We all know the story of Greta Thunberg, the 15-year-old who bunked school and sat on the rose-coloured cobblestones outside Sweden’s parliament to protest about climate change. That Friday, in August 2018, holding a home-made placard that read “Skolstrejk för klimatet” (School strike for climate) and dressed in an oversized yellow raincoat, she sat alone.
Now she’s the voice of a generation and millions around the world have joined her cause.
It’s a Friday and journalists from all corners of the world are having a round-table Zoom interview with the 18-year-old.
During the Zoom session she demonstrates mastery of her subject, but seems distracted. Her eyes regularly glance away from the screen. Is she making notes of the questions or reading from her notes?
Then I ask her what she does for fun. She laughs softly, tilts her screen and reveals the puzzle she’s been working on.
“Now I’m doing a jigsaw puzzle, which is something that I do to relax, and I also do sewing, embroidering, knitting, crocheting and so on.” She grins for the first time during the interview.
It’s difficult to imagine why this soft-spoken young woman has been called a “brat”. It’s harder to reconcile this puzzle-building ingénue with the girl who lashes out at world leaders.
In 2018, five months after she started her School Strike for Climate, she scolded 200 world leaders at a UN climate change conference. She accused older generations of abandoning young people and stealing their future by refusing to commit to measures that would halt global warming.
In September 2019, with tears in her eyes, Thunberg gave another impassioned speech, at the UN Climate Action Summit. “You all come to us young people for hope. How dare you? You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words, and yet, I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing,” she said.
She recalls learning about global warming in school from as early as seven years old. She was only eight when she started getting really concerned.
The number of species that go extinct every day. Earth is already in its sixth mass extinction
— 150
Her activism career kicked off when she won a writing contest in a Swedish newspaper in 2018, highlighting the need for immediate action on climate change. Nobody was keen to join her lone protest and her parents tried to stop her, but she decided to go it alone. This came after a heatwave in northern Europe and forest fires that ravaged parts of Sweden.
She’s been nominated for a Nobel peace prize three times, had conversations with the Dalai Lama and met David Attenborough. She’s been praised at the UN, met France’s President Emmanuel Macron and has been endorsed by the German chancellor, Angela Merkel.
Thunberg also has her detractors. Former US president Donald Trump often took to Twitter to criticise her. When Time Magazine named her its “Person of the Year” in 2019, he lambasted it as “ridiculous” and labelled her an angry girl.
Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro called her a “brat” in 2019.
Asked about Trump, she grins and says: “I hope he’s enjoying himself but I don’t miss him. I think it’s time for the world to move on from that era.”
Thunberg says she is not an angry girl and that she is actually shy and didn’t really talk to people before becoming the face of climate change.
I was alone all the time in my room, just not doing anything, basically. I didn’t think that what I did mattered because I was too small and I couldn’t make a difference
— Greta Thunberg
Having been diagnosed with depression at the age of 11, she was later also diagnosed with Asperger’s, obsessive compulsive disorder and selective mutism.
“I was alone all the time in my room, just not doing anything, basically. I didn’t think that what I did mattered because I was too small and I couldn’t make a difference.
“And now I’m much, much happier. I’ve gotten lots of friends, I feel like my life has more of a meaning now,” she smiles as she continues to build her puzzle.
It’s all very well for kids from privileged backgrounds to protest about climate change, but what about youngsters who are too busy wondering where their next meal will come from to focus on green issues? After all, the greatest challenge facing SA’s younger generation is unemployment at a record high of 43.2%.
“Today the climate crisis seems to be a problem for the privileged, those who have food on the table, and who don’t have to worry about whether they will be able to receive income,” Thunberg says.
“There is also another aspect to it; the climate crisis will impact mostly the ones who are already suffering, who are already in the most vulnerable positions of society. That’s a very unfortunate aspect to the climate crisis. That it’s so unfair.”
For her, social justice and climate justice are interlinked.
She’s no longer distracted by her puzzle or the open window in her father’s apartment.
“We can’t solve the climate crisis in a world where people are suffering and people don’t have basic human rights.”
She says the Covid-19 pandemic has shown that the world has the ability to galvanise around a global crisis and the same should apply to the climate. She uses the word “crisis” 26 times during the interview.
Before the pandemic struck she took a year off school to visit places that highlight the complexity of the climate crisis. With a BBC crew in tow she visited melting glaciers in the Canadian Rockies, a California town torched by wildfires and a Polish coal mine. The three-part documentary, A Year to Change the World, shows Thunberg and her father sailing from Britain to the US in a zero-emissions boat.
In the documentary she says: “People think that I’m an angry teenager who screams at world leaders; that’s not who I am.”
She tells viewers her favourite story is Hans Christian Andersen’s The Emperor’s New Clothes. “The only one who dares question the collective lie is a child … Climate activists are the child saying the emperor is naked.” She says she loves reading, spending time with her dogs, freestyle dancing and joking with her international group of climate activists.
Thunberg doesn’t travel by air, to reduce her own carbon footprint. She is vegan and has influenced her family to join her lifestyle. Her mother, Malena Ernman, an opera singer who represented Sweden in the Eurovision Song Contest in 2009, gave up flying, which had a severe impact on her career. Her father, Svante Thunberg, became a vegetarian.
People think that I’m an angry teenager who screams at world leaders; that’s not who I am
— Greta Thunberg
Her sister, Beata Ernman, 14, launched her singing career last year. Malena and Beata will star in a musical set to premiere in Stockholm in September.
Svante is an actor and said to be a descendant of 19th-century scientist Svante Arrhenius, the Nobel peace prizewinner who came up with a model of the greenhouse effect.
Recently Thunberg has spoken out about vaccine inequality and donated €100,000 (R1.7m) to help the vaccine-sharing Covax scheme secure vaccines for the world’s most vulnerable.
But the young climate activist would much rather be in school thinking about science projects. After her gap year she says she’s happy to be back in class.
Being the global face of climate change has undoubtedly changed her life but Thunberg says it hasn’t changed her. “It doesn’t really impact my mental health in a bad way, more the opposite, I feel happier that my life has meaning when I’m doing something that I’m passionate about, and that I feel that I’m making a difference.
“In a perfect world, there wouldn’t be a need for climate activists, especially young climate activists.”
HEATED DISCUSSION
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Start caring
“When a crisis hits, whether it is the corona pandemic, or the climate crisis, the ones who are already in the most vulnerable positions of society will be exposed, no matter almost what crisis it is. The root cause of these problems is basically the same, that we have turned our backs on one another and also to nature, that we have lost empathy in a kind of way. The solution to them is also the same: that we regain empathy and that we start caring for one another.”
— Greta Thunberg
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