Imagine the year is 4000. Now imagine that humans are still living on earth and that the planet has never been healthier; the forests are thriving, the air is clean, the rivers, lakes and oceans are plastic-free and unpolluted. Our descendants have written history books about the time we almost destroyed our planet. School children are taught one story in particular because it has many lessons to impart. That is the story of Greta.
Once upon a time, in Stockholm, Sweden, lived a girl called Greta Thunberg. She had a superpower that helped rescue the world. But for a long time she did not know about her superpower.
Greta was not like the other children at school. She was quiet and socially awkward. Her classmates teased and bullied her, and sometimes, she would hide in the girls’ bathroom to avoid them.
Greta was 8 years old when she first heard about climate change. She was shocked that adults did not take the issue more seriously. Videos she saw of plastic in the ocean and starving polar bears stuck in her head. Greta’s worries about the environment and what it meant for her future made her feel depressed. When she was 11 years old, she was so upset she stopped going to school. She also stopped eating and talking. Greta’s eating disorder would go on to affect her size growing up, making her seem smaller and younger than her age.
Greta’s parents tried everything to help her. After many hospital visits, medical tests, and doctors’ appointments, Greta was diagnosed with Asperger syndrome, medically classified as a high-functioning type of autism spectrum disorder. This explained everything. Just like Greta’s obsession with the environment, people with Asperger’s can focus intensely on one topic. Greta’s social awkwardness was also connected to the syndrome.
Greta began to see her Asperger’s as an advantage. In a speech she was later to give in London’s Parliament Square in 2018, she said, “I have Asperger’s syndrome and, to me, almost everything is black or white. I think in many ways that we autistic are the normal ones and the rest of the people are pretty strange. They keep saying that climate change is an existential threat and the most important issue of all. And yet they just carry on like before.”
On August 20, 2018, inspired by the Parkland high school students in Florida who marched out of classes to protest U.S. gun laws, and after forest fires destroyed acres of Swedish land due to a record heatwave, Greta wrote her iconic protest sign, “School Strike for the Climate.” Then 15 years old, Greta skipped school, rode her bike to the Swedish parliament building, and sat outside in protest with her sign, handing out leaflets that stated, “I am doing this because you adults are shitting on my future.” She later said, “The first day, I sat alone from about 8.30am to 3pm – the regular school day. And then on the second day, people started joining me. After that, there were people there all the time.”
Word of Greta’s protest soon spread on social media networks like Instagram and Twitter. Inspired by Greta, strikes began forming around the world. Before long, she was making public speeches at marches and rallies across Europe. Even though she did not like being the center of attention, she felt compelled to “use my platform to do something good.” At the World Economic Forum in Davos on January 25, 2019, Greta began her speech with, “Our house is on fire. I am here to say, ‘Our house is on fire.’” She told them humans were less than 12 years away from being unable to undo their mistakes and that, at a minimum, CO2 emissions needed to be reduced by at least 50 per cent immediately. She ended with this plea for urgency: “I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is.”
On March 15, 2019, an estimated 1.6 million people in 133 countries took part in Greta-inspired climate strikes. In attempting to explain Greta’s appeal, activist and author of This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, Naomi Klein, said, “There’s something very hard to categorize about her, and I think because she’s not looking for approval and is not easily impressed, people don’t know what to do with that.”
In August 2019, Greta travelled from the U.K. to the U.S. in a racing yacht with solar panels and underwater turbines. It was a carbon-neutral transatlantic crossing. Once in New York, Greta caught the subway to attend all her T.V. interviews and media functions. By then she was a recognizable figure; the little Swedish girl with braids, who spoke excellent English, never wore make-up, and dressed in often-wrinkled and well-worn clothing (adhering to “Shop Stop”). At one of these media interviews, with CBS, she described Asperger’s as her superpower, a condition that allowed her to “think outside the box” while preventing her from caring about “social codes” or what she could and could not say. Her superpower was to speak clearly and truthfully about what the science was showing the world. She told world leaders and billionaires things like, “I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act.” She told the secretary-general of the United Nations, “What’s the point of going to school if we don’t have a future?”
On September 20 and 27, 2019, an estimated 4 million people attended school strikes for climate. In between, on September 23, 2019, by then 16 years old, an uncharacteristically emotional Greta gave a searing speech at the U.N.’s Climate Action Summit in New York City. She began with the words, “My message is that we’ll be watching you.” She continued, “People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!”
Greta had done her homework on the subject, having spoken to the leading scientists in the field and poured over books, studies, and articles. The facts and figures she came across were all stored in the steel trap of her photographic memory. She explained, “[t]he popular idea of cutting our emissions in half in 10 years only gives us a 50% chance of staying below 1.5 degrees, and the risk of setting off irreversible chain reactions beyond human control. . . a 50% risk is simply not acceptable to us — we who have to live with the consequences.”
The last words of Greta’s speech at the U.N. delivered a historic admonition:
You are failing us. But the young people are starting to understand your betrayal. The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us, I say: We will never forgive you.
We will not let you get away with this. Right here, right now is where we draw the line. The world is waking up. And change is coming, whether you like it or not
Superheroes don’t always come packaged in bright, shiny capes and costumes. Superpowers are not always glamorous. The truth is not a matter of opinion but of facts. And, “each of us can work to change a small portion of events. It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a [person] stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, [s]he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”
Sources for this article:
https://time.com/collection-post/5584902/greta-thunberg-next-generation-leaders/
https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/men-of-the-year/article/greta-thunberg-interview
https://theintercept.com/2019/09/13/greta-thunberg-naomi-klein-climate/
https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/people/why-is-greta-thunberg-so-triggering-for-certain-men-1.4002264 fbclid=IwAR3CTKmJt4MpGcd6xoDWu4k0wOGAfXwOKVJzjwVoyVKd_fV0ddp_bP6eS8I
https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/greta-thunberg-is-the-anti-trump
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greta_Thunberg
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/09/why-greta-wins/598612/
