The Girl and the Tree s: Tree Activism in German Newspaper

A photo of the climate activist Greta Thunberg in Hambacher Wald ( a Rhineland lignite mining area) aroused a media hype in the German press for the wrong reasons. If Thunberg visited Hambacher Wald in order to protect the forest arguing that we are ”ignoring natural climate solutions” there trees are told to be a “tool we can use to repair our broken climate” the headdress of a person pictured attracted attention. The photo look like a poster from a Netflix series: Greta Thunberg is at the front looking directly into the camera. To the right is Luisa Neubauer, the organizer of the Friday for Future climate strike in Germany. To the left of Thunberg stands a hooded person. Michael Mertens, the state president of the NRW police union, claims. “This is far from the peaceful protests of the movement Friday for the Future”. Drawing from Anna Tsing’s (2015) concept the “arts of noticing” I want to sketch out possibilities to study photos from an affective, new materialist and postcapitalistic perspective.