This Is How Activist Greta Thunberg Is Battling Climate Change
In his 2020 book The Good Ancestor: A Radical Prescription for Long-Term Thinking, philosopher Roman Krznaric highlights the importance of learning to live in ways that preserve and enhance the quality of life for future generations. People like this, he writes—citing Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg as a prime example—are “time rebels” who are working toward intergenerational justice in order to help save the future for all of us.
Waking up the world
In 2018, Thunberg launched what would become a worldwide movement with a lonely act of conscience in her local community. She sat down outside the Parliament building in Stockholm with a sign that said “Skolstrejk för Klimatet,” or “School strike for the Climate.”
She spent three weeks there with her sign, hoping to move lawmakers to take more constructive action ahead of the elections. Every day, a few more people joined her, spurring worldwide media attention. She continued spending every Friday outside of school on strike and called her growing movement “Fridays for Future.” Soon, students in countries throughout Western Europe and North America joined her.
In March 2019, Thunberg led a worldwide strike to call attention to the problem, which involved an estimated 1.6 million people in more than 130 countries.
The force of her personality and her convictions have led to speeches before the World Economic Forum at Davos and national and international parliaments, meetings with Pope Francis, President Barack Obama, and other world leaders, as well as a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize. Moreover, she was Time magazine’s 2019 Person of the Year.
Her difference is her “superpower”
Born in Stockholm on January 3, 2003, Thunberg is the child of an opera singer mother and an actor father. In 2015, she was diagnosed with Asperger syndrome, a condition that places her on the autism spectrum. Experts say that people with Asperger’s tend to experience difficulty in interacting with others, often find it challenging to read body language and other non-verbal cues, and frequently immerse themselves in a single cause or field of study. People with Asperger’s also typically earn a reputation for being direct and speaking up without fear of social consequences, driven by a sense of plain duty to stand up for justice and fairness.
Those who have gotten to know Greta Thunberg have consistently remarked on her quiet, steadfast friendliness, her bravery, and her sense of being utterly true to herself and what she believes.
Thunberg first learned about the problem of climate change at age 8. Within a few years, she switched to a vegan diet and refused to travel by air in order to do her part to stop global warming.
The author of the 2019 book No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference, she co-wrote—with her parents—the 2020 book Our House Is on Fire: Scenes of a Family and a Planet in Crisis.
In the book, Thunberg’s mother recounts how, before her daughter became a global spokesperson for climate action, she was a teen struggling with an eating disorder who felt that she had no energy or friends. At age 11, she stopped speaking and eating, so her parents turned their lives upside-down to ensure that she had what she needed in order to thrive.
As they searched for a way through their child’s problems, the family found the core of the answer in the world around her: She was growing up on a planet that was quickly heating up to the point of endangering her life and that of its other young people.
Being on the autism spectrum can make life difficult sometimes, Thunberg has acknowledged. However, she notes that neurological and other differences can provide people with insights and inner strengths that they would not otherwise have possessed. She has also remarked that, when critics start making fun of someone for looking or acting different, “you know you’re winning.” She has embraced her Asperger’s diagnosis as her “superpower.”
A new champion arises
In 2019, Thunberg took a solar-powered sailboat on a two-week trip across the Atlantic Ocean, with her father and a small crew, in order to attend the United Nations Climate Action Summit in New York.
Her carbon-neutral trip drew mockery from climate change skeptics, as well as from prominent figures who jeered at her for her Asperger’s diagnosis. One columnist called her “deeply disturbed.” Thunberg quickly defended herself, saying she was indeed “deeply disturbed” by the organized “hate and conspiracy campaigns” swirling around her activism. Her decision to sail wasn’t meant to dictate others’ travel choices, but to make a point about how all of our actions impact the climate of the only planet we have.
Stepping ashore in the United States, she said that the global crisis involving our environment and climate is the biggest challenge ever to confront human beings and that “if we don’t manage to work together...then we will fail.”
At the UN, she told the leaders of the world that on behalf of herself and other young people, “We’ll be watching you.” Adults and political leaders, she noted in her passionate remarks, pay lip service to the power of young people as a source of hope. Yet she, as a 16-year-old, should not have had to miss school to tell them that it is their job to make the world safe for her generation. “How dare you?” she said. “You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words.”
Yet she still understood her own position of relative safety in one of the world’s wealthy democracies. Others her age, she pointed out, are not so lucky, and all the world’s living things are in peril as entire ecosystems collapse, while adults in power continue to believe in the “fairytale” of unrestrained economic expansion.
Her message to other young people: “Be creative. There is so incredibly much you can do.”
In fall 2020, Thunberg returned to school after a “gap year” traveling the world to spread her climate change message. This “good ancestor” became just another young student again, tweeting out a smiling picture of herself about to hop on her bike with her schoolbag on her shoulders.