In 1983, the movie Nostalghia by Soviet director Andrei Tarkovskij featured a heartbreaking monologue about solidarity and longing. Set against the backdrop of a grey Rome where every person appears motionless, lunatic Domenico speaks for all: “We must fill the eyes and ears of all of us with things that are the beginning of a great dream. Someone must shout that we’ll build the pyramids. It doesn’t matter if we don’t. We must fuel that wish and stretch the corners of the soul like an endless sheet. If you want the world to go forward, we must hold hands.”
I think this perfectly fits with the question: what does climate ambition have to do with peace?
In June 2025, the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, a maritime campaign organised by the grassroots movement Freedom Flotilla Coalition, set sail in an attempt to challenge Israel’s naval blockade of the Gaza Strip and deliver symbolic humanitarian aid. Led by the vessel Madleen, the flotilla departed from Catania, Sicily, on 1 June, carrying supplies including baby formula, flour, diapers, medical kits, and prosthetic limbs for children.
Among those on board were Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg and French-Palestinian member of the European Parliament Rima Hassan (GUE/NGL, left). The mission followed a failed attempt on 2 May, when the vessel Conscience was struck by drone-fired projectiles in international waters off the coast of Malta. On 8 June, Israeli forces intercepted and boarded the Madleen, preventing it from reaching Gaza.
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When asked about the risks she was facing, 22-years old Thunberg simply replied:
“I happen to have a platform for some reason, and then it is my moral obligation to use that platform. And if my presence on this boat can make a difference, if that can show in any way that the world has not forgotten about Palestine, and to try once again to attempt to break the siege and open up a humanitarian corridor and deliver the extremely needed humanitarian aid, then that is a risk I am willing to take.”
Thunberg is not new to linking environmental rights and human rights, especially when it comes to decolonisation:
“No matter what the cause of the suffering is, whether that is CO2, whether that is bombs, whether that is state repression or other forms of violence, we have to stand up against that source of suffering,” she added. “And if we pretend to care about the environment, if we pretend to care about the climate and our children’s future, without seeing and acknowledging and fighting against the suffering of all marginalised people today, then that is an extremely racist approach to justice that excludes the majority of the world’s population.”
She knew she was not likely to succeed in reaching Gaza. Yet she shouted she would.
Back in Sweden, journalist Emma Bouvin highlights the power of this action in an article for Dagens Nyheter, not only for people watching from the outside but for Israel too: “Israeli media do not always follow the same pattern as international media. News ratings often look different, especially when it comes to news about Gaza. The suffering and hunger in the besieged enclave have not been top news. But on Monday morning, it is the same in Israel as in the rest of the world: Greta Thunberg and the Freedom Flotilla top websites and news broadcasts.”
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Alexandre-Reza Kokabi interviewed Thunberg and Hassan for Reporterre just before their arrest.
“It’s true that our activist backgrounds are quite different, but neither she nor I pursue our struggles in isolation,” Hassan told him. The MEP added that Greta Thunberg
“approaches the climate issue in its global dimension, and this global vision also includes decolonial struggles. Because a colonial project is also a project of destruction of the land, of the connection between peoples and their environment. This is what happened – and continues to happen – to the Palestinian people. In Gaza, the notion of ecocide is now widely documented. The UN has pointed out that only 5 % of arable land remains , due to the destruction caused by the Israeli regime. And for my part, human rights cannot be separated from environmental struggles or the denunciation of neoliberal capitalism, which is based on the infinite exploitation of both humans and resources.”
Let’s talk more about day-dreaming about a green and just future. In Danish newspaper Information, William Sass writes: “Several researchers and climate movements today point to utopias or utopian thinking as a tool that can help create concrete action – partly by breaking with habitual thinking and criticising the state of things, and partly by outlining an ideal that one can strive for.”
Besides, those who are shouting out loud sometimes are heard. Indigo Rumbelow is the co-founder of British campaign Just Stop Oil. She is serving a sentence in HMP Styal for nonviolent resistance. “Why so harsh? Because protest works,” she explains in a Guardian’s opinion piece:
“The climate crisis is not our cause; it’s a matter of life or death for everyone. We set out to disrupt the planes at Manchester airport because history shows that resistance can be a catalyst for change, and science shows that we need to change our destructive way of life now to prevent disaster. When we were arrested on the way to the airport, we had a banner in our pockets that said ‘Oil Kills’. When we were sentenced in court we each raised signs saying, ‘Billions will die’. The science is clear, and the judge is right: I consider the facts to be so alarming, so stark, so utterly heartbreaking that disruption to everyday life is warranted. And I have spent each day in custody, questioning why others equipped with the same knowledge as I have do not feel the duty to act in the same way that I do.”
More to read
Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado, tireless observer of the Earth and what we have made of it, has died on 23 May, age 81, in Paris. Isabel Coutinho and Lucinda Canelas remember him on Público.
The United Nations conference on the Ocean (UNOC) is taking place in Nice, aiming to reach a deal on the sustainable management of our seas. Le Monde’s Léa Sanchez talked about survival with ‘Her Deepness’ oceanographer Sylvia Earle.
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