from taking such measures.
MB: Regarding the Ruhr area, I still remember in my childhood hearing about people washing their curtains and hanging them up in the garden, only to bring black curtains back into their homes. In the Ruhr area, in the 20th century, there was an incredible economic achievement in cleaning up the water and an ecological awareness that brought about real social change.
AS: I'm still familiar with the gray-black laundry. Of course, this coal dust pollution affected not only the laundry but also the children. There were lots of childhood illnesses that had something to do with dust and aerosols. Pseudocroup, for example, was one illness. And despite the warnings, the Ruhr region adopted a high chimney policy. In other words, they actually built chimneys 200 or 300 meters high, and the air in the Ruhr improved. But of course, that didn't make the problem go away. At the time, we wanted to prove that sulfur dioxide, dust, and heavy metals were transported as far north as Norway by the tall chimneys. And that the lakes in Sweden were becoming acidic.
Finally, the acidity was reversed – again due to European pressure. ›People, please keep your dirt, or make sure that it's not produced,‹ which ushered in the removal of the dirty gas plants.
MB: You got into Development Aid quickly after completing your doctorate. That was the path to the dream you just mentioned. As a Development Aid worker in Bolivia, you worked as a Forestry lecturer in Cochabamba, and immediately afterward, you managed a Forestry project in Indonesia. Tell us, what insights did you gain as a child of the Federal Republic of Germany, a somewhat, let's say, subdued social being, where you saw films about Foresters?
AS: I must say, I have many insights. I just mentioned my doctoral supervisor and that I could have chosen a university position with him. And he didn't understand how you could somehow go into Development Aid with this career option of becoming a future professor, where you don't know what will happen. So what did I take with me? At the time, the motto of both state and private Development Aid was to learn and help overseas. And that's precisely what I took with me. I learned an incredible amount, and we achieved a considerable amount.
Unfortunately, today – and I readily admit that this disgusts me – we have a new motto: to teach and improve. Right down to the worst post-colonial eco-imperialism that is currently taking place in our Development Aid.
This is disgusting for former Development cooperation workers because...
MB: We're talking about Green Colonialism now, aren't we?
AS: That's right, I'll give you some examples. With all due respect, the world is supposed to be made up of Germans, but from a corner where you wouldn't expect to find them if you let yourself be blinded by double standards? For starters, yes, Development Cooperation workers were experienced professionals. You didn't just get there out of University. You needed at least three years of professional experience. And what I find particularly important is that a certain Karl Marx from Trier once said that practice is the criterion of truth. And this practice was poured out in buckets all over you – in an extreme situation. And this sentence by Marx is more relevant today than ever when I look at the many bullshitters in my everyday life back then. Not all of them, of course, but they only know about experience, cooperation, commitment, and so on from their mother's stories. And they've been at University for 10 or 12 years without professional or practical experience.
But okay, you asked about my personal experience. I was in Bolivia, in a province called Ayopaya, with a 50 percent infant mortality rate. You can hardly imagine the poverty. There was no medical care, no drinking water, a lot of malnutrition and undernourishment, and inadequate to no schools. With a few Foresters, we tried to do erosion control, reforestation, drinking water supply, and the like – in other words, integrated rural development. And what do you get out of it? I took home the best roast potatoes of my life (laughing). When arriving in communities with two or three team members trying to do something, you were accommodated somewhere in a mud hut. Of course, there were no houses. A woman I remember well was Donja Margarita, a hostess for me, who slaughtered one of her three chickens in our honor to make roast chicken and then told us at some point during the meal that she had lost all ten of her children and her husband too. And that was due to diarrheal diseases, which are widespread, which I also contracted, for example, dysentery, salmonella, whatever. Diseases that could be alleviated with 50 cents and shouldn't have resulted in death. But there was no medical care.
Of course, I was full of ideas from the University and Development Cooperation. I saw the need for erosion control and the understanding of a drinking water pipeline, and more — and at some point in the conversation, I asked her what she thought we could actually do here in the village with child mortality and so on.
The answer was that »climate protection and feminist development policy, that is, equal participation in social, political, and economic life regardless of gender, gender identity, gender orientation, skin color, disability, and other characteristics, don't bring us anything« – but it's what development policy brings, and that's so far removed from what is reality in rural areas.
It’s not only in Bolivia, Africa, and Asia that you naturally ask yourself who you can convince of this, except perhaps a few woke groups in some big cities committed to it. What I found interesting was that this feminist foreign policy already existed in our country, too, logically. It was just called something else: Emancipation. I had a female graduate student who came from the University in Vienna at the time and was very emancipatory and tried to talk to the indigenous Quechua and Aymaras. The women sent her home because they told her:
›These are your European problems. We can't understand them. Our issues are entirely different, and we can only manage them with our men, not without them. And by the way, we'd already have dealt with the men. Don't worry about it.‹
So, to that extent, woke ideologies won't stop these people from claiming the needs for themselves and their children that we take for granted. In other words, we need solutions for hundreds of millions of people in rural areas that address elementary needs and not some woke ideology.
MB: It must be the old Hegelian view that if reality doesn't want to submit to theories, all the worse for reality. Of course, when you're really on the ground, where life is life-size, that doesn't work. That's always the next question. What did you actually do in Bolivia, for example? What were the things you said ›Are these steps that I can take concretely that really change the living situation?‹
AS: During our preparations, we were briefed that the most important thing was ›to open your eyes and ears and keep your mouth still.‹ I always learned a lot listening to the Quechua and Aymaras.
They have an exorbitant amount of knowledge, which is not accessible to us straightaway because we come across with the arrogance of the affluent and well-educated. At University, I later learned that we knew exorbitantly little and that there was a lot of scientific know-how among the indigenous people. So listening is the most important thing. In my view, it seems this has completely disappeared, and we currently have a raised index finger that says ›We know where to go. We know the solution.‹ We don't know these things right now, and we're already failing at very trivial things.
