Who is Greta Thunberg?
For anyone who thinks this young, highly effective activist who I featured in yesterday's post is new to protest, think again.
In September 2018, she led a school strike against climate change (see the BBC video here; it won't embed.
At 15 years old. Speaking to the world press in English, not her first language. Insanely clear in her message.
So who is she?
Her Wikipedia page is right up to date on her and her activities, so it's a pretty good place to start while we wait for someone to write a book about her (which I'll be first in line to buy, as long as it gets shipped to South Africa in a carbon efficient way).
Greta Thunberg; born 3 January 2003) is a Swedish climate activist. In August 2018, she became a prominent figure for starting the first school strike for climate outside the Swedish parliament building, raising awareness of global warming [about which I've written a number of times in this blog, most recently in December in a series of feedback articles on COP24]. In November 2018, she spoke at TEDxStockholm, and in December 2018 she addressed the United Nations Climate Change Conference.
Life
Greta Thunberg was born on 3 January 2003. Her mother is Swedish opera singer Malena Ernman and her father is actor Svante Thunberg, who is named after his ancestor Svante Arrhenius. Her grandfather is actor and director Olof Thunberg.[citation needed]
Thunberg has been diagnosed with autism. She insisted that her family become vegan and give up flying.
Student strikes for climate
On 20 August 2018, Thunberg, then in ninth grade, decided to not attend school until the 2018 Sweden general election on 9 September after heat waves and wildfires in Sweden. Her demands were that the Swedish government reduce carbon emissions as per the Paris Agreement, and she protested via sitting outside the Riksdag every day during school hours with the sign Skolstrejk för klimatet (school strike for the climate).
If you watched the BBC video, you'll see she said that her parents weren't happy she was striking but that "they can't stop me." Her parents don't sound like wallflowers, if Wikipedia's page on her mother is to be believed:
Ernman has been politically active supporting the Paris Agreement against climate change, including writing a debate piece in Dagens Nyheter with 7 other researchers and artists, at the same time announcing she will personally stop using air travel for climate reasons. Her daughter Greta Thunberg also is a climate activist. Ernman has also been politically active supporting immigration and the right of asylum.
This page also says she has another daughter, Beata. I don't want to infer too much from a few lines in Wikipedia, but I can't help picturing what dinner table conversations are like in their household. I hope Greta's parents are wise and find ways to share their attention and affection equitably with both daughters. It sounds like being around Greta can be a combination of tremendously uplifting and inspiring, and possibly exhausting.
How about in her own words?
Here's an extract from an article she wrote in The Guardian about why she was exhorting Australian students to join her in the school strikes.
I first learnt about climate change when I was eight years old. I learnt that this was something humans had created. I was told to turn off the lights to save energy and recycle paper to save resources.
I remember thinking it was very strange that we were capable of changing the entire face of the Earth and the precious thin layer of atmosphere that makes it our home.
Because if we were capable of doing this, then why weren’t we hearing about it everywhere? As soon as you turned on the television, why wasn’t the climate crisis the first thing you heard about? Headlines, radio programmes, newspapers, you would never hear about anything else, as if there was a world war going on.
Yet our leaders never talked about it.
If burning fossil fuels threatened our very existence, then how could we continue to burn them? Why were there no restrictions? Why wasn’t it illegal to do this? Why wasn’t anyone talking about the dangerous climate change we have already locked in? And what about the fact that up to 200 species are going extinct every single day?
The autism link
And I find it intriguing to learn from the Wikipedia page that Greta has been diagnosed with autism.
The little I really know about autism, I've learned not from films like The Rain Man, but from friends who have been diagnosed as high-level functioning autistics. What I can say from those relationships is these are people who are keenly, painfully aware of truth, hypersensitive to injustice, and contrary to popular opinion can be deeply empathetic rather than "tied up in themselves". In some ways they don't seem to have the societal filters to keep them from expressing themselves when they see things that are wrong, perhaps because it hurts too much to keep it in, regardless of the pain pointing it out can cause them.
In the meantime, again in her own words, she reveals she's been diagnosed with Aspergers syndrome:
I have Aspergers syndrome so, for me, most things are black or white. I look at the people in power and wonder how they have made things so complicated. I hear people saying that climate change is an existential threat, yet I watch as people carry on like nothing is happening.
I have to do some more reading on the matter, and instead of taking an anecdotal, experiential approach only from my own relationships, get a better understanding of what autism really is and where Aspergers fits in.
What should we do?
Rather, don't:
Because this young autistic/Aspergers woman might just save us all from ourselves, if we listen to her most un-British message to panic as if the house was on fire. Because our house is on fire.
References
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/nov/26/im-striking-from-school-for-climate-change-too-save-the-world-australians-students-should-too
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-europe-45439003/swedish-teen-greta-thunberg-skips-school-for-climate-protest
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greta_Thunberg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_strike_for_climate
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Sweden_wildfires
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malena_Ernman
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A brave young woman. Being diagnosed on the autism spectrum is sometime helpful - to explain things. I have more friends than I care to think (as clearly you have), who have children or relatives on the spectrum. One who's child is so serverly affected but not so bad that he must be institutionalised, but can't live independently, has emigrated to Scotland because of the care they they know he will get when they get too old to do so. Then, in our circle of friends is a 65+ year old who has aspergers. Prodigious memory and intellect. Very polite. Excruciatingly so, sometimes and at others, very direct. To the point of rudeness some might say. Not really because he's simply being factual.
I think that Greta is right when she says her parents can't stop her. She will simply do what she believes she must. Based on the facts she has at hand. She doesn't see herself as being disobedient but rather as she says, but using different words, she is responding to the realities that are as plain on our faces, and which we should all be seeing.
Perhaps being in Sweden helps - she won't have the same challenges a Malala Yousafzai
Thank you so much for this thoughtful response, @fionasfavourites. Both autism and Aspergers have been deeply misunderstood by the general public for decades, not least because the entertainment industry has presented people with these conditions as being at the extreme end of the spectrum. I appreciated the sensitive portrayal of someone with Aspergers on, of all shows where the "normal" people were extreme, Boston Legal.
I hope more people have an intuitive understanding of the Gretas of this world the way you do. Thanks for your mention of one of my heroes, Malala. You're right about the kind of challenges she faces - at least in many ways she's now a citizen of the world and can draw on the positive of her Pakistani roots rather than be constrained by them.
I'm actually about to write a post about that autism stuff. I'm diagnosed with Asperger's too so I probably should.
Edit: here you go :)
https://steemit.com/gretathunberg/@isarmoewe/what-can-be-learnt-from-greta-thunberg-about-asperger-s-syndrome
Thank you - I read it and really appreciated it.
True.