the biography of greta thunberg

Greta Thunberg

Greta Thunberg is a Swedish climate youth activist who has received worldwide recognition for her efforts to fight climate change.

Who Is Greta Thunberg?

Greta Thunberg is a Swedish climate youth activist who sparked an international movement to fight climate change beginning in 2018. With the simple message "School strike for climate" handwritten on poster board, Thunberg began skipping school on Fridays and protesting outside the Swedish Parliament. Thanks to social media, her actions have spread and influenced millions of young people all over the world to organize and protest.

Launching "Fridays For Future," Thunberg and other concerned youths throughout Europe have continued to pressure leaders and lawmakers to act on climate change through their regular walkouts. Thunberg has also traveled the world, meeting with global leaders and speaking at assemblies to demand climate solutions and a recommitment to the Paris Agreement. Recently diagnosed with Asperger's, the activist has publicly shared her views on her disorder, referring to it as her "superpower."

Thunberg was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in March 2019, and a few months later she became the youngest individual ever to be honored as Time 's Person of the Year.

Thunberg was born on January 3, 2003, in Stockholm, Sweden. Thunberg began her climate activism at age 15. Thunberg was born and raised in an artistic family. Her mother, Malena Ernman, is an opera singer, and her father, Svante Thunberg, is an actor. She has a younger sister, Beata, who is a popular singer in Sweden. Like her sister, Beata has been open about her own challenges dealing with disorders like ADHD and OCD.

Climate Activism

Thunberg was only eight when she first learned about the climate crisis. Since then, she has made efforts to lower her carbon footprint by not flying and becoming vegan and has influenced her family to do the same.

"You are not mature enough to tell it like is," she said at the summit, addressing the Secretary-General. "Even that burden you leave to us children. But I don't care about being popular. I care about climate justice and the living planet."

Cross-Atlantic Trip to the United States

Invited to speak at the UN Climate Action Summit in New York City, which took place in September 2019, Thunberg traveled across the Atlantic on a zero-emissions yacht, accompanied by her father and a supporting crew. Taking a little over two weeks, the yacht arrived in New York City on August 28th, and from there, Thunberg visited with President Barack Obama and later spoke before the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the House Select Committee in Washington D.C. on September 18th.

Known for her blunt speaking style, Thunberg barely spoke before the committees and instead pushed forward the latest UN report. "I don't want you to listen to me," she said. "I want you to listen to the scientists."

Historical Climate-Change Protest in NYC

Two days later on September 20th, Thunberg walked with millions of protesters in New York City to demand climate action at the New York City Global Climate Strike. The demonstration became the largest climate protest in history with a total of 4 million people marching all over the world. The next day, she spoke at the UN Youth Climate Summit.

United Nations Climate Action Summit, 'How Dare You' Speech

Although the world's eyes were already on the teen activist, her speech on September 21, 2019, at the United Nations Climate Action Summit brought headline news. Speaking before leaders, lawmakers and U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, Thunberg lambasted them with one of her most indignant speeches.

"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. "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!"

She added: "For more than 30 years, the science has been crystal clear. How dare you continue to look away and come here saying that you're doing enough, when the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight... You are failing us. But the young people are starting to understand your betrayal. The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us, I say: We will never forgive you."

Days later, Thunberg joined 15 other young climate activists to file an official complaint that five countries — Argentina, France, Germany, Brazil and Turkey — have not honored their Paris Agreement pledges and have therefore violated the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child treaty.

President Trump's Response

Thunberg's "How Dare You" speech attracted so much attention that President Donald Trump , a vehement climate change denier, felt compelled to offer a mocking tweet: "She seems like a very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future. So nice to see!" he wrote.

In response, Thunberg changed her Twitter bio temporarily, using Trump's language against him. Her profile read: “A very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future.”

In December 2019, Thunberg was among the speakers at the UN Climate Change Conference (COP25) in Madrid, Spain. She also attended another major climate demonstration in the city, telling her fellow protesters, "The hope is not within the walls of COP25; the hope is out here with you."

Nobel Peace Prize Nomination

In March 2019, Thunberg was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for her climate activism. However, she lost the award to Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed.

'Time' Person of the Year

On December 11, 2019, Thunberg was named Time magazine's Person of the Year; a month shy of her 17th birthday, she became the youngest individual to earn the honor.

"Thunberg has become the biggest voice on the biggest issue facing the planet," wrote the Time editor-in-chief. "This was the year the climate crisis went from behind the curtain to center stage, from ambient political noise to squarely on the world's agenda, and no one did more to make that happen than Thunberg.

Future Plans

Taking a year off of school to campaign for climate action, Thunberg plans to travel to Mexico, Canada and South America to meet with environmental activists and see firsthand the regions most affected by climate change.

QUICK FACTS

• Birth Year: 2003
• Birth date: January 3, 2003
• Birth City: Stockholm
• Birth Country: Sweden
• Best Known For: Greta Thunberg is a Swedish climate youth activist who has received worldwide recognition for her efforts to fight climate change.
• Astrological Sign: Capricorn

We strive for accuracy and fairness.If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us !

CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: Greta Thunberg Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/activists/greta-thunberg
• Access Date:
• Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
• Last Updated: March 10, 2021
• Original Published Date: November 4, 2019
• 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. 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!
• For more than 30 years, the science has been crystal clear. How dare you continue to look away and come here saying that you're doing enough, when the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight.
• We can’t just continue living as if there was no tomorrow, because there is a tomorrow.
• People are underestimating the force of angry kids. If they want us to stop being angry, then maybe they should stop making us angry.
• The planet is outside its comfort zone and we also need to be outside of our comfort zone to prevent the worst consequences from happening.
• My role is to be one of many, many activists who are pushing for climate action. I don’t see myself as a leader, or icon or the face of a movement.

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Amelia Tait

Greta Thunberg: How one teenager became the voice of the planet

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.

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“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.

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!”

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.”

On April 21, 2019 – after two straight days of train travel – Greta Thunberg came to London. A long queue of people snaked down Euston Road the next day as children and adults alike waited to hear her speak at her first public event in England. Just over a week earlier, the Youth Strike for Climate UK brought traffic to a halt in London. Children waving meme-emblazoned placards chanted outside Downing Street: “Theresa May, hear us say, climate change is here to stay!”

Two days later, Thunberg addressed MPs in the UK parliament, a microphone clipped to her pink-and-black check shirt, her voice and her plaits as unwavering as ever. “I know many of you don’t want to listen to us – you say we are just children,” she said. Two months earlier, Theresa May scolded school strikers for wasting teachers’ time and urged them to return to class. “I assure you we will go back to school the moment you start listening to science and give us a future. Is that really too much to ask?” Earlier that day, Thunberg met leading Westminster politicians, including Jeremy Corbyn, Vince Cable and Caroline Lucas. A symbolic empty seat was left out for Theresa May. "It was incredibly inspiring to meet Greta and in particular to hear her speak the truth to politicians about the scale and urgency of the climate crisis," says Lucas. "Politicians who fail to respond will be judged by history far less kindly than those striking or taking to the streets over the climate emergency."

It is clear that children’s climate activism is already putting pressure on world leaders to change. In February 2019, striking students in Belgium forced an environment minister to resign after she claimed the protests were a “set up” by adults. In the same month, California senator Dianne Feinstein was criticised for her failure to engage with child activists who were rallying for the Green New Deal.

“When adults say we need to go back to school I feel like they don’t understand the message that we are trying to send,” says Anuna De Wever, the de facto leader of the school strike movement in Belgium. “It’s a message of urgency. Of the fact that we are facing an existential crisis. We literally won’t have a future if we don’t act now. We are the last generation to actually be able to save this world.”

Are there limitations to movements run on social media, where followers and subscribers click "Like" to soothe their own guilt? “It feels like if someone steps behind me then their conscience is clear,” says Thunberg. “If all the people who followed me on social media did something then the world would look very different.” What about limitations to movements run by kids?

“There’s this weird thing where people will pit you as an inspiration, but then they don’t actually do anything about it,” says Zero Hour’s Margolin. “World leaders will be like ‘Oh, you guys are going to change the world’. It’s like, actually, we’re just kids telling you to stop messing up.”

Thunberg readily concurs. “I have spoken to many politicians who ask me ‘What do you think about this?’, and it’s just insane,” she says. “We are not doing this because we have solutions and we want to be the ones in power, we are just messengers. We are just children and we cannot solve this. We cannot wait for us to grow up and become the ones in charge because by then it will be too late.” In her speech to the UK parliament, she was not optimistic, noting that despite the strikers' accomplishments, the greenhouse-gas emission curve was still rising.

Yet despite the naysayers, many other politicians and powerful people already back the #FridaysForFuture strikers. Angela Merkel says she welcomes the protesters, while Norwegian Socialist Left MP Freddy André Øvstegård nominated Thunberg for the Nobel Peace Prize. “We need to recognise this new movement and enhance the momentum for change,” he says now. “She deserves the prize.”

Scientists, too, back the youth activists – in March 2019, more than 12,000 of them signed a letter in support of the youth protests. “She and her colleagues have great moral authority – they’ll have to live with these changes all their lives,” says climate scholar Bill McKibben. “They can call on the rest of us to act, and they have. And I think many people will choose to answer.”

Whether that is true remains to be seen, but Thunberg is cautiously optimistic. When asked why so many people are blind to the realities of the climate crisis, her answer is simple. “I do not think they are evil,” she says. “I just think that they are not informed.”

Thunberg is part of a long history of child activists – in 1990, TIME ran an article about “ecokids”, a “new generation” of environmentally active schoolchildren. Thunberg is not naive about her place in this narrative, and understands newer and fresher faces may replace her as the media’s favourite young activist. “I am not going to be this interesting for long,” she says. “This attention is soon going to fade out, but I just hope that the attention sticks to the movement.”