If I look at the Last Generation, one of their three goals to save the climate is the 9 € ticket for local public transport. Does that contribute to climate protection? No, it doesn't.
But let's leave that aside. It's simply an unrealistic model because local public transport is not even translatable into Quechua, Aymara, Sudanese, or any of Indonesia's 300-500 national languages. I can't make it clear to anyone that it's not a problem for most of the world's population. The problem is getting something to eat and drink – that basic needs are being missed. Suppose we fail in doing that – every few years, as many new people come into the world as when I was born. If we fail to offer them prospects, it won't be easy. We won't achieve this as much as some people would like...that they go without their basic needs...
MB: Have you been able to observe in your students, prospective Dr. Forests, or that a form of moral economy has taken the place of a practical examination of complicated circumstances? Do you see this as a generational dilemma?
AS: Of course, but not always. I had great people on the team because, fortunately, I chose people who had a lot of professional experience and a lot of experience abroad and took a differentiated approach. But over the last 20 years, I can say that there has been a clear trend in the direction you mentioned; unfortunately, there is a complete lack of experience, professional experience, and independence. And that's a big challenge, especially for universities and parents, who prepare children for everyday life again. I really miss that. Of course, there are also the issues of panic and fear. The fastest-growing department at the University of Münster was the psychological service.
MB: Really? For God's sake!
AS: Yes, yes, it is now very, very well documented from a wide variety of sources, whether from the Barmer Insurance company or University Medical Services. For over 10 percent of students in our country, psychological care is needed, with the main symptoms being climate anxiety, climate panic, and fear of the future. That is exorbitantly frightening.
MB: Apocalyptic thinking is really crazy; I would say, of course, because of social media. You see the forest as a cultural landscape shaped, exploited, and cared for by people; it’s always a mirror of human culture’s condition. Yes, namely, another Latin lesson. We were told that Italy's lack of forests was attributable to the Romans' desire to have a fleet and that it was given priority. In short, we're in an area where Ecology, Economics, and Politics interact in the forest, and the results can be very different. So, when you put the development of the Green worldview and your professional view in relation to each other, when did it first occur to you that there might be irreconcilable cognitive dissonances here?
AS: I’d say for 20 years – increasingly since I accepted the call to Münster and came back from the tropics and Development Cooperation; how did I determine that? There has been an increasing use of adjectives and adverbs instead of facts and figures. I have an example of when it starts with a bit of epistemology: what is truth? Is there even one truth? Or are there several truths? How do we approach this scientifically? As an example, as part of my introductory lectures, I've said: ›Think of an autumn forest in Germany, a beautiful beech forest, autumnal, and invite an African woman from the Kalahari, an Inuit from northern Canada and, if you like, a German Forester. And ask them what they are feeling right now. And the African woman will say that I feel very cold. The Inuit will say it's pretty warm here. And the Forester will say it's nice and pleasant.‹ What is true or untrue at this moment? If there’s only one truth, two others must be lying. So, feelings don't lie. They are sacrosanct. In other words, the moment I work with adjectives and adverbs, as a scientist, I have to throw up my hands and say, ›yes, that's right, there's no other way.‹ I can't deny a feeling; I can't tell the Inuit that it's not warm, very cold, or cool. Besides, feelings can lie, but they can also be mistaken. The joke example is always Lothar Matthäus (a national football player in Germany), who said ›Lolita and I would stay together forever.‹ After six divorces, he also thinks to himself, ›okay, feelings can deceive you.‹ Well, what does science do now? Theoretical knowledge. We contrast these adjectives, which are subjective and not objective, with reproducible data collection. For instance, in this banal example, we measure the temperature as 18 degrees Celsius or something in Fahrenheit, whatever, Kelvin. And if I measure it like that, then it's reproducible. Then I know, even as a fourth or fifth person who isn't in the forest, what the temperature is, how I have to imagine it, and I can check the temperature.
But the new – not just the Greenworld view – focuses on feelings, on beliefs. And I simply can't discuss beliefs scientifically. I have to accept them. I can only decide whether I choose them or share them. But a discussion is out of the question. And the data is often perceived as disturbing and even fought against.
Unfortunately, I'm increasingly finding that you're very quickly labeled as a skeptic or denier if you put up tables or graphs. You all know the term climate skeptic or climate denier, even though you're far from it yourself, because you can no longer do much with data, only with feelings. That's a difficult situation. Your example is fitting because, as a cultural landscape, there are no more natural forests in Europe. Occasionally, some publications say ›Just forget about it again; the glorification is misunderstood Romanticism and dangerous. Everything in Europe is a cultural landscape that humans have influenced for centuries.‹ And your example isn't limited to Italy. The entire coastline of the Mediterranean has been destroyed by mankind through boat building. At some point, the Spanish, Portuguese, English, and everyone else did that; it wasn’t just the Romans. And so climate change in Central Europe around the Mediterranean didn’t start with industrialization’s CO2, but with the destruction of the forests on the Mediterranean coasts, resulting in a dry, hot climate because all the soil was gone. If you drive along the former Yugoslavian coast, hardly any soil is left, and almost all the old-growth forests are gone. It’s challenging to reforest there. Yes, I agree with what you said about cognitive dissonance. I would add that there is also an increasing lack of competence, as it’s no longer highly rated. It must also be said that this is a very bitter learning process in German Universities. What I feel increasingly is ›a »planned economy« without a plan or concept.‹ I always compare it to an incompetent pilot in the cockpit who’s guided by his perceived beliefs. He looks and sees lots of instruments, displays, and levers, destroys all the ones he doesn't know, and is then surprised the plane crashes.
