The Face of Change

Roscommon/Crawford Chapter

The Face of Change

Just in case you didn’t know, the cherubic, girl-child face looking out at you above is 17-year-old Greta Thunberg, the most famous teen-ager in the world, known simply as Greta, the face of climate change among the world’s young people. She has some 17 million followers who watch her posts on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. She addresses diplomats, politicians and business tycoons and they all know her name. She has been applauded by former president Barack Obama, Pope Francis, French president Emmanuel Macron, Al Gore, Prince Charles and the UN secretary-general, Antonio Guterres to name only a few. She was Time magazine’s Person of the Year for 2019, and has twice been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Among the world’s leaders she stands unequalled as the spokesperson best known for climate change activism.

Greta came upon her fame by her ability to lecture the world’s leaders, speaking simply and forthrightly, famously telling them, “shame on you" for letting the earth be destroyed by climate change when you had a chance to save it. Despite rubbing elbows with world leaders during her hectic schedule of speaking at events around the world, she has no time for self-serving statements about her accomplishments. “I have just acted on my conscience and done what everyone should be doing.”

The self-effacing youngster has the facts about climate change behind her bold calls for action. Given the opportunity she can rattle off statistics and facts that prove the wisdom of her words despite her tender age. She comes by this ability from studying the matter intensely for the largest share of her life. She speaks regularly with scientists and other leaders in the climate change movement. Her activism on the subject has changed the behavior of her parents, her school, and millions of her peers. Her fame began when she provoked a school strike; first at her hometown in Stockholm, Sweden and then in neighboring areas until the strikes became world famous. In 2019, the demonstrations that she organized involved easily 4 million demonstrators.

I was one of them as I joined a few of my peers in Traverse City Michigan at a September, 2019 demonstration for changes needed to help prevent more climate change. Those of us in Michigan were joined by a several million other demonstrators. Here is a picture of one of the many demonstrations.

Montreal

 (500,000 demonstrators)

In conjunction with the demonstrations, Greta gave 10 major speeches in 2019 at events attended by leaders from around the world. All those leaders who mattered, listened to her plaintive cries to help save the planet and gave accolades for her plain-spoken style, sincerity and content. Among world leaders, only US President Donald Trump mocked her, noting the emotional content of her remarks and her obvious discomfiture when discussing the health of our planet.
She comes by her deep distress honestly as she has had a difficult childhood in dealing with the facts of a deteriorating earth.  She began her study of climate change at age 8. By age 11, all she read deeply depressed her. She cried constantly. Her mother, an internationally celebrated opera singer explained.

“She was slowly disappearing into some kind of darkness and seemed to stop functioning. She stopped playing the piano. She stopped laughing. She stopped talking. She stopped eating. She lost 10 kilos [about 22 pounds] in two months. She was eventually diagnosed with Asperger’s, high-functioning autism, and obsessive-compulsive disorder.”

Greta speaks matter-of-factly about this period, " I was diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome, OCD, and selective mutism. That basically means that I only speak when I have something important to say.  Now is one of those moments.” Greta credits her illness with giving her the dedication to pursue her work on climate change. She says it gives her superpower.

Her activism began after she convinced her parents to adopt several lifestyle changes to reduce their own carbon footprint. Her mother stopped flying which meant the end of her international singing. Her father became a vegetarian and the family began using bicycles, public transportation or driving their own electric vehicle. The changes they made and their embrace of Greta’s ideas led to the end of her health problems.

On the morning of August 20, 2018, Thunberg put on a black T-shirt with a crossed-out airplane on the front. She and her father then cycled to the parliament building where she sat down on the pavement. While her father watched discreetly from a distance, she asked a passer-by to take a picture of her that she posted on Twitter and Instagram.

 

She started spending her school days holding her hand-made sign reading Skolstrejk för klimatet

(School strike for climate). She said the idea for the student strike came to her after the students at Margery Stoneman Douglas struck their high school in Florida after the shootings at their school. Greta sat alone outside the Swedish parliament holding her sign. Then, one other student joined her. And then another and another. Journalists arrived to interview her and Climate Strike movement began. Soon, other students engaged in similar protests in their own communities. Together, they organized a school climate strike movement under the name Fridays for Future. The global school strike movement had begun.

After Thunberg addressed the 2018 United Nations Climate Change Conference, student strikes took place every week somewhere in the world. Greta became the darling of the press. She began accepting invitations to speak at international events attended by world leaders. To avoid flying, she sailed to North America where she attended the 2019 UN Climate Action Summit as a featured speaker. Her speech there, in which she exclaimed "how dare you!" was widely taken up by the press and incorporated in a song and play that became popular. Her speeches were widely lauded by both climate experts and politicians.