Before Thunberg inspired one million school students to protest about climate inaction on March 15, 2019, she wanted to be an astronaut. Or an actor. Or a singer, scientist, farmer, policewoman, politician or doctor. “It is so hard to find something and decide what I want because I want to do so much,” she says. “But I realised that if you don’t care about the climate then the other things won’t matter in the future.”

Thunberg is neither hopeful nor pessimistic about the future of our planet – she is firmly grounded in the present, trying to change what she can now. “I have just decided that I will do this even if there is no hope. Not having hope is not an excuse for not doing something,” she says. “Everyone says different things. Some say we are already screwed and some say we still have time.” Her message, as always, is calm and clear. “I just hope that this movement will continue and we do something about the climate – because that is the only thing that matters.”

This article was originally published by WIRED UK

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Greta Thunberg: ‘I really see the value of friendship. Apart from the climate, almost nothing else matters’

Greta thunberg has spent three years raising the alarm on the climate crisis, her mission could end up saving the world, it's already saved her.

The transformation of Greta Thunberg Words: Simon Hattenstone Portraits: Marcus Ohlsson

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Greta Thunberg has made the ultimate sacrifice for the Guardian. She’s allowed us to turn her into a human oil spillage. The treacly black stuff is dripping from her hair, down her nose, past her cheeks on to her neck and shoulders.nose, past her cheeks on to her neck and shoulders.

Down, down, down it drips. By the time we speak on Zoom, a day later, she has just about got herself cleaned up. Has she ever been covered in oil before? (It’s actually a mixture of non-toxic finger paint and olive oil.) “No,” she says. This is a typical Thunberg answer – short, factual, to the point. She never likes to waste her words. How did it feel? “It felt better than I thought it would feel. I had a ribbon on my hair to not get my hair black, but then it spilt through the ribbon so my hair was completely black. It was very difficult to get off.” I suggest that she sues the Guardian. “Yes,” she says. Thunberg isn’t smiling.

We talk first thing on a Sunday. Look at Thunberg and she seems little changed – still elfin-like and earnest; still quoting the climate science with fastidious politeness; and still with that curious mix of pessimism (we’re doomed if we don’t act) and optimism (we can avert catastrophe if we do). But, as she relaxes, I begin to discover that this is a very different Thunberg from the one she presented to the public in 2018. While she has done much to change our perspective of the world, the world has done much to change her – and, she says, for the better. Despite the climate crisis deepening by the day, Greta Thunberg has learned how to be happy.

Like the rest of us she has retreated from the world over the past year and a half, but she has used her time to good effect – to grow up. Thunberg is now 18 years old and campaigning as ferociously as ever, while living in her own apartment (where she is speaking from), hanging out with friends and having fun. She is turning into the kind of young woman that neither she nor her parents could have ever envisaged.

At home in Stockholm, she says, she goes unnoticed. “Fortunately I live in Sweden, which is very good because people aren’t interested in ‘celebrities’. When I do get stopped, it’s mostly tourists and people from abroad.”

Her father, Svante, talking to me from the family home, tells a funny story about the time he and Greta attended a climate exhibition in the Swedish capital. “She was the main part of the exhibition. There was a big picture of her taken in North Dakota, hanging in the middle of the hallway, five metres tall. No one came up to her. When we left, someone came up with an iPad. I thought, ‘OK, maybe someone wants an autograph’ and the woman said, ‘Excuse me, we’re doing a survey for the museum.’ That sums up how people treat her in Stockholm. They’re not very impressed, and I think that’s good for her. No one really gives a damn.”

Locals may not give a damn, but I discover later on that plenty of other people do – sometimes in a way that has threatened the safety of Thunberg and her family.

I might be naive because I’m very young. But naivety and childishness are sometimes a good thing

Three years ago Greta Tintin Eleonora Ernman Thunberg was an unknown 15-year-old terrified that we were destroying the planet and furious that adults were letting it happen. Her fury was particularly directed at those with power. She decided to take unilateral action, and tweeted her plan. “We kids most often don’t do what you tell us to do. We do as you do. And since you grownups don’t give a damn about my future, I won’t either. My name is Greta and I’m in ninth grade. And I am school striking for the climate until election day.” She didn’t expect anyone to take notice. Thunberg had spent her short lifetime not being noticed. She was small, rarely spoke and described herself as “that girl in the back who never said anything”.

Thunberg spent the first day sitting cross-legged on her own outside the Swedish parliament alongside a sign made from wood scrap that read “Skolstrejk för klimatet” (“School strike for climate”). Although she was striking, she still treated it as a regular school day – she rode to the Riksdag on her bike, took out her books and studied till the end of the school day. The next week a few others joined her – fellow students, teachers and parents – and her campaign began to attract media interest. In September 2018 she began a regular Friday strike, calling it Fridays for Future, encouraging other students to join her. By March 2019, her protest had spread to more than 70 countries. On 20 September 2019, 4 million people joined a school strike across 161 countries – the largest climate demonstration in history.

