University teacher of the year: “We could be more ambitious”

Advocate for the seas and outstanding science communicator – this is how the German University Association justified the award for deep-sea researcher Boetius. In an interview, she explains what the award means to her.

tagesschau.de: What does this award mean to you?

Antje Boetius: That’s a huge honor. Mainly because it is about research and teaching together. Having a voice for the seas, for the earth, for all of us in relation to nature, its conservation, its care – that is so important in these times. And I am very happy: It is an award for the overall package of research, teaching and transfer.

Tasks of teaching and research

tagesschau.de: How important is it for scientists to be a real voice today – in your case for the deep sea?

Boetius: In the face of global change, there has been a growing awareness that we have entered a new age – the Anthropocene – in which man is the most powerful geological force. This applies to all fields. Many students ask themselves: What is my degree for? What jobs can I do with it? What do I need to know today for the future in order to take an active role in it myself? What do I need to know to put something together that seems to have fallen apart? And this is exactly where teaching and research at colleges and universities are very important.

Answer big questions together

tagesschau.de: You said something seemed to have fallen apart – what do you mean by that?

Boetius: I think society and science are more closely intertwined than ever. But many parts of our knowledge and expertise have fallen apart. When it comes to the big questions of the future, it is clear that people, the economy and the environment belong together. But after many decades of focusing on specialist knowledge – which we always need – we have trouble answering the big questions together and comprehensively.

And that requires research and teaching. This also requires knowledge transfer, and universities are required as spaces for the joint acquisition of knowledge. If you look at the history of knowledge, it always comes out that universities play such an important role. We just have to manage to make the training even better for everything that the future will demand of us. But this also means that research and teaching are better funded.

“Shaping the use of resources fairly”

tagesschau.de: It took almost 15 years for an agreement to be reached on the High Seas Protection Agreement. Why is this taking so long?

Boetius: It is about a space that hardly anyone has access to, with a diversity of life that we know very little about. Dividing up the approach, describing which future values ​​are actually at stake here – that’s an unbelievable challenge. And that’s exactly the problem we’re stuck in.

For the global commons, which include the entire diversity of life on the planet, we do not yet have a concept of fair sharing. As humanity, we are only learning with difficulty how we can use resources fairly all over the world. Not only for our present, but also for the future. That’s incredibly difficult. 15 years is almost a short time to do that.

Organize a good future

tagesschau.de: As a scientist, are you sometimes impatient?

Boetius: I get impatient when it comes to our own national contributions to the future of the whole. Because within the national borders, the goals that we have already set out, we could be much further, especially in Germany, together in Europe. We could be more ambitious, be faster. It has already been clarified how everyone has to work together so that we can organize a good future for our children and grandchildren.

And that’s what sometimes frustrates or annoys me, that everything is so clearly discussed on the table and it still takes so long until we’ve done the right thing that will do us good. I don’t find it surprising that this is very difficult on a global level, given the after-effects of centuries of injustice. Because to this day, the question of nature and preservation is still linked to the effects of colonialism. And we’re still a long way from getting over it, cleaning up with our history.

“A reorganization is taking place”

tagesschau.de: How does this knowledge come to people, i.e. to society?

Boetius: It needs a reorganization of how we act and operate today. We humans know well how we can function as a community. Let’s just take the example of garbage disposal. In Germany it is completely normal that the individual does not have to worry about garbage and garbage disposal. You pay a tax for it, a contribution and then the garbage is picked up. In other countries this is not a matter of course and it is just a question of the organisation, the rules, the contribution.

When we now think of the global commons, like our atmosphere, we didn’t organize it for that. To this day we use the atmosphere as a free dump. A CO2 tax, for example, is being levied painfully slowly so that it will be possible to use the funds raised to protect the atmosphere and, so to speak, to clean up, i.e. to remove CO2.

And also to be fair, for those who don’t have many means, don’t emit that much CO2, be it here or around the world. This principle of protecting the commons together is ancient, but it has never been translated to the scale of all communities and the whole planet.

It has to be simple, cheap and right so that what we pay in taxes protects nature and the atmosphere. On the other hand, it must be uncomfortable to overexploit and destroy the global commons. This must be done precisely by each individual state and also for the areas of the earth that all states and all people have in common.

Support for knowledge transfer

tagesschau.de: Could scientists do more, communicate more, communicate more easily?

Boetius: Communicating science takes the full scale. Of course we have to share our expertise with each other. It is incredibly difficult to come to agreements, to proposals, to joint research across the different disciplines. And then, of course, many other people want to share in the fresh knowledge that is emerging. To do this, you have to use different forms of language, means of communication, media and platforms.

For science and universities, however, all of this comes on top of that. Science is not necessarily organized for this today. She does not always manage to transfer the knowledge she has gained into artistic, fictional formats or into citizen science, for example.

So we could be better supported and encouraged here, so that we can take on this important task in society. Because the crises we are in, one after the other, are often about the speed of knowledge and its implementation. It should go fast, go immediately and it should still be reliable. This means there is a high need for structural support.

Anja Martini conducted the interview for tagesschau24. It was adapted and shortened for the written version.