MB: That's called data protection, which I have my interpretation of. After writing a history of digitalization, you get to the point where you say that data protection is possibly nothing more than the resentment of illiterate people who want to protect themselves from the alphabet. And that's, I think, the point you've just raised, which I find very interesting. For example, if we go back and ask ourselves where the Matters of Fact or Statistics come from. In Achenwall's case, political science is the knowledge of the science of the state, which is, therefore, statistics. When we look at the Matters of Fact, we see Robert Boyle standing in front of his vacuum pump with an audience; what can we take out of this image? We can see — and the forest is a beautiful paradigm — that all Matters of Fact have something to do with a society's goals, aspirations, and desires. In other words, social practices are always involved. The forest is an interesting phenomenon because it says that you can perhaps wish for certain things, words, tabloids, or the like, but unfortunately, you're dealing with realities. This reality test is interesting because it's a matter of fact; it's not something social constructivist that I can just deal with as I please, but in the end, I have the reality test.
AS: Hence, the quote from Karl Marx. If you look at critical infrastructures, such as Agriculture and Forestry, you can see how far politics in the Berlin bubble has moved away from this. In other words, what is happening in Agriculture and Forestry is a closed book. And I think that's exorbitantly dangerous. When I watched a video on the current discussion about farmers and the taxation of agricultural diesel, I wondered about the underlying objective and why we specifically target our farmers. Of course, also forest farmers, meaning forest owners, with restrictions and taxes that make them uncompetitive. A jar of honey here costs 12-15 €. That's no longer competitive at all. Is the idea still there that we’ll need the farmers and foresters in our country again at some point, given the crises in Ukraine or Israel or, for all I care, climate change? The generation that thought this has long since passed away. But it should be handed down again that Chile won't supply us with honey, and China won't provide us with asparagus when things really get bad.
MB: It makes perfect sense to me, but this phenomenon of the moral economy, which is so detached from the realities of life, is bizarre. It's a topic that preoccupied me when thinking about our Digital Age. The fact that a time can altogether bypass its own practices. That it actually fights the emergence of a new era, just like the late Middle Ages did. Of course, this has to do with how blind spots spread in the field of thought. In our case, it's the question of the Attention Economy, which is deeply connected to the social glue. The paradox here is that we pay attention, usually to scandals, sex, and crime, but we don't know how to store attention – which is the function of money. You illustrated this beautifully during our preliminary discussion. You told the shareholders of an American company that the time frame for your investment is 30 years, and ideally, it would be 100 years. And the time frame they had in mind was the following quarterly report. That's the paradox. We are talking about sustainability – a term that originates from Hans Carl von Carlowitz's early 18th century, from Forestry. But our time horizon has been pushed back to the next quarter. How does that work?
AS: Yes...by the way, I've read your sustainability article and highly recommend it. It's a fascinating example. The large wealthy families from Germany or the families of companies that we advised naturally came with financial managers, family offices, and lawyers who tended to think in milliseconds. That's how equity derivatives bonds are issued today; that's how large fortunes now believe. Politicians also only think until the next election. So, in a few months, even Helmut Schmidt can be quoted as saying that anyone with long-term visions should go to the doctor.
In the Forest, the vision we’re looking at is 30-year planning, which is accurate, and we have a vision of what the forest should look like in 100 years. And the nature of forecasting forest growth over several hundred years is rather disturbing to them.
So, how do you get this theoretical knowledge broken down for the consummate professionals with tens of thousands of employees and huge assets, including institutional ones? Students also had an aha experience when I told them the story of Jakob Fugger—as that's what economists at Harvard teach. I think there's a doctorate on the subject. So all the Bill Gates in the world don't come close to Fugger's fortune if you convert the currency. I think the doctoral student came up with the equivalent of 4.000.000.000 € in his assets from the 1500s, which is a utopian sum.
What remains of this financial and economic empire, its companies, and government bonds in modernity, without going into the details of the Fuggers, is tiny. But the Forest, because Fugger was so intelligent that, very early on, he put large parts of his fortune and assets into forests, which he turned into a foundation. Since 1650, this Forest has survived the plague, the Thirty Years' War, currency reforms, and economic crisis wars thanks to sustainable planning for decades, if not centuries. And if you travel to Augsburg today, you will come across the world's oldest existing social housing estate, which Fugger founded. It’s still primarily financed from the proceeds of the forest. The rest is gone. So the Fuggers aren’t poor, that's not what I'm saying – but the rest of the gigantic fortune is simply gone, and only the forest remains. Incidentally, even today, low-income people can live in the Augsburg Fuggerei for €0.88 a year in rent and three prayers a day – all thanks to the foundation. That's how it's stipulated and meticulously monitored by the tax office. Then it becomes clear if I want to protect myself in the long term and don’t believe in any kind of state pension insurance, then a forest investment is ideal for protecting families and companies – and it’s also suitable for pension funds or insurance companies, which also have to plan decades in advance. If I take out a life insurance policy today as a 20-year-old, the insurance company has to prepare the payout at some point, in 30, 40, 50, however many years I live. That's why forest investments are prevalent in the USA and Canada, especially among institutional investors – Harvard and Yale are all forest owners. The giant pension funds are also large forest owners because they’ve internalized this form of sustainability thinking very well. And you mentioned von Carlowitz – it’s always been vital for me to emphasize this. Since von Carlowitz and the early publishing of local common law [Weistümer], hasn’t it been about continuous, consistent, and sustainable use? A lasting benefit is that it continues to be sustainable. Ecology, the term didn't even exist yet, nor did ecological thinking. So sustainability has consistently been, above all, an economic principle.
MB: Absolutely.
AS: Unfortunately, this is entirely out of our heads. Young people have no contact with economics in their primary and secondary school education, and at the university level, business administration and economics students have little interest in it.
If we want to transform our Forest today in the direction of Bullerbü4, that is into a nature reserve. Then, as you mentioned, essential things aren’t being understood ecologically. This cultural landscape will take thousands of years to become a natural landscape, if it is still possible at all. And what opportunities are we giving up through sustainable use if we turn it into an animal farm?