Within a year, Thunberg had become one of the most famous people on Earth. Since then she has been nominated twice for the Nobel peace prize, addressed the UN and been thanked by the pope. Liberal world leaders suck up to her to show their people they take the climate crisis seriously, rightwing populist leaders mock her to show that they don’t. November’s Cop26 climate conference in Glasgow is due to be attended by more than 200 nations, and will be one of the largest gatherings of world leaders in history. But many people only want to hear from one person – the autistic teenager with the pigtails.

Perhaps the biggest change in Thunberg is her faith in people. When she started out, she didn’t have any. “I didn’t think young people cared about climate because all the young people I knew were like, ‘Oh yeah, the climate is important, but I don’t want to do anything about it.’ But it turned out many young people around the world actually care. A lot! And they are very ready to do something about it. I’m very glad I was proven wrong.”

She talks about the activists she has met, and how they have inspired her. For the first time in her life, she was meeting people who shared her passion – or obsession. I had met one of her fellow Fridays for Future activists a couple of weeks ago – Vanessa Nakate, Uganda’s first school striker. Thunberg’s face lights up when I mention her. “Vanessa is an incredible person.” She draws such strength from people like Nakate, she says, because they are taking greater risks than she has ever had to.

“Some places are much harder to be an activist in than others. I look up to them so much. They give me the hope and inspiration to carry on.” She pauses. “Of course, I might be naive because I’m very young.” She pauses again. “But I think naivety and childishness are sometimes a good thing.” The great thing about youth, she says, is you’re not blinded by realpolitik and the assumption of compromise. “I do think older people make things more complicated than they actually are.”

Is there a sense of solidarity between fellow activists? “Definitely. We have daily contact. We don’t just campaign together, we are also friends. My best friends are within the climate movement.” I ask if she could ever be friends with a climate denier. “Erm, yeaaaah,” she says uncertainly. “I mean in one way we’re all climate deniers because we’re not acting as if it is a crisis. I don’t know. It depends on the situation.” So there’s hope for your friendship with Donald Trump? She lets out a hiccup of laughter. “Well, I don’t think we would enjoy each other’s company that much. We have very different interests.” In 2019, when Thunberg was crowned Time magazine’s person of the year, Trump tweeted: “So ridiculous. Greta must work on her Anger Management problem, then go to a good old fashioned movie with a friend! Chill Greta, Chill!” Eleven months later, with Trump demanding a recount, having lost the election to Joe Biden, Thunberg coolly tweeted: “So ridiculous. Donald must work on his Anger Management problem, then go to a good old fashioned movie with a friend! Chill Donald, Chill!”

She is still thinking about the question of befriending a climate denier. The funny thing is, she says, she used to be in denial herself. “When I first heard about it, I didn’t think it was real because if it was real, people would do something about it. It didn’t add up to me.”

Then, aged eight, she was shown a film of an armada of plastic assailing our oceans. She couldn’t get it out of her head. She started to read about it, and became more and more terrified. She was exceptionally bright, with a photographic memory, but was also withdrawn and quiet. And she was becoming more so.

At the age of 11 she fell into a deep depression and stopped eating and talking. Why does she think she was so unhappy? “One of the reasons was I couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that people didn’t seem to care about anything, that everyone just cared about themselves rather than everything that was happening with the world. And being an oversensitive child with autism, it was definitely something I thought about a lot, and it made me sad.” Was it also because she had been bullied at school? “Yeah, to some extent.”

I ask if she literally stopped talking. “I spoke to my parents, my sister and a bit to my teacher,” she says. Why did she stop? “I don’t know. I just couldn’t.”

I mean in one way we’re all climate deniers because we’re not acting as if it is a crisis

Svante tells me it was terrifying. “It was complete hell; a nightmare for me and my wife. We took all the time in the world to be with her and sort this out, and that was the best thing we’ve done in our lives.”

Svante and the opera singer Malena Ernman have two children: Greta and her sister, Beata, who is three years younger. When Greta was born, Malena’s career was taking off, so Svante – who had trained as an actor – stayed at home to look after the children. By the time they started school, Malena was touring internationally. Svante started a production company and looked after her work. But when Greta fell ill, he became a stay-at-home dad again, monitoring everything she ate (“Five pieces of gnocchi in two hours”) and her dramatic weight loss, and talking her through her fears. That was when he discovered that so much of it was rooted in the climate crisis.

It amuses him when he reads that it was he and Malena who turned her into a climate activist. Svante says that Malena was an activist but she campaigned for refugees (and they had refugees living with them) rather than the environment. The only aspiration he had for Greta back then was for her to get better. As for himself, he knew little about the climate crisis, wasn’t convinced by what he did know and just wanted to get a nice big car – an SUV or pick-up truck. Over time, Greta changed his mind.

“The way she got us interested was a bit by force. She hijacked us. She started turning off lights. She cut the electricity bill in half.” He laughs. “She’d say, ‘Why have you got the lights on in this room, you’re not even in here?’ and I’d say, ‘Because we live in a country where it’s dark all the time and it makes me feel nice’ and she’d say, ‘Why? It doesn’t make any sense.’ Of course, she was right.”

