Madrid, December 2019. Climate activist Marie Kolo has come all the way from Madagascar to take part in the COP 25 World Climate Conference. A determined 31-year-old with her tongue firmly in her cheek, Marie Kolo had taken the liberty, a few days earlier, of criticizing Madagascar’s Minister of the Environment, Alexandre Georget, on Facebook. In front of the COP delegates, he came across her, grabbed her by the arm and insulted her. How could a young woman have the nerve to criticize a male member of the world’s powerful caste?

Madagascar. The average age of the island’s 28 million inhabitants is 19. However, young people’s voices, wishes and concerns are generally not heard or represented in parliaments and power structures. Marie Kolo insists on the place that should be given to young people and to women. An article in Der Tagesspiegel (a German daily distributed by subscription only) puts it this way:

She describes herself not only as a climate activist, but also as a gender advocate and ecofeminist, a term first coined in the 1970s and traced back to women’s rights activist Françoise d’Eaubonne, who died in 2005. For ecofeminists like d’Eaubonne and Kolo, ecocrisis and the oppression of women are linked. The exploitation of nature and the oppression of women are, in their view, the two faces of capitalism.

Marie insists on the link between the oppression of women and the exploitation of nature:

Many don’t even know that there is a link between gender and climate change. And when it does, it has little or no priority in the negotiations. Those who suffer most are women.

One of the many examples Marie Kolo highlights is the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti: after the quake, women refugees in emergency camps were often physically and sexually abused. Another example:

In the patriarchal societies of the global South, women are responsible for many daily tasks. They look after the family’s food and water supplies, for example. To do this, women have to walk long distances in the arid regions of Madagascar – often ten, sometimes up to twenty kilometers. When they get home, they can’t drink the water, no matter how exhausted they are. First it’s the men’s turn, then the children’s, then the animals’. In the end, the women can drink, if they have anything left. The same applies to the food supply.

Marie Kolo says she was a rebel from the age of 8. It was a few years later, when a textile factory opened not far from her home and began “to change the color of the fields”, that Marie Kolo became an activist. Her petition against industrial air pollution was successful, and the factory was forced to close shortly afterwards. Women who inspire her: Wangari Maathai (“the woman who planted trees”, Kenyan, Nobel Peace Prize winner in 2004) and Vandana Shiva (Indian ecofeminist activist, head of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Natural Resources, alternative Nobel Prize winner in 1993).

At climate conferences, the majority of delegates are white, elderly men. (translated with DeepL)