Martin Burckhardt: I was already convinced of the concept of sustainability but in a completely different sense. Sustainability was nothing more than a reminder, ultimately, of something like the metaphor of the forest, if you like, that I am doing something and that something has a long-term effect – just as you said in the story of Fugger, that there’s a longue durée. And in my life, as you'll probably understand, I've seen how the time horizon of my intellectual contemporaries has become shorter and shorter and shorter, melting down into the millisecond range. And of course, I ask myself, if this gift for the next generation isn't there any longer, then you know that education isn't going to work correctly any longer because the next generation’s time horizon is no longer there. Right now, we’re in a situation, ultimately in a digital revolution, where we have to think about how things will change in a quasi-sustainable way because we can see this is an epistemic outline if you like. The old idea of the 18th century physiocrats was everything has a natural basis. In the digital age, however, we see that we have become detached from certain things in a certain way, that the digital order is an entirely abstract world that is above the metaphysics of the naturally occurring. The forest would be the perfect metaphor for this. You'd have to say, ›think in terms of your open-source programming or whatever; think as if you were building a forest.‹ But the opposite is the case with our contemporaries. That these time horizons have dwindled is an alarming thing.
AS: I can only underline this, as I've increasingly felt the same thing over the last 20 years at Universities. We have a lot of work ahead of us, which has something to do with education. I think the PISA study said 15 or 18 years ago that if we want to get Germany back on its feet somehow, we have to find up all the money lying around in the corners and put it into our education because it’s been wholly bombed to the ground. Perhaps we'll come to that in a moment, but the challenge par excellence for me isn’t just companies complaining to professors ›Who do you send us from the University? They can't do anything.‹ The Universities themselves say that 50 percent of students wouldn't have had a chance to attend University 20 years ago. Unfortunately, that's the problem.
MB: Yes, that's clear. But now we're approaching the political field, which has become increasingly involved in the Attention Economy. You said it earlier about the next election cycle. This means that ›If I can now generate clicks with some blatant statement, I no longer have to worry about yesterday's gossip.‹ In this context, I’m very interested in your experiences because you’ve worked with various governments and their representatives. And, as a prophet of sustainability, you‘ve been in great demand as their discussion partner. How and when did you realize there was a deep divide?
AS: It was very soon after my return from Southeast Asia, Indonesia, in 1996 when I was accepted as a Professor of Forest Ecology and Climate Science at the University of Paderborn. I quickly got calls from ministry officials who were full of if-then sentences. ›So Mr. Schulte, if you say this and that on television – or this and that in the press, then cooperation will be difficult.‹ Incidentally, it didn't matter which of the four parties was in whatever NRW government constellation at the federal level as the ministerial officials remained the same, and they pushed through their own or the government's political interests above all else.
MB: What were the problems? What were the points where it really hurt?
AS: I specifically remember a study we did; everyone knows about cyclone Cyrill when emergency radios were set up immediately after it hit. The region was very severely affected, especially in the Sauerland. The State Government made double-digit million sums available for forest farmers using EU, state, and federal funds. Three or four years later, the Green Party minister responsible at the time asked me to examine how successfully the funds had been used, what had been done with them, and so on. We confidentially obtained all the data, and it was clear that only a tiny fraction of these funds had been used for reforestation, road construction aid, and so on. He was utterly horrified because it didn't paint a particularly good picture, and he naturally asked why. It was because the guidelines were about 100 pages long in such a complex way that no Forest Farmer could fill them out – and you had to submit to a 10 to 15-year inspection with the threat of criminal prosecution. In other words, they were nonsense by design because such guidelines were, at the time, made for a particular reason.
I concluded by telling him they were written without the intention of helping a forest owner. Instead, it was a case of wanting to stand in front of the Press and say ›We're doing something; we have recognized the problem; we’re now doing something for Farmers and Foresters to help them in a difficult situation,‹ but the intention of support wasn’t there.
Instead, it was just a few available funds tied right down to specific tree species that had to be planted if you wanted money. You had to submit and say, ›Okay, I'll plant the tree species you tell me to.‹It was ideological and didn’t fit the Foresters or Farmer’s needs. And then, when I wanted to publish, I got a call telling me: ›We'll accept the study because that’s our job. But you won't get another commission from us if you publish it.‹ The ministry was very afraid it would reflect on them negatively. And then the calls came in, I said, ›Think again because I don't give a damn about your money, but these are public funds, they're not yours, and of course, I'll publicize it.‹.
MB: The reaction was actually to cut the money?
AS: That came a little later when the Science Ministry cut almost 200,000 € from a project already approved with an official funding decision because their advisor had miscalculated, even though I'd already hired people. That's when I got fed up and went public with the Bild-Zeitung and the like – I don’t remember now. The Science Minister of NRW, Svenja Schulze, now the Development Aid Minister, had to stand up to a question-and-answer session in the State Parliament to sort out what all the nonsense was about. We got all the money – but if we’d tried to get it legally, we’d have had to wait five or six years. It was only due to public pressure ranging from the Bild-Zeitung to Parliament that a settlement was reached, and we received all the money. Still, we were obliged not to make any statement, not even to members of Parliament, on the matter. Even the judge who acted as mediator said, ›Tell the Ministry of Science about the current Judicial Year we are in – and that we're still in Germany.‹
MB: Academic freedom. The German professor is a real Kaiser!
AS: But then I said I didn't feel like dealing with it anymore and gave up all my EU research projects, my Federal and State funding, and I said, ›If you need a Doctor Marlboro to certify that smoking is healthy, go and find one. It's not me.‹ That’s when I started advising large companies and families in Forest Investments, especially in the USA and Canada, because 10-15 years ago, I was already of the opinion that investing in Agriculture and Forestry in the Federal Republic of Germany made no sense.
MB: Which is abstruse? But what is the socio-psychological impact of something like that? You weren't alone; there were collaborators and the like. What discourses arise and the cautions and considerations taken when such political interference—which, in the end, is only aimed at the Attention Economy—actually interferes and is almost erratic because you can't foresee what will happen, who will feel touched, and where? What happens to people?