Did he get pissed off with her? “Oh hell, yeah. She can be very, very, very annoying. But because we were in this crisis we had to react, so we became aware and began to do stuff for the environment, but not because we wanted to save the environment; we did it to save our child.”

At the time, Beata had also been diagnosed with neurodevelopmental disorders, and the family was imploding. Malena and Svante wrote a book about this period, with the Bergmanesque title Scenes from the Heart. It was published on 23 August 2018, three days after Greta’s first school strike. Svante says the timing couldn’t have been worse. “It was a hell of a nuisance when she decided to do the strike because it left us in a tricky situation.” Why? “It was obvious everyone would say you’ve written this book and she’s going on school strike as a PR stunt. But she had made up her mind she was going on strike, so we thought the only thing we could do was give every cent away. All our earnings from the book went to charity.”

In the book, Malena describes how the 11-year-old Greta was “slowly disappearing into some kind of darkness and, little by little, bit by bit, she seemed to stop functioning. She stopped playing the piano. She stopped laughing. She stopped talking … She stopped eating.” They were, she concluded, “burned-out people on a burned-out planet”. An updated version of the book was published last year in the UK, retitled Our House Is on Fire: Scenes of a Family and a Planet in Crisis, this time with contributions from the girls, and the whole family credited as authors. Malena explained why she had felt compelled to write it in the first place. “Because we felt like shit. I felt like shit. Svante felt like shit. The children felt like shit. The planet felt like shit. Even the dog felt like shit,” she wrote. Svante says hardly anybody bought either version of the book because they decided not to promote it.

I ask Thunberg how important her family’s support has been. “In the beginning they didn’t like the idea of me skipping school, but then they helped more, arranging trips. My dad even followed me on some.” They made huge sacrifices for you, I say. “Yep. They changed their lifestyles. My mum stopped flying, and by doing that she stopped her international career, and I really appreciate it.”

Does she feel guilty about stymying her mother’s career? She seems surprised by the question. “It was her choice. I didn’t make her do anything. I just provided her with the information to base her decision on.” At times like this you can see how unyielding she is – while it’s the source of her strength, you can imagine just how tough it may have been for her parents. “Of course, you could argue one person’s career is not more important than the climate, but to her it was a very big thing,” she says.

Thunberg was at home with her father for a year. By the time she was ready to return to school (initially a specialist autism school, then grammar school), she had been diagnosed with Asperger’s, obsessive compulsive disorder and selective mutism. Thunberg says the diagnosis came as a relief. “When I felt the most sad, I didn’t know that I had autism. I just thought, I don’t want to be like this. The diagnosis was almost only positive for me. It helped me get the support I needed and made me understand why I was like this.”

She describes her autism as her superpower. I ask why. “A lot of people with autism have a special interest that they can sit and do for an eternity without getting bored. It’s a very useful thing sometimes. Autism can be something that holds you back, but if you get to the right circumstance, if you are around the right people, if you get the adaptations that you need and you feel you have a purpose, then it can be something you can use for good. And I think that I’m doing that now.” Thunberg has not just become the world’s best-known climate change activist, but also its best-known autism activist.

As she tells her story, I can’t help thinking of it as some kind of parable – the girl who was ignored, or worse, by her peers who becomes the face of a global movement for young people.

Her rhetoric is as beautiful as it is brutal. Again, she thanks her autism for the bluntness of her language. In a thunderous speech at the UN climate action summit in 2019, she told the great and the good: “This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be standing here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you? You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words.” It was an extraordinary sight – the schoolgirl rebuking the world’s leaders in the language of a furious parent. And the very people she was condemning gave her a standing ovation.

There was a frightening intensity to the speech. You couldn’t help wondering what it was taking out of Thunberg. Does she feel she has missed out on her teens? “No, definitely not. I don’t have an urge to party or drink alcohol or do whatever teens normally do. I enjoy much more doing this and being a nerd!” I ask what she does to relax. “I listen to music, and podcasts. But I do other things. I do embroidery like I’m doing now.” I hadn’t even noticed that she was stitching away while chatting. Can I see what she’s making? “No, because it’s a surprise for somebody,” she says.

Actually, she says, she’s got loads of hobbies. “I also do a lot of jigsaw puzzles. The biggest was 3,000 pieces, but that didn’t fit on the table so it was very complicated to finish. And I also spend time with my two dogs [a golden retriever and black labrador] and talk lots to friends. We are very silly. Maybe people have an idea that climate activists are serious, but that’s not the case.” She hiccups another giggle.

Do you really speak to your climate activist friends every day? “Yes, many times a day.” Do you have parties? “Since we are spread all over the world it’s hard to do that, but we have Zoom calls and movie nights online and lots of chats where we just spam each other.”

