“We are facing a disaster of unspoken sufferings for enormous amounts of people. And now is not the time for speaking politely or focusing on what we can or cannot say. Now is the time to speak clearly,” says the Swedish schoolgirl, brave enough to tell the adults that they are bringing doom upon their children.
She’s small for her age. When she meets journalists from the most prominent media, they always seem surprised by this fact – how come such a tiny, unsmiling teenager is making such poignant, uncompromising statements? She calls the world leaders out on their indifference and hauls them over the coals.
Greta Thunberg, a 16-year-old Swedish girl, has become an icon of the fight with global warming. It was her sadness that kept her from growing bigger. When Greta was 11, she developed severe depression. She stopped eating, talking and going to school. One of the reasons for her breakdown was a fear for the planet. Greta was worried about the future becoming an apocalyptic nightmare, because nobody is trying to avoid this scenario. And certainly not grown-ups, who have been failing to do anything about it for the past 30 years. Greta has read about it in books, reports and research papers. She knows everything the scientists have made indisputably clear. Every one of us could realize it, too, if only climate change – an unprecedented tragedy unfolding on planet Earth here and now – was given the platform it deserves in the news, parliament sittings, corporate board meetings and school curriculums. That’s what Greta believes.
It was sheer coincidence that Svante Arrhenius (1859–1927) – a Nobel Prize laureate in Chemistry; the man who was first to investigate the greenhouse effect and propose the global warming hypothesis – was her distant relative.
Friday I’m on strike
“I don’t want your hope. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I do. Every day. And want you to act.” On one August Friday in 2018, Greta rolled out a camping mat in front of the Swedish Parliament building in Stockholm. She had a banner on which she wrote: ‘School strike for climate’. Greta made a promise – first to herself, then to the global public – that she would skip school and come here every Friday until the government of Sweden commit to the Paris Agreement signed in 2015 and radically, instantly reduce the country’s CO2 emissions. That was what world leaders had agreed upon: keeping