AS: Yes, you're absolutely right, and, of course, I had a large University team at the time because we'd received a lot of money from the EU for Forest Research, including millions in International Research funding. However, the team was aware of this. The majority said they no longer wanted to do this, encouraging me to make our expertise available to an entirely different clientele – like the USA charitable foundation, which was the first prominent institutional investor to buy forests with us, or private companies – who found it helpful, unlike some ministry officials who just file it away or make some nonsense out of it. After all, such EU projects involve an incredible amount of work, three or four years of work, many weekends, reports, PowerPoint presentations, workshops, and trips. And when you realize after three or four years as a research assistant with a doctorate that someone in the EU doesn't think it's useful and files it away, that's unsatisfactory.
MB: Yes, of course...
AS: If it's a well-known charitable foundation doing great work and interested in telling the truth so that people can see that they’re now buying a forest and managing it sustainably with great goals. That's fun! It fulfills you. You can go into the forest with them...you also have Canadian and US Foresters you can work with. It's all about the cause.
For example, in my lectures, I always tell what I was quickly told after returning in 1996 by a ministry official with whom I argued about what I wanted to do ›Mr. Schulte, remember one thing: Please spare me the factual arguments.‹ That was 18 years ago, and it initially shocked me.
I’d just come back from Southeast Asia, and the longer you're out there, the more you idealize German Universities. I would have the Humboldtian image of freedom and liberty, research and teaching, St. Paul's Church, and the constitution somehow all in my mind with its independence from political and economic interests and the best judges, on whom I gladly swore an oath...Basic Law Article 33 and all that. And then someone comes along and says, ›Please spare me the factual arguments; this is about politics.‹
MB: Going back to ›Spare me the factual arguments.‹ That's really adorable, of course. When we consider that it's about the Republics and you say ›That's our common cause now, please spare me the factual arguments.‹ That's really funny!
AS: So there were lots of slogans. I quickly learned a lot and put aside these unpolitical educational ideals. One objection I had, after seven years abroad and having opportunities to go to other Universities, was when I went to the Ministry of Science to present my ideas – they wanted to know who that was. I then explained my concept of creating an internationally oriented elite support and junior research group.
And then the Ministry said ›We don’t want to ever hear about elites here again; this is an SPD-led institution. If you say that again, you are guaranteed no support. Please rewrite your idea and delete the wording: internationally oriented elite funding.‹
And that was about ten years before I understood that the universities were SPD-led – let's leave out the Greens for the moment – and should be converted into large-scale programs.
MB: Hahaha!
AS: Now comes the old SPD philosophy that working-class children should be able to attend University. And the higher the percentage of University graduates, the better – that's what Svenja Schulze used to tell me on the sofa. So, that’s the NRW’s Science Policy goal, but how is that possible? I still remember asking myself that. First, you needed more professors for the same amount of funding because there wasn’t any money available, and certainly not for the Universities. By international standards, professors were the best paid in 1900. Then, SPD Education Minister Bulmahn, who I think was minister from 1998 to 2005, bombed Professors’ salaries to the ground, which very few people know, so that a chemistry graduate received more as a starting salary than a Professor. It took a long time until the Federal Constitutional Court ruled in 2012 that professors' salaries were so low they were unconstitutional and called on the federal government to make improvements. Now, a W2 Professor gets something like 6.000–6.500 € gross, while the average age for an appointment is 42…so they have put two decades into their training, mostly with half contracts, minor and temporary contracts, sometimes with three-month extensions, to get something that's absolutely ridiculous by international standards. What is the consequence? The consequence is that for the last 20 years or so, we've been getting what's left on the job market at our universities.
MB: Yes, the leftovers. The one you like to...
AS: Certain professions, such as architects or doctors, are now saying: ›I'll take the title of professor; who cares about the money? I'm not interested. I earn money through private medical billing at the University Hospital, which is excellent. I can run my architecture firm, and I've met all those freaks. I’ll build golf courses in Dubai for them, and that's my income. I can sell myself better if I have the title of professor.‹
MB: Hmmm...
AS: However, it is becoming very difficult to obtain what we used to have at German Universities, namely top staff, and that's why our rankings have fallen in absolute terms on the global comparison scale – we’ve totally plummeted. So you won't find any German Universities among the top 30, no matter what ranking you use. And as I’ve said at one point: ›We can spend a long time discussing the causes and salaries, but if we look at the supervision ratio – not even from Harvard, MIT, or other elite universities - we're talking about one to eight, one to ten, meaning about ten students per professor and research assistant.‹ In NRW, when I started, it was less than 1 to 50, but in the last 15 years, it has grown to 1 to 90 – but be careful, that's an average. That means it includes interdisciplinary Cyprus research or all those wonderfully obscure orchid subjects with two or three students. If you enter business administration or subjects like law, you have 200 or 300 students per professor. Knowing that we don't have to ponder why we've been left behind. I don't even know whether the University of Münster, for example, still appears in these rankings. I've always made a point of telling investors who don't want to acknowledge these conditions to just come to the University of Münster. At the University of Münster, we couldn't even offer our students seats due to the large influx of students – because the CDU (Christian Democratic Union), SPD, Greens, and the government wanted the large influx of students without providing adequate resources. So, in other words, the University had to use the anterooms
MB: with cameras and with the monitors ...
AS: The students who didn't have a seat stood and formed the audience. Yes, long before Corona. So, if you know and have observed that, you don’t have to wonder. And, by the way, I didn't even have that at Universities in developing countries; it's just here...
MB: Public viewing!
AS: We simply accepted that. And then, I told our investors, who couldn’t believe it,
›If you want to know what condition our University is in, just go to a toilet. After all, these are all public buildings.‹ I always told the Greens the same thing: ›If you take biodiversity research seriously, then do some research in our toilets. That's where you discover new life forms. Because no money was left to clean them daily, they were cleaned once a week.‹
And that's precisely what it looked like.