I didn’t have the courage to get friends. Now I have many, I really see the value of friendship. Apart from the climate, almost nothing else matters

Wow, I say, so, really, you’re just a bunch of jokers? A little crease spreads across her lips. I think she’s smiling. “Yes, we discuss very important topics like mousse and baby carrots, and bread. Sometimes we have very heated discussions.” About chocolate mousse? “No!” she says, appalled. “The animals.” Do you discuss whether moose are in danger of extinction? “No! I don’t know if I want to say this. We joke we are a moose cult.” Why? “It’s a very long story. And then we have these internal jokes, like the poem about the baby carrot.” At this point, I have to admit to her that she’s lost me. But she’s on a roll. “It’s Henrik Ibsen. You can Google it. We sometimes have discussions where we just write ‘babycarrot, babycarrot, babycarrot’.” (I do Google it later, and discover it’s a source of contention whether Ibsen actually wrote the 11-word poem Dear Babycarrot.)

That’s bonkers, I say. She nods, happily. I love seeing her like this. It feels a privilege to be let into her private world, however briefly. Lots of people would think you don’t have the time or the inclination to mess around, I say. “I think we mess around a bit too much. I may make us sound like idiots now, but that’s what we do.”

I drag her away from the world of moose and baby carrots to discuss Cop26. How optimistic is she that the conference can achieve anything? “I am not. Nothing has changed from previous years really. The leaders will say we’ll do this and we’ll do this, and we will put our forces together and achieve this, and then they will do nothing. Maybe some symbolic things and creative accounting and things that don’t really have a big impact. We can have as many Cops as we want, but nothing real will come out of it.”

What does she think about the fact that Boris Johnson says climate is his priority while at the same time supporting new coalmines in Cumbria and the Cambo oil fields off the coast of Shetland? “It’s hypocritical to talk about saving the climate as long as you’re still expanding fossil fuel infrastructure.” She says she can’t think of a single politician who has impressed her. “Nobody has surprised me.” What about, say, New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern, who said that the climate crisis was a matter of “life or death” at the June launch of her new roadmap to control global heating? She looks sceptical. “It’s funny that people believe Jacinda Ardern and people like that are climate leaders. That just tells you how little people know about the climate crisis.” Why? “Obviously the emissions haven’t fallen. It goes without saying that these people are not doing anything.” In April, it was revealed that New Zealand’s greenhouse-gas emissions had increased by 2% in 2019.

Little has been seen of Thunberg during the pandemic. In May a short film conceived by her examined how people’s land use, agricultural practices and exploitation of animals create the perfect conditions for diseases to spill over from animals to humans, making pandemics ever more likely. The Friday strikes became virtual as live activism was put on hold. The enforced break was necessary, her father says. She had done so much and travelled so far (twice crossing the Atlantic by boat in 2019 to attend conferences, and journeying through America and Canada to witness the impact of climate change) that she was exhausted. “The pandemic has been a complete tragedy for everyone, of course, but being stuck here in Sweden for a year and a half has been good for Greta,” Svante says. “She definitely needed a break after all the madness she’s been through.”

However, the last thing Thunberg herself wanted was a break – the climate wouldn’t wait for her and, anyway, she was on a high. After all those years of struggle, she had finally found her purpose.

It’s astonishing how many people see you as some kind of secular saint, I say. “No!” she says adamantly. She sounds shocked, almost angry at the suggestion. Do you find yourself getting bigheaded? “No, it’s very important not to. But I think it’s an exaggeration saying many people treat me as a saint. More people treat me like something very, very bad. There are people who laugh as soon as they hear my name.” Why? “Because they have already decided what they think of me and nothing they hear will change that point of view because it’s such a filter bubble. And they just hear fake stories about me, and people who mock me. So it’s two extremes.”

When people mock you, what are they mocking? “Oh, ‘The climate goblin is forcing you to stop eating meat’, which I have never said. They just do it to make fun of me and other climate activists.” Does that hurt you? “Noooooah,” she says sweetly. “I understand that everybody has their own sense of humour. Me, personally, it doesn’t hurt, but if it affects my family or other activists, then it’s a different thing.”

And has it affected your family? “Yes. If there are people standing outside your house filming you through the window and then trying to break in, of course that affects the family. And constantly having rumours spread about you that you’re manipulating your child, of course that affects you.” Again, she says that the rumours about herself don’t bother her. Such as? “According to some, I’m an evil, manipulative child who takes advantage of everyone I meet. Others say I’m a helpless child who has been exploited. Some say I’m a communist; some say I’m an extreme capitalist; some say I’m an agent for India, or Russia, or the US … ” She could go on. How is she an extreme capitalist? She shrugs. “I don’t know.”

Svante is not so quick to shrug it off, though. She has had to deal with more than rumours, he says. “There have been lots of death threats, and one man has been sentenced in court in Sweden. As a parent you’d be a fool not to worry about that.” Does it scare him? “Of course. There are a lot of crazy people out there. Now, though, her being 18, she’s an adult, she makes her own decisions; she can decide everything and she just wants to live like a normal person. Her being a public figure is not a place where you necessarily want to be.”