Shortly before Thunberg began her first school strike, she and her parents asked to see Kevin Anderson, a climate change professor at the universities of Manchester and of Uppsala in Sweden. They quizzed him in the morning, over lunch, and into the afternoon. “I was slightly cynical. There was a sense inside me that perhaps this was a child being used to voice the concerns of her parents,” Anderson told me. “That changed. By the end of lunch, I realized it was the other way around. It was Greta who had really made her parents think about these issues. She was well informed, articulate and was genuinely interested in the science and what to do about it.”

Greta’s current speaking schedule takes nearly all of her time. She carefully prepares for each presentation and offers the latest data on climate change that she discusses with knowledgeable scientists.  She writes all her own speeches. She seeks facts, checks drafts and explores simple ways of expressing complicated ideas with half-a-dozen well-respected climate change scientists – those who are the Who’s Who in the climate change world. Those she seeks out for advice includes several Americans who are either university researchers or climate change activists themselves.

Thunberg strives to ensure not only that her message is accurate, but also that it is not compromised. She accepts no sponsorship, though it is often offered. During her first school strike, for example, a representative of a major burger chain offered to provide free food for her and her fellow strikers. She refused. At the financial meetings at Davos, a Russian energy company representative offered her a lot of money. Greta rebuffed his offer.

She has no team of media advisers telling her what to say or how to say it. She is sometimes accompanied on her travels by an old friend of her mother who until last year worked for a global public relations agency. The agent insists that she helps only with logistics and that Greta shapes her own messages.

Thunberg also receives pro bono help from a couple of members of the Global Strategic Communications Council, a non-profit network of communications professionals concerned about climate issues. They field up to 100 requests a week for media interviews with Thunberg. They insist that Greta herself decides which interviews to do and what to say.

Nick Robinson, the BBC correspondent, interviewed her after she addressed a meeting at the Quaker Friends House in London last spring. “I fully expected a bunch of minders to come in with her but she just walked in on her own,” he told me. “I was much more impressed than I expected to be in the sense it was not spun or controlled or anything.” Likewise, the BBC team that spent several hours recording her editing the Today program in Stockholm just before Christmas found no PR advisers on hand – just Greta and her father.

Greta’s compelling speeches have been nearly universally well-received, and have won her honors and awards. She has been given an honorary Fellowship of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society; Time magazine's 100 most influential people and the youngest Time Person of the Year; inclusion in the Forbes list of The World's 100 Most Powerful Women (2019) and two consecutive nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize (2019 and 2020). Quite a record of achievement for one who just turned 17-years-old.

If you haven’t heard Greta speak or seen a climate change strike, here is a sample of her schedule and her words. Recently, Greta sent a text message to another 17-year-old leader of a small English “Youth Strike 4 Climate.” Greta wanted to know if a school strike was planned while she was visiting England. ”I participate in a school strike every Friday, wherever I happen to be,” she explained. The young leader from Bristol, England couldn’t say no to the world-famous activist, and advised Greta that she and her group would plan a Friday strike. The leader, Lily Fitzgibbon, called together a dozen of her girlfriends to organize an event. They first raised $1,999 and used the money to rent a field and a stage equipped with a sound system. They met with the local police and then trained 90 volunteers for crowd control of the event, respectfully declining an offer from a local bank for a meeting room and the mayor’s offer of giving a welcome speech.

It was a good thing that they trained the 90 volunteers and rented the large field – 20 to 30,000 people showed up for the nearly impromptu event. Greta Thunberg, wearing a woolly hat and her trademark yellow jacket, cut a tiny figure on the stage. She offered no preamble, no jokes, and no levity in her four-and-a-half minute speech, just characteristic bluntness. The sense of her remarks are captured in a few words.

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“People are dying because of the consequences of the climate and environmental emergency and it will get worse,” she declared. “Nothing is being done despite all the beautiful words and promises of our elected officials … We are being betrayed by those in power and they are failing us. But we will not back down, and if you feel threatened by that then I have bad news for you: we will not be silenced because we are the change and change is coming whether you like it or not.”

Thunberg did not bask in the adulation, or milk the crowd for applause. Speech over, she gave a brief half-wave then joined a huge, exuberant march around Bristol’s city center. People spilled from shops and restaurants to watch her pass in a melee of police, photographers and drummers. Office workers hung out of windows. Others packed bridges and overpasses, or climbed up traffic lights and on to bus shelters, to get a better view. “Greta, we love you,” they yelled.

This is pure Greta – the face of change in a world that badly needs it.

[Editor’s Note – Material for this piece was taken from several sources including the free encyclopedia Wikipedia. In a few instances, entire sentences from sources have been used without attribution.]