MB: We've slipped into a genuinely paradoxical situation, politically speaking. The issue of sustainability is omnipresent where, if nothing else, it's the battery fueling the apocalyptic thinking of the present –– but the sober view of options for action and reason has completely evaporated. This is nowhere near as visible as in the issue of the energy transition. Germany is marching ahead with a moral foot in its ear, but this march lacks planning and is nothing more than a moral panic. In this context, I can't help thinking of this sentence by Talleyrand, who admonished Napoleon with the following words: ›Monsieur, this is worse than a crime; this is stupidity.‹ And that's what you, as an expert, have to deal with all the time, just what you said about the University being a single collective folly. You don't have to deal with practicable options for action but with foolishness. So tell me, what effect will our grandiose energy transition have on the German forest?
AS: Yes, it can be summarized as an ultimately fatal underestimation not just for the forest but for everyone, for Germany as a whole, and for Agricultural and Forestry businesses. That's why my video channel is also called If Ideology is Master, You Reach Disaster Faster –– that's what it's all about. We’re going into a planned economy without a plan; that's what I said. So, let's look at the energy transition, and then we’ll look at its impact on the forest. We’ve phased out nuclear energy but imported nuclear power from France and the Czech Republic; everyone knows that. We have a highly paid Court that applauds this against all knowledge. For example, thrillers were published at the same time as the phase-out. While a good day for climate protection, scientifically, it's bullshit. You can have whatever opinion you want on nuclear power – I'm not arguing over that point – but we have 15 million tons of additional CO2 emissions annually. It could be 12 or 28, depending on the calculation. But we have incredibly high additional CO2 emissions.
The next significant point is that we got out of hard coal while tripling coal imports from Colombia to meet our needs –– in the last two years under this government, coal imports from Colombia have increased by a factor of three from the dirtiest mine to over 5 million tons per year, while one nuclear power plant would be enough to eliminate all blood coal imports from Columbia.
This is a disgusting double standard because it was the Greens, when they weren’t yet in the chair of the Foreign Minister and the Economics Minister, who campaigned massively in the Bundestag against coal imports from Colombia.
You can read some nice quotes from Ms. Baerbock, which I also summarized in the film Blutkohle aus Kolumbien. And now that they're in the sedan chair, they’ve no problem with it. Not even the Greenpeace activist — who is now State Secretary in the Foreign Ministry — has a problem with it, even though she used to spit poison and bile when she was with Greenpeace. Then we ban fracking in Germany, in our own country, but import fracking gas from Canada and Qatar, for example. I know fracking gas fields; you have to take a look at the environmental destruction they cause. But we don't have a problem if it's not in our country but elsewhere. Incidentally, ecological destruction isn’t included in our CO2 balances. Not even the blood coal in Colombia; that's somewhere else. Yes, now it's actually about climate protection. Are the results at least good? No, they’re devastating if you don't fall for the manipulated figures. The Ministry of Economic Affairs says CO2 emissions have fallen. Still, naturally, everyone knows it also has something to do with the decline in Germany's economic strength and situation. But, precisely, deindustrialization and emigration, but...
MB: Sure, emigration, deindustrialization…
AS: The decisive factor isn’t the total amount of CO2 emitted but the amount of CO2 emitted per generated kilowatt hour; Germany has risen from 370 grams to over 430 grams within two years under this federal government. Over 400 grams of CO2 per kilowatt hour means we’ve almost doubled our emissions compared to the EU average. In France, CO2 emissions are around 65 g per kilowatt hour, while we’re the leader in electricity prices and do nothing for climate protection.
We’ll be making a video about the latest significant energy from the Federal Environment Agency that has a CO2 calculation assigning 1.7 tons of CO2 to one ton of wood when burned. However, it’s scientifically agreed that with sustainable forest management, burning is climate and CO2-neutral. The Federal Environment Agency disagrees with this as their idea is bombing the share of wood energy, which is currently over 80% of renewable heat, into the basement, making us utterly dependent on electricity. If you look at the cluelessness and incompetence of governments, it isn’t always the Greens, and I would like to quote Ms. Geywitz, SPD Minister for Construction. »If you take a tree trunk,« which is a literal quote, »and burn it, my heart bleeds as a Construction Minister. Burning real functional wood, except on a Saturday when Mom and Dad urgently want to have a romantic evening, I would rather not do that.« This is the current federal government's approach to the reality of Agriculture and Forestry from the SPD of all parties. Many, especially older single women with small pensions in rural areas, depend on inexpensive wood heating. And then an SPD construction minister, of all people, comes out with this, even though nobody would think of burning a tree trunk.
MB: But how do you explain this? Could you say it's Malthusianism, a social Darwinism of an exceptional kind, where people who can afford certain luxuries and ideologies dictate to other people how they should do business, with demonstrated cluelessness? Carlo Cipolla, a remarkable economist, called this Stupidology.
He said ›A thief doesn't harm society because it's ultimately a zero-sum game. What I take away from you doesn’t make a difference macro-economically. But stupid people are always in a dilemma in economic terms. He harms himself and others.‹
And when the stupids are in decision-making positions, you have real problems, don't you?
AS: Yes, and that’s standard practice. I could list all the people with no professional experience, University degree, or anything else who sit in our Bundestag or make ministry decisions. But it's a very long list of Greens, SPD, and CDU members in critical positions. Everyone knows the relevant people, from Katrin Göring-Eckardt and Ricarda Lang to Kevin Kühnert, whoever, it doesn't matter. And when this complete cluelessness – this incompetence is paired with an almost religious ideology, you can't get any further with facts and figures. Then, only one thing works is saying ›That's your religion, but it's not mine.‹
MB: If I rewind our conversation back to the beginning, I’d say that the concept of a system, which changed massively in the 1980s, has much to do with the idea of decentralization, which in turn goes back to our digital age. In other words, the top-down model of states and monopolists is over. From now on, everything will be bottom-up, which we mistakenly call the Grassroots movements. The paradigm for this new system structure isn’t your front garden but the Internet, which functions atopically. But most of our contemporaries don't see our new system structure this way. They would instead try to hang out with the Earth Mother Gaia. Bruno Latour, for example, made a fatal distinction in his Gifford Lectures. He distinguishes between Earthlings and those who have, as it were, evaporated into a Digital Nowhere – and he explains the latter with explicit recourse to Carl Schmitt. So here we're no longer dealing with Political Romanticism but with an emerging ideology of nature entering into a fatal alliance with dark thinkers and powers. How do you see this politicization of the concept of nature? As an original Green, could you have imagined people getting involved in such fields?
AS: No, frankly, I couldn’t have imagined it, and I wouldn't have returned to Germany if I had. I've been telling students for twelve or fifteen years now to think about New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Uruguay, and other countries that may offer more opportunities. This personal alliance you’ve mentioned is a given: Nature-ideologized, incompetent. But thanks to useful idiots, I focus on optimization and meeting on the other side with the lobbyists with very tough economic interests. From negotiating in challenging environments in developing countries where corruption is rife, I know it takes a good negotiator only three minutes to find which piano keys to play that brings everyone to their side without them realizing it. I was deeply surprised by this incompetence of the federal government when I saw the following quote: »This is Robert, and this is Cem.« That's how they introduced themselves when they were romping around in the Brazilian rainforest, »It's very exciting for us to understand how you can live in the forest and protect the forest because, in Germany, the Germans cut down all the trees a thousand years ago. So our forest is more or less gone.« I can't even get that through at the daycare center. How can a Minister for Food and Agriculture responsible for the forest in Germany stand next to it and say, »Robert, let's go and have a Coke.« Let me explain: The forest is not gone in Germany. How can you say that? This is the Minister of Economic Affairs from one of the largest economies worldwide, who is also responsible for one of the most significant clusters of the Forestry and timber industry, with over a million jobs. Let's leave out all the ecology – we can't tackle climate change without the Forestry and Timber industry. He says that our forest is more or less gone; it's at the day-care center level of understanding where they're not even disgusted by their own vomit anymore. And if you then summarize that, without a professional degree, zero experience, zero professional experience, and zero competence –– that means the slogan delivery room, lecture hall, or plenary hall is still being used. Whether it's Omid Nouripur, Ricarda Lang, Kathrin Göring-Eckhardt, Claudia Roth, Kevin Kühnert, Paul Ziemiak, Julia Hamburg, or even the Green Environment Minister in NRW, Oliver Krischer, having studied biology without a degree and any professional experience, they are deciding our future. I would never have dreamed of that. This is also fatal for the universities because they ask themselves: ›Why am I still training people? Why am I doing this?‹ Because without training they earn 10,000-11,000€. It's pretty simple. With training, they go to some University in some temporary half-time position and will have difficulties living on their pension afterward. Even at universities, the best selection is no longer in demand – instead, the choice of professors is increasingly influenced by attitude. There's no other way to explain the pompous clown noses we have as rectors at the two Berlin Universities.
MB: But how is it possible? This is a very profound question. How is it possible that in the shadow of this idea of sustainability, which is the watchword for all these ideologies, such a caste has suddenly empowered itself – while at the same time clueless; but has an incredible problem with people like you, who come from the field and then have to deal with these ideas of sustainability while actually knowing the fragility of such systems and how unpredictable many things are and how carefully we must act. How is it possible that the idea of sustainability has become a mere argument for killing but is wholly insubstantial in itself?
AS: This once culminated in a statement by a member of parliament who said that sustainability [Nachhaltigkeit]5 is the translation of the English term sustainability. Then it stops. It's very, very, very difficult to get into discussions from the last 15-20 years back on track again. It also becomes increasingly difficult when you have the belief –– let's take the Catholic Church –– that Mary had a virgin birth. How do you get into an objective, fact-based discussion with such a belief? You don't. And more and more of those now in government are pushing such beliefs. And for scientists who say, let's get back to data and facts, it becomes rather difficult because they’re negated.
MB: May I make a small, how shall I put it, reputational contribution to Mary? Having considered the History of the Machine for a long time, I naturally considered the question of the Immaculate Conception at some point. And, in doing so, you come to some strange conclusions. The church father Origines thinks that the Logos is reproduced, not a reproduction of the womb. This Immaculata story is such that there is a fertilization of the ears. You can see it in the pictures, the rays that go into the ear. And as it goes into one ear, it comes out of the other. This is also called a seminar. Go into cultural history and see where the Cathedrals were built in Europe. You'll see that the Immaculata project is the conditio sine qua non upholding our academic nature, as her Cathedrals are where the first Universities were built. I'm only telling this story because you can find infinite reasoning in this belief – but that was a rationale developed over centuries that ended up as our beautiful University system. So, I don't necessarily see it that way now. And I think we’re perhaps slowly coming to an end here. But I am very interested in how politicians perceive someone like you, who doesn't talk about wishes but about realities. Do you still have any contacts, or have they, I fear, been completely severed for you?
AS: Definitely, we’ve ended the contacts of our own free will. I’ve only told you one or two stories, but there are many more. We said, ›No, we will naturally continue with the forest issue and concentrate on sustainable investments.‹ To get the whole thing under control organizationally, we handed over our Forest Research and Management Center, including our large research center. What was our conclusion? That there was no actual interest in truth but rather a desire to confirm beliefs with as much scientific veneer as possible.