Thunberg is not alone in receiving threats. Climate activists are being targeted around the world. This month, the campaign group Global Witness revealed that more than 220 activists who work to protect the environment and land rights were murdered last year – a record number.

As well as her enemies, there are the Greta groupies to cope with. While the locals let her get on with her life in Stockholm, some international fans have been more intrusive, Svante says. “When we came back from North America, she couldn’t stay at home because people kept showing up. They travelled from various countries and came knocking on the door, and that was a bit of a problem.” It got so bad that he and Greta moved out of the family home into another apartment.

Just a few weeks ago, she left home permanently to live by herself. Could he imagine when Greta was struggling most that at 18 she would be living independently? “The main thing I’m concerned about is my children being well, and the fact that Greta is now living by herself, coping by herself, travelling by herself is amazing,” he says.

Thunberg is enjoying the new freedoms of adult life. Yesterday she went on a demo that had nothing to do with climate – a protest against the violence in Afghanistan. She thinks she may go to university next year, but nothing has been finalised. Career-wise she always tells Svante she’d love to do something that’s nothing to do with climate, because it would mean that the crisis has been averted. But they both know it’s a fantasy. In the meantime, she is back striking in the real world, on Fridays, alongside millions of others.

I sense that what she’s really looking forward to is spending quality time with her friends at Cop26, tearing a strip off the heads of state for failing the world’s young yet again, and chatting nonsense about moose cults and baby carrots.

I ask if she was friendly with any young people before she became an activist. “No,” she says baldly. Would you say until three years ago you didn’t have any friends? “I had friends, but I didn’t have friends my own age. I was a good friend with my teacher, and I had friends when I was younger. Then I didn’t. So it was a strange feeling to have always been the quiet person in the back that nobody really noticed, to becoming someone lots of people actually listen to.”

Hers is a remarkable story. Not just the fantastical stuff – the little girl who conquered the world. But the smaller, more personal story, the one she’d doubtless tell us doesn’t matter – the lost little girl who learned how to belong. This is the one that really moves me.

When she didn’t have friends, did she want them? “I think I did, but I didn’t have the courage to get friends,” she says. “Now, when I have got many friends, I really see the value of friendship. Apart from the climate, almost nothing else matters. In your life, fame and your career don’t matter at all when you compare them with friendship.”

Thunberg says she has met like-minded people – in every way. “In the Fridays for Future movement, so many people are like me. Many have autism, and they are very inclusive and welcoming.” She believes the reason that so many autistic people have become climate activists is because they cannot avert their gaze – they have a compulsion to tell the truth as they see it. “I know lots of people who have been depressed, and then they have joined the climate movement or Fridays for Future and have found a purpose in life and found friendship and a community that they are welcome in.” So the best thing that has come out of your activism has been friendship? “Yes,” she says. And now there is no mistaking her smile. “Definitely. I am very happy now.”

Makeup Jeanette Törnqvist

Hair Erika Svedjevik (both for Lundlund)

Post-production IWonderU Studios

Digital design Harry Fischer

• TED Speaker

Greta Thunberg

Why you should listen.

In August 2018, Greta Thunberg started a school strike for the climate outside the Swedish Parliament that has since spread all over the world and now involves over 100,000 schoolchildren. The movement is now called Fridays For Future. 

Thunberg has spoken at climate rallies in Stockholm, Helsinki, Brussels and London. In December 2018 she attended the United Nations COP24 in Katowice, Poland, where she addressed the Secretary-General and made a plenary speech that went viral and was shared many million times around the globe. In January 2019, she was invited to the World Economic Forum in Davos where her speeches again made a worldwide impact.

Thunberg tries to live a low-carbon life. Therefore she is vegan, and she doesn't fly. In 2019, TIME magazine named her  Person of the Year  as well as one of the world's  100 most influential people . 

Greta Thunberg’s TED talk

The disarming case to act right now on climate change

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Leslie Hook

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When I first catch sight of Greta Thunberg, it is eight in the morning, and a small crowd has already gathered. It is a Friday, her day of protest, and the 16-year-old is standing outside the rose-coloured parliament building, next to a beaten-up sign that says “School strike for climate” in Swedish.

The February sun has barely risen over Stockholm. Thunberg is slightly hard to spot, because she is so little — less than five feet tall. Her face peeks out between a big hat and a thick scarf. “Well, it’s warm today,” she says with a smile, when I ask how the protest is going. It is 5C and doesn’t feel very warm to me.

This is the 26th week of her school strike, which has taken place every Friday since school started last August — including vacations. During that time she has rocketed to a level of fame and influence that pretty much nobody, including herself, expected.

Over the past six months, she has become a superstar of the climate change movement. Her school strike, which started out with her sitting alone on a camping mat next to parliament, was swiftly highlighted by the media. Then came a Ted talk, speeches at rallies, and an invitation to address last December’s UN climate talks in Poland. Inspired by her example, the number of student strikers across Europe swelled into the thousands, then the tens of thousands — and all because of the bundled-up teenager in front of me with her hair in plaits.

For years climate change has been a big issue in search of a leader. Politicians, celebrities and naturalists have taken up the cause — think Al Gore, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jane Goodall. But no one has captured the spirit of what is happening to the Earth as much as this autistic teenager, with her simple message: you are stealing my future.

Her protest has struck a chord because it comes at such a bleak time for the planet. Global emissions of carbon dioxide hit a new high last year , highlighting the limits of decades of climate negotiations. Temperatures have been rising — the past five years were the hottest since modern records began. And a string of natural disasters have started to make climate change feel less of an abstract threat.

The goal of Thunberg’s strike is to bring Sweden in line with the 2016 Paris climate agreement, which pledges to limit global warming to well below 2C, compared with pre-industrial times. She will, she says, keep striking every day until that happens. “Why should I be studying for a future that soon will be no more, when no one is doing anything to save that future?” she asked in her Ted talk. It’s a message that has resonated across the world, echoing the spirit of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal resolution in Washington. On the day I visit, thousands of schoolchildren are striking across more than 200 cities in Europe.

Thunberg is famous for her blunt speaking. “We must change almost everything in our current societies,” she told businesspeople and politicians at Davos. “Adults keep saying: ‘We owe it to the young people to give them hope.’ But I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic.” As I watch her, it is hard to reconcile those searing words with the slight figure in front of me. Is she really the climate hero that so many make her out to be?

She speaks softly, often simply nodding when addressed. A few years ago she was diagnosed with Asperger’s, obsessive compulsive disorder and selective mutism, which means she only speaks when necessary.

Hötorget, Sergelgatan 29, Stockholm

1 Temple paneng SKr110

1 Temple bulgogi SKr110

Tap water Free

Total (inc tax) SKr220

I’ve arranged to have lunch with Thunberg a few hours later in a friend’s house. Her father, Svante, usually picks up food for her, so I walk over to meet him at a nearby vegan chain, Taku-Taku. His long brown hair, well past his shoulders, makes him easy to spot. The menu is an Asian-inspired hodgepodge featuring lots of fake meat. Mr Thunberg recommends the bulgogi, saying it is good if you like mushrooms. He orders the “paneng” curry with rice for his daughter.

There has been some controversy about whether Thunberg was put up to all of this by her parents, a charge that is often levelled at teenage activists. “At the start, obviously we were very reluctant for her to do this [the strike],” her father says as we walk through central Stockholm. Commentators have questioned why students needed to miss school rather than protesting at the weekend. Thunberg’s father stresses that she is the top of her class and makes up for the work that she misses.

She suffered from a severe depression when she was 11, he goes on to explain, and taking action on climate change helped her recovery. The family bought an electric car, stopped flying — a rule that effectively ended Thunberg’s opera-singer mother’s international career — and became mostly vegetarian. “It is like day and night, it is an incredible transformation,” he says, talking about how happy and energetic she is now.

Some activists and politicians have suggested Thunberg is not the ingénue she seems and is being used as a front for radical environmental groups. In Belgium, where the climate strike has been popular, one of the country’s environment ministers, Joke Schauvliege, claimed state intelligence had told her the striking students were a “set-up” by environmental groups. This was denied by state security, and the minister resigned earlier this month. In response to such accusations, Thunberg wrote on Facebook describing the activists and scientists who have been influential to her, emphasising she never takes money for speaking engagements.

“The timing was right,” her father says, when I ask why she rocketed to fame so swiftly. “Enough people were aware of the situation, and there was a frustration . . . Then she came along, and all of the sudden she carried the message through.”

Although Thunberg doesn’t have her own organisation, she had quickly been adopted as a figurehead for environmental and activist groups. “The network was there,” her father acknowledges. People showed up and wanted to help. There is still a slightly improvised quality to the Friday strikes, though — the main way to track them is by following her hashtag, #FridaysForFuture, on social media.

But being mobbed by her acolytes seems to be taking a toll. “It’s like a seven-hour-long press conference,” she sighs, after we extricate her from her admirers. We wind through the twisting streets of the Old Town to their friend’s apartment. Sunlight streams through the windows into a cosy kitchen, where we sit at a long wooden table.

Thunberg, who became a vegan last year, eyes the rice on her plate, which is topped with a dollop of red curry containing peas and sweet potatoes. I dig into my own mystery bowl, which is topped with fresh spinach, beets and shredded carrots, wondering what lies underneath. As Thunberg nibbles in silence, I ask how the school strike really began.

She traces the starting point to winning a writing contest in a Swedish newspaper last year, for an essay about why we should act now on climate change. Some environmentalists contacted her, and she joined a group that would discuss protest ideas, such as a school strike in playgrounds or classrooms. Thunberg wanted to strike from school altogether. “I tried to make the others in the group join me . . . but no one was really interested. So then I decided I was going to do it alone. And even if no one was joining me, I was going to do it.”

But the seeds of the protest were planted earlier still, when her teachers showed environmental films at school, about ocean plastic or the plight of polar bears. She spears small amounts of rice with her fork. “At first when I heