Aspire: Greta Thunberg

ASPIRE: Greta ThunbergFRIDAYS FOR FUTURE

Greta Thunberg, the 16 year old climate activist who has captured global attention and is credited with sparking the Fridays for Future movement in schools across the world, was initiated into the world of climate activism via a solitary demonstration in front of the Swedish Parliament in August 2018. For her second demonstration—one week later in the same place— she had company and the movement has grown from there. In an impassioned address to the UN Climate Action Summit on September 23rd, 2019, she challenged the assembled world leaders with the words “how dare you” four times in four minutes. After calculating both the urgency of the situation in overwhelming figures and the bewildering lack of response, she concludes with the direct remark, “There will not be any solutions or plans presented in line with these figures here today because these numbers are too uncomfortable and you are still not mature enough to tell it like it is. You are failing us.”

“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.”

In her 2018 TED Talk, Greta discusses her depression stemming from environmental stress and despair, and her ensuing diagnosis with Asperger’s Syndrome, obsessivecompulsive disorder, and selective mutism. “That basically means I only speak when I think it’s necessary,” she explains, “Now is one of those moments.” The first international student led climate strike, orchestrated through Fridays for Future, was held on March 15th in over 2,000 cities across 125 countries and boasted over 1.6 million strikers. The Global Climate Strike that took place September 20 - 27, 2019 saw 7.6 million strikers across 6,135 actions in 185 countries between the two Fridays that fell in that week. The student run fridaysforfuture.org is a hub for the youth climate activism started by Thunberg and includes resources such as communication channels, suggested language and form letters, school absence permission slips penned by climate scientists and psychologists, sign-up forms, and the like. It also acts as an aggregator of Thunberg’s and the movements’ various social media profiles. “I want people to panic,” Greta has been known to say. If the world wasn’t awake to the urgency of climate change before Greta Thunberg sat alone in front of the Swedish Parliament last August, they are now. Her dedication to an honest, global reckoning of the climate crisis has inspired an entire generation and has the attention of the world. Go Greta.

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