Greta Thunberg

Hillary

In August 2018, when it came time to return to classes at her high school in Stockholm, then fifteen-year-old Greta Thunberg decided to go on strike instead. Like many countries, Sweden had seen record-breaking heat that summer. The news out of the scientific community was bad, and Greta had had enough. She wrote “SKOLSTREJK FÖR KLIMATET”—“School Strike for Climate”—in black letters on a piece of wood. Then she put a few snacks in her backpack, put on her sneakers, and headed down to the Swedish national legislature, the Riksdag, to set up camp on the sidewalk out front. Her goal was to protest her government’s inaction on what she sees as the greatest threat facing her generation: climate change.

“I know so many people who feel hopeless, and they ask me, ‘What should I do?’ And I say: ‘Act. Do something.’ Because that is the best medicine against sadness and depression.”

—GRETA THUNBERG

Greta is part of a generation that has grown up seeing increasingly alarming news about the state of our planet. She has talked openly about her falling into a depression after learning about climate change at a young age. “I stopped talking. I stopped eating,” she has said. She couldn’t understand why everyone around her—from classmates to world leaders—wasn’t similarly fixated on confronting this global emergency. Then she decided to do something. She would later attribute her ability to focus so intensely on the issue in part to her Asperger’s syndrome. “I see the world a bit different, from another perspective,” she told New Yorker reporter Masha Gessen. “I have a special interest. It’s very common that people on the autism spectrum have a special interest.” Through activism, she found a purpose.

Greta’s urgency is justified. Just a few months after she first went on strike, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a report warning the world that we need to cut our greenhouse gas emissions in half before 2030 to avoid passing the 1.5-degree Celsius threshold that would be catastrophic. Ancient glaciers are breaking up, leading to an anticipated sea-level rise that has forced nations like Indonesia to explore relocating cities on the coasts because they’ll be underwater in fifty years. Villages in Alaska have already been moved. Scientists warn of thawing permafrost in Siberia leading to the release of more methane into the atmosphere and more warming from there, initiating devastating feedback loops. Destructive “hundred-year” floods, wildfires, and hurricanes have become regular events.

We often talk about tackling climate change as something we’re doing “for the planet.” Activists like Greta know that the planet will survive, but humans and life as we know it may not. That’s what we have to worry about, and urgently. As Greta has said: “I want you to behave like our house is on fire. Because it is.”

Greta was inspired to go down to the parliament building that day by the students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, and their activism around gun violence. She saw the Parkland students challenging adults to take long-awaited action on an issue that threatened their very lives, and she saw a parallel in her own growing anxiety about climate change. At first, she worried that the actions of one young girl couldn’t make a difference. She didn’t let her own doubts, or the ridicule she encountered from others, dissuade her. She was supported by her parents—actor Svante Thunberg and celebrated opera singer Malena Ernman, who travels to her performances by train and bicycle instead of flying in order to reduce her carbon footprint.

“We do need hope—of course we do. But the one thing we need more than hope is action. Once we start to act, hope is everywhere.”

—GRETA THUNBERG

Just as the Parkland students inspired Greta, Greta has inspired young people all over the world to strike for climate action. That first day Greta packed her backpack, she was on her own. “I tried to bring people along to join me,” she said, “but no one was really interested, and so I had to do it by myself.” She went back to school after a few weeks but kept striking on Fridays in an ongoing protest she called #FridaysForFuture. Students across Europe and the world started joining—first just a few, then dozens, then hundreds, and now thousands. On March 15, 2019—a Friday, of course—1.6 million young people all over the world joined protest marches from Sydney to San Francisco and Kampala to Seoul. “The most common criticism I get is that I’m being manipulated and you shouldn’t use children in political ways,” Greta has said. “And I think that is so annoying! I’m also allowed to have a say—why shouldn’t I be able to form my own opinion and try to change people’s minds?”

CHELSEA

So many of the leaders in the global movement to confront climate change are gutsy women—from activists like Greta to women at the UN like Christiana Figueres and Patricia Espinosa, each of whom has served as executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Christiana assumed the position in 2010, just six months after global climate talks in Copenhagen failed to produce a consensus. Five years later, thanks in no small part to what she called her “stubborn optimism,” 195 countries came together in Paris and decided unanimously to “intentionally change the course of the global economy in order to protect the most vulnerable and improve people’s lives.” When Patricia took the helm in 2016, she helped widen the global conversation, including by launching an online effort that invites countries and nongovernmental organizations of all kinds to submit their own policy proposals to help achieve the Paris Agreement’s targets. I am also grateful that Greta is talking about a climate crisis, not climate change. Every day we don’t meet the commitments that Christiana helped negotiate and that Patricia is working to enforce, we are a day further from tackling our crisis and ensuring our planet is healthy and habitable for our children.

We face an immense challenge in making sure future generations can live and thrive on our planet. As a grandmother, mother, and human being, I’m personally invested in seeing climate action succeed. I’m grateful to Greta and all the young people who see a world in need of saving and have decided to act, individually and collectively, to save it. Talk about guts.

“Change is on the horizon,” Greta has said. “But to see that change we also have to change ourselves.” Let’s do it.