One last example. At the time, the East Westphalia-Lippe National Park was already under discussion. The Green Minister of the Environment asked me if I could write the report because he knew we had all the economic conditions data on East Westphalia from our cluster studies. And I said, yes, I have the data. However, the upshot is that the Forestry and Timber Industry in East Westphalia is so economically strong that the National Park may be justified. Still, it won’t have the economic consequences of doing without logging, meaning there’s no financial advantage.
He didn't like that, so he commissioned one of the big four, whose business model is asking the client what should be in the study and then looking for justifications. I actually said the following. ›Many politicians have spoken out, but there isn’t any insight. Why don't you just go out and say nature conservation is critical and stop lying to people? We need money for nature and environmental protection. Politicians cost money, the military costs money, and roads cost money. We don't ask about those economic factors; we just say: ›This is important; we’re doing it now and giving money for it.‹ Then you get acceptance from the population. Go ahead if you think you can fool the East Westphalians with fake data. It won't work.‹ And it hasn’t succeeded — it really hasn’t. It’s been tried a second time, and the people of East Westphalia have rejected the National Park again. No, they don't want it.
MB: They don't want that in Lipperland.
AS: Yes, our insight was there’s no actual interest in consultation. There isn’t interest in the truth, just in confirming beliefs. And that’s done with a lot of money. A court is brought in to tell the Kaiser that you're not naked at all, and I really like your clothes.
MB: That's a depressing prospect. In response to the last question, I'd ask perhaps what you would write if you were a science fiction author and imagined, possibly a dystopian science fiction character, like a Forestry scientist in the year 2050 who has entered the labyrinth of politics and consultancy and how he has to act. How would you tell such a crime story, which could also be a story of stupidity?
AS: I probably wouldn't go for the general crime story but rather a fairy tale about the court. I’d also make a movie loosely based on Hans Christensen Anderson's The Emperor's New Clothes. We have to blame ourselves for having allowed the Jester to be abolished. So the Forester in 2050 would be the Jester, like scientists. While the Jester lived dangerously in the past, he was the only one the Court allowed around the Emperor and Empress who could speak her mind. And in Andersen's fairy tale, he would be the one to say, ›No, Emperor, stop talking; you're not wearing any clothes. While the Court, of course, attests that your clothes are beautiful.‹ And that would be my story. I never wanted to be a Courtier, so I’d tell the Emperor that he can pay as much money as he likes, but he’s still naked. My perspective for the year 2050 would be that we start talking again as scientists — especially since we have the academic privilege of freedom of opinion, which is not the case everywhere. So, as Professors, we're doubly privileged compared to journalists, and we should actually use this double privilege in 2050.
But we currently have something completely different. It's well documented that we spend billions on front organizations – and if you look closely, that's nothing other than the Court. And we are bombing our universities into the ground. Even if there are fewer free spirits like me every year, there are still people who might speak their minds. But that’s not what’s really wanted; rather, it’s apron organizations that are desired. It’s extremely difficult if you look at what’s sprung up in recent years because people realized it would be good to hijack the universities at some point. In other words, the universities are no longer as democratic as they used to be. In the past, the Professors elected the Dean from among themselves, and then the Rector was elected from among the Deans, which is highly democratic. Today, there are Supervisory boards on which politicians from the third and fourth ranks couldn’t get a better-paying company position: they decide who will be president or chairman. And when they make such bad decisions, they can't get them voted out of office. That's what I want: to take on the role of the Jester, not just as a Forester, but as a Scientist, and say out loud, ›Emperor, you're naked, and I can prove it to you with data and facts.‹ It is surprising that 1934 is relevant again. Berthold Brecht is credited with having the courage to write the truth, even though it was suppressed everywhere, and the wisdom to recognize it, even though it was concealed everywhere. This fits the situation of German Universities like a Forest to the Eye, although it was written in 1934.
Translation: Hopkins Stanley and Martin Burckhardt
Germany has a special relationship with Forests, stretching back to the pre-Roman Germanic tribes. Englisch readers are referred to read the German Wikipedia entries on Forestry Science [Forstwissenschaft] for the long Dr. Forest lineage that Dr. Schulte is a part of and the Wood [Wald] for a better understanding of this conversation. [Translator’s note]
When Dr. Shulte refers to Development AID, he’s referring to Germany’s long tradition of sending professionally trained Germans to assist developing countries of which he was part. Historically, this tradition can be traced through the Deutscher Entwicklungsdienst [German Development Service or DED] which was founded in 1963, absorbed into the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit [German Society for Technical Cooperation or GTZ) in 2011, and renamed as the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit [German Society for International Cooperation or GIZ]. [Translator’s note]
In 1980, Die Grünen Partei [The Greens] sprang into relief out of the Cultural Revolution of 68’s wake in 1980. Initially, its platform included the now-familiar ecological, anti-war, anti-nuclear stances. But it’s oft forgotten that the Green’s original platform also championed the European Revolution of 68’s initial impetus of sexual liberation, which Danny le Rouge [Daniel Cohn-Bendit] used to ignite its overwhelming drive, which included eliminating the age of sexual consent in its 1980 Manifesto. In 2013, there was a public German debate on the German Green’s involvement around the issue of Pedophilia in its early phases, triggered by awarding Daniel Cohn-Bendit the Theodor Heuss Prize, which included an internal query by the Greens themselves.
Bullerbü is a children's book series by the Swedish author Astrid Lindgren, who lived an idyllic life at the beginning of the 20th century in the countryside from the point of view of a seven-year-old girl. [Translator’s note]
Referring to the German Wikipedia entry for Nachhaltigkeit, roughly translated ›In the corresponding English word sustainable, this principle is literally recognizable: to sustain in the sense of ›endure‹ or ›endure.‹ In other words, the systems involved can "permanently withstand" a certain amount of resource use without being damaged. The principle was first applied in forestry: In the forest, only as much wood can be cut as it grows back permanently. As in the second half of the 20th century was recognized that all raw materials and energy supplies in the world were threatening to run out, its use went over to the handling of all resources.‹ Also see DWDS. [Translator’s note]
