The days are getting warmer.

It's May after all, and we have global warming.

Whether in a village in the Palatinate, in Leipzig or in Kurdistan.

The same everywhere, the vines have to be watered, the trees dry up.

The parks are already dry in June, and the wells have to be drilled deeper every year.

In Neustadt an der Weinstraße and in Duhok, the Fridays for Future climate kids are organizing themselves, painting posters and protesting.

That's what it's like to live on the same planet.

There is no place that is exempt from the climate crisis.

Even if you are not affected by it in the same way everywhere.

To put it simply: Some people have the water up to their roofs, others have none left at all.

And not everyone has the same resources, some can build a floating house, others don't even have a drill,

Global warming is by no means the only problem.

In Kurdistan, signs have been put up at the popular picnic spots: Keep Kurdistan clean.

You have to know that picnics are a national sport in Kurdistan.

No sooner is Newroz, the beginning of spring, than everyone moves out into the countryside.

It is picnicked like crazy.

Whole hordes of families drive into nature or city parks, with plastic chairs, tables, carpets, with teapots, fruit bowls, coolers full of meat and bags full of bread.

Even when the IS front was only an hour's drive away, people still went out for picnics.

It's the same misery everywhere: people drive into the countryside and fill up everything with rubbish.

Shape figures out of clay

The Middle East is well known for a huge pile of problems (war, corruption, terror, dictatorship).

The environmental problem is only one of them, but it is related to them.

War is waged with fire and water.

For example, when Turkey builds dams and withdraws water from the Kurds in Syria and Iraq.

Or the so-called IS sets fire to entire fields, the Turkish and Iranian armies burn down forests.

Back in the 1990s, Saddam Hussein allowed the Mesopotamian swamps to dry up in order to deprive the Shiites of their livelihood.

After he was finally gone, the dams were pulled down and the swamps were allowed to recover, only to be threatened again – this time by the Ilisu Dam in Turkey.

But that's not all.

Unexploded bombs, war ammunition, heavy metals poison soil and groundwater.

In north-eastern Syria, makeshift oil refineries are also polluting the air and soil.

The Kurdish north was once considered a granary, sixty percent of Syrian grain was grown here.

The soils were fertile.

There was plenty of water.

My grandparents, my aunts and uncles were part of this grain production.

And not only grain: they tilled fields, harvested watermelons, picked cotton.

They also had a garden that has little to do with what is understood by a garden in this country.

There was everything: olives, figs, lemons, tobacco.

They were self-sufficient, but that was a completely non-ideological thing.

They put a lot of love into the garden, but above all effort: You plant,

A while ago I was at an event where Kurdish-German politicians were sitting.

And one proudly introduced himself and said: My name is Kassem, I grew up in a passive house in Zakho in the nineties, a mud house.

In the meantime, most mud houses have disappeared from Zakho and concrete buildings have given way.

They still exist in my grandmother's village.

The clay is the concrete of the poor.

Clay is free.

He's lying around everywhere.

You still have to know how to handle it, how much chopped straw, how much clay, water and silt to mix to keep it from cracking and crumbling.

My grandparents lived in the mud, my father grew up in the mud.

As a child I played with the clay during the summer holidays, formed and kneaded figures.

When I talked about mud houses in Germany, it always sounded like Misereor, Bread for the World and SOS Children's Villages.

The clay was excellent.

In the winter it kept you warm and in the summer it kept you cool.

When the power went out again, which happened every day, and the fans and air conditioners went out,

Clay is soft and has this special warm color.

It is one hundred percent biodegradable.

Even the Mesopotamians built with clay, and in Central Europe the half-timbered walls were made of clay.

I recently read an interview with the architect Anna Heringer, who specializes in clay.

She now also builds with clay in Germany, and for a long time wasn't taken seriously, but now she's seen as a pioneer.

The pioneer of a design that has been around for thousands of years