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AMELIA TAIT LONG READS 06.06.2019 09:43 AM

Greta Thunberg: How one

teenager became the voice of
the planet
When adults wouldn't listen, Greta Thunberg
started to strike. Now millions of school children
around the world follow her. Thunberg's generation
is our best chance of saving the world

16-year-old Greta Thunberg has mobilised millions of young people to demand action on the
world's climate crisis AORTA

When Greta Thunberg first downloaded Instagram in June

2018, the Swedish schoolgirl used the app to post pictures
of herself posing with her rescue dog, Roxy. There was
Roxy in the snow, Roxy at sunset, even Roxy at an open-air
theatre. It was an ordinary 15-year-old girl’s Instagram in
many ways, though there were hints – a photo of
homegrown tomatoes, multiple shots of fields and lakes –
that Thunberg was passionate about the natural world.
Indeed, just a month before, she had won a climate change
essay competition run by Swedish daily newspaper
Svenska Dagbladet. “I want to feel safe,” she wrote. “How
can I feel safe when I know we are in the greatest crisis in
human history?”

At the age of 12, Thunberg gave up meat and stopped

taking flights, in order to lessen her impact on the climate.
In her early teens she became depressed and spent time off
school, partly because of her fears about global warming.
Then, in the summer of 2018, she became distressed again
when heatwaves and wildfires spread across Sweden.

On August 20, 2018, Thunberg posted a picture of herself

sitting outside Sweden’s parliament building, the Riksdag.
“We children don’t usually do what you grown-ups tell us
to do. We do as you do. And since you don’t give a shit
about my future. I don’t give a shit either,” she captioned an
image of herself in leopard print trousers and a blue
hoodie, sat on the ground in Stockholm, a stray cigarette
butt resting on the cobbles at her feet. Two-thirds of the
frame was filled by a handmade cardboard sign reading,
"Skolstrejk för klimatet”.

Thunberg’s plan was to skip school until the Swedish

general election on September 9, 2018, in protest against
the government’s inaction on climate change. “I was going
to sit there and gain media attention on the climate crisis
so that people would start talking about it, but then
afterwards I thought: why should I stop now?” she says.
While Thunberg returned to school for four days of the
week after the election, she continued to strike every
Friday. And so, #FridaysForFuture was born.

When Thunberg, disturbed after Sweden’s warmest

summer, began striking, she initially asked her classmates
to join her protest. Her immediate peers refused. However,
like any self-respecting member of Generation Z, Thunberg
cross-posted her original strike photo on both Instagram
and Twitter.

Almost instantly, other social media accounts amplified her

cause. According to Thunberg, one of her earliest high-
profile supporters was Ingmar Rentzhog, a Swedish
entrepreneur and environmentalist who arrived at her
strike after it was covered by local journalists. He posted
pictures of Thunberg on Facebook and Twitter, allowing
her cause to spread further. (Thunberg is reported to have
cut ties with Rentzhog after allegedly using her name to
crowdfund for his company.) Sasja Beslik, head of Group
Sustainable Finance at the Finnish bank Nordea, quote-
tweeted Thunberg’s post to more than 200,000 followers.
Three days later, on August 23, Thunberg tweeted another
picture, excitedly writing that “almost 35 people!” had
joined her strike.

“I heard of Greta’s school strike on the afternoon of the first

day,” says Mayson Persson, a non-binary trans 15-year-old
from Stockholm who goes by they/them pronouns. Persson
is politically engaged as a member of RFSL Ungdom, a
Swedish youth organisation for LBGTQ+ rights. They say,
they saw Thunberg’s post on Instagram after it was
amplified by high-profile youth activists.

“The next day, just after 8am, I was there at her side,”
Persson says. “I have, for a few years, had an interest in the
climate and have chosen to not travel by airplane or eat
meat in order to lessen my impact on the climate. I joined
Greta because youths are strong but we are even stronger
together.” At lunchtime, a handful more people joined the
strike.

“Social media can be very effective in creating

movements,” says Thurnberg. “In the beginning, that is how
I first got attention. That is when journalists started
coming.” Thunberg quickly attracted local reporters, going
on to earn international coverage in just over a week.

On October 8, 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on

Climate Change (IPCC) issued a dire statement: a failure to
limit the increase in global average temperature to 1.5°C
above pre-industrial levels, it said, was likely to result in
fires, floods and famines. “We don’t fall over a cliff at 1.5°C
or by the year 2030,” says Jim Skea, an IPCC co-chair. He
explains that while the media ran headlines about 12 years
to save the planet, the report itself said 1.5°C warming
would be hit between 2030 and 2052. The IPCC found that
at 1.5°C warming, crop yields and livestock would be
affected by rising temperatures, leading to food insecurity
and poverty. “The IPCC is not an advocacy organisation, so
it doesn’t say yes or no to a particular level of warming,”
Skea says. “We can identify the implications, but we don’t
actually advocate for it.”

Regardless, immediate action was needed to prevent an

irreversible climate catastrophe, but while the scientists
couched their findings in “ifs”, “buts” and “maybes”, one
16-year-old girl didn’t hold back. On October 20, Thunberg
addressed 10,000 people gathered in Finland for a climate
change prevention march in Helsinki organised by
Greenpeace, WWF, and Helsinki University’s student
union. On November 24, she gave a TEDxStockholm talk.
By then, children in other countries had begun striking as
well, using the #FridaysForFuture hashtag to spread their
cause. On April 13, 2019, Thunberg posted a picture of
Leah, a 14-year-old Ugandan student who skipped school
and held up a sign demanding: “#ClimateAction Now!!!”.

In December 2018, Thunberg addressed the United Nations

climate change summit, telling world leaders that they
were “not mature enough to tell it like is”. This talk became
her first real viral video – more than 9.8 million people
watched her speech when it was uploaded on the
Facebook page for Brut UK, “a video content publisher
covering social justice”. On January 22, 2019, she told
delegates at the World Economic Forum in Davos that they
should be panicking. “Our house is on fire,” she said. “You
say nothing in life is black or white. But that is a lie. A very
dangerous lie. Either we prevent 1.5°C of warming or we
don’t. Either we avoid setting off that irreversible chain
reaction beyond human control or we don’t.”

On Friday, March 15, 2019, more than a million students

took part in 2,000 protests in 125 countries, from Albania
and Kyrgyzstan to Peru, Thailand and Zambia, in the first
Global Climate Strike for Future. In seven months,
Thunberg had become a social media celebrity with 1.1m
Instagram followers and 400,000 Twitter followers – and
the global figurehead for climate action.

Thunberg speaks to a journalist outside the Riksdag in Stockholm, on April 12, 2019 GETTY
IMAGES

On a crisp Friday morning in April 2019, Thunberg sits

again outside the Riksdag, wrapped in a large, scuffed
purple duffle coat, a cream woollen hat atop her now
signature pigtails, and her hands – in mismatched black
and grey gloves – resting on her lap. It is her 33rd week of
striking. “It is hard to realise how fast it has all spread
around to so many people,” she says. “I am so busy now I
don’t really have time to sit down and think through what
is actually happening.”

Social media was crucial for Greta’s journey because she is,
she says, a natural introvert. “Without social media I don’t
think it would have worked,” she says. “I just sat down on a
school strike. Now I reach millions of people.” Although she
has mobilised millions of children around the world, she
rarely chats with the kids at her own school. “They do not
talk to me that often but that is good because then I am in a
free zone where I don’t have to deal with all the attention,”
she says. A few years ago, she was diagnosed with selective
mutism, an anxiety disorder characterised by an inability to
speak in certain situations. “It is hard sometimes to always
be at the centre of attention,” she says, “but when you talk
about me you also have to talk about the climate.”

In person, Thunberg’s speaking style is identical to that she

uses to address the world’s most powerful men: she is
straightforward, unemotional, eloquent. She was
diagnosed with Asperger’s four years ago, and regards her
diagnosis as a “superpower” when it comes to speaking
candidly about the climate. The only question that gives
her pause – she thinks for five seconds before answering –
is: “Do you ever feel like a celebrity?”

“I do not see myself as a celebrity or an icon or things like

that… I have not really done anything,” she says. Less than
six minutes later, an elderly man in a black anorak kneels
down next to Thunberg to say that he has stopped flying,
clutching her hand in his. Moments afterwards, two
middle-aged women shake her hand and ask for a selfie, a
tall Indian man requests a hug (she stoically complies), and
a tourist holds out his notebook for an autograph. She
writes her name in small, neat, thick black letters at the top
of the page and then draws a love heart. When asked if this
happens often, she simply says: “Yes”.

Yet, while the tourist couples around Thunberg want

selfies, the Swedish schoolchildren gathered nearby want
change. Four small children, perhaps between eight and
ten, approach Thunberg to chat about their concerns, one
clutching four bright orange Post-its full of notes, another
waving a poster that says: “Marine life in plastic is not
fantastic”. A large group of primary school age later arrive
at the strike to rapturous applause; on neon green poster
paper one child has written: “Stop global warming” and
glued on three memes. In one, a starving polar bear asks:
“There’s no such thing as climate change? Oh, good.”

Malin, a 16-year-old from Stockholm sporting devil horns,

a blue rain jacket and walking boots, has come to strike
with her friend Astrid, 18, for the third Friday in a row.
“Greta has been such a leader, and it feels safe to express
what I want when someone goes before me,” she says.
Nearby, Ester, also 16, is the only student from her school to
strike. “I think a lot of it comes from a lack of information,”
she says.

“At school we’re taught about climate change and they say
‘this might happen’. I think we need to start making it clear
we need to act now. It’s not a hypothetical universe that
this is happening to, it’s happening here, and it’s going to
affect us, everyone.”

The youngest protester is a five-year-old boy in a raincoat

and blue hat who has written a message on A4 paper in a
handful of different coloured felt-tip pens. His mother,
who wishes to remain anonymous, travelled four hours by
train to see Thunberg, and translates his sign. “Don’t cut
any trees down, just two a week.” Clutching a jar of honey
made by her own bees that she intends to give to
Thunberg, the mother calls the teenager “very inspiring”.
The crowd in the square comes and goes, but it is clear
Thunberg has galvanised people from five to 50

“What do we want?” the protesting children spontaneously

begin to chant. “To save the climate.” When do they want
it? “Now! Now! Now!”

Thunberg addresses the Extinction Rebellion protest in London, April 2019 GETTY IMAGES

Greta Thunberg is far from the only child activist calling

attention to the climate crisis, nor is she by any means the
first. Jamie Margolin is the 17-year-old founder of Zero
Hour, a youth-led climate movement established in the US
in 2017. Margolin says when she first became an activist at
the age of 14 in her home town of Seattle, it was “really,
really” difficult to get anyone to pay attention.

“Climate change was barely in the news ever and I felt so

alone,” says Margolin, who was motivated to start her
movement after smog from over 20 Canadian wildfires
blew over to her home city of Seattle, giving her “two
weeks of headaches”.

“I’ve had this overwhelming sense of dread ever since I

was really little,” Margolin says over Skype from school,
while her peers shout, chat and play in the background.
Like Thunberg, she can speak at length about the climate –
her passion not betrayed by any audible emotion, but by
the depth of her knowledge. “Whenever I saw something
about climate change on TV, I would just not look at it
because it was so scary,” she goes on. “I remember going to
the beach in Seattle and the sign said, ‘Don’t feed the seals,
don’t feed the otters’. But I never saw any seals or otters.”

Margolin joined local environmental organisations and,

alongside other youth activists, sued the state of
Washington to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. (The case
was ultimately dismissed.) “Environmental activism wasn’t
like some little extracurricular, it was a full-time job
outside of school,” she says now. “With other youth in my
state, I was doing the unglamorous, gruelling work of
building a movement, and no one was listening.”

Zero Hour aims to “centre the voices of diverse youth in the

conversation around climate justice”. Rebecca Raby, a
professor of child studies at Canada's Brock University,
researches youth activism, and says that minority voices
often struggle to gain media attention. Margolin, who is
Hispanic, readily acknowledges that she built her
movement “on the shoulders” of those who came before
her, including the indigenous youth activists who resisted
the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock in 2016. She
also acknowledges that Thunberg – who sent her a
message on Twitter asking to work with Zero Hour in
October 2018 – built upon her work.

“Right now there’s this international climate movement

that people are seeing, but the community organising for
this has been happening for centuries,” Margolin says.
“Even if we don’t directly get the credit or funding or
whatever, it’s still amazing to see this movement grow. To
be one of the first dominoes to knock this whole thing
down is really amazing.”

There are a handful of reasons why Thunberg became the

figurehead who mobilised the world’s children. The media
impact of the “12 years to save the planet” figure touted in
the press just two months after she started striking was,
says Skea, “unprecedented” for the IPCC. Thunberg
arguably also had pre-existing social capital – her mother
is opera singer Malena Ernman, and she retweeted
Thunberg’s original strike photo to over 40,000 followers,
writing that while she understood the environmental crisis,
she encouraged her daughter to go to school. Thunberg’s
parents have always been clear that her campaign was
entirely her own initiative.

“I followed her mum so that’s where I saw Greta’s first

tweet,” says 18-year-old Nora Axelsson Håkanson, who
speaks on children’s rights for the Swedish Feminist
Initiative party, and joined Thunberg on her second day of
striking. “Many people stopped by to tell us that they’d seen
the post on Twitter or Facebook and support us,” she says
of the early strike. “It all exploded and went viral just over
the night.”

Yet beyond Thunberg’s social capital, there are other

cultural reasons why adults listened to the solitary
schoolgirl. Raby says that while there are many historical
examples of youth movements, young people are now
mobilising in more significant numbers and across more
widespread geographies. The academic says it’s not the
case that children are becoming more engaged — the real
change is that adults have started paying attention.

“Young people’s views have often been marginalised based

on arguments that they don’t know what they are talking
about. Recent issues that young people have mobilised
about all directly link to their lives and experience,” Raby
explains. She adds that the UN Convention on the Rights of
the Child, signed in the 1990s by Canada, the UK, India and
New Zealand among others, means there are more top-
down youth initiatives than ever before.

In 2018, one movement in particular inspired children to

mobilise in greater numbers than ever before. On
Valentine’s Day, a gunman killed 17 students and staff at
Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland,
Florida. Student survivors immediately demanded stricter
gun control throughout the US, holding their first rally just
three days after the tragedy. Rapidly, a handful of students
became household names – Emma González and David
Hogg, among others, ultimately led more than 1.2m
protesters on the March for Our Lives in Washington, on
March 24, 2018. Thunberg cites these marchers as one of
the original inspirations for her strike. Hogg and González
are now social media celebrities, with a combined total of
over 2.5m followers. As teens, they aptly used memes and
hashtags to make their movement go viral.

“Social media has played a significant role in recent

activism,” says Raby. “While in the past young people and
other more marginalised groups had to rely on established
news media to publicise their concerns and events, now
young people can communicate with each other and with
adults directly.”

When it comes to the environment, the children are (what’s

left of) the future. Kehkashan Basu is the now 18-year-old
founder of the Green Hope Foundation, a member of the
World Future Council, and a former co-ordinator of the
United Nations Environment Programme. “My first climate
action was planting a tree on my eighth birthday, using my
gift money. Since that day, I have organised over 15,000
tree plantings across multiple countries,” she says.

At the age of eight, Basu became an activist when she saw

a picture on television of a dead bird with “its belly full of
plastic”. “Numb” at the thought of the bird’s “agony”, she
organised a “no plastic” campaign in her neighbourhood.
At 12, she started the Green Hope Foundation in her home
city of Dubai. “What began as a dream with a handful of
friends back in 2012 is now a global social enterprise with
over 1,000 members working at ground level in 12
countries,” she says. The young people in the foundation
clean beaches, plant trees, conserve habitats, and give
speeches and presentations about global warming.

Basu has since moved from Dubai to Canada, a country

with its own famous young environmental activist. At a
First Nations meeting in 2016, the then 12-year-old
Autumn Peltier confronted Justin Trudeau about his
pipeline projects. “I am very unhappy with the choices
you’ve made,” she told the Canadian prime minister,
referring in part to his approval of the Trans Mountain
pipeline expansion, which could see 980km of pipe pump
oil through vulnerable habitats, risking spills in bodies of
water such as the Strait of Juan de Fuca, on the British
Columbia coast.

“I think when the message comes from youth it has a

bigger impact, because we are the future generation, the
future leaders,” Peltier, now 14, says. Peltier comes from
Wiikwemkoong, a First Nation on Manitoulin Island in
Ontario, and says her people have nicknamed her a “water
warrior” because of her advocacy. In March 2018, she told
the United Nations general assembly to “warrior up” and
stop polluting the world’s water.

“People my age are starting to notice how adults are

treating the planet,” she says. “There’s a lot of kids that are
worrying about our planet and our future, and we’re all just
standing up now.”

A #FridaysForFuture protest outside the Riksdag in Stockholm GETTY IMAGES

On April 21, 2019 – after two straight days of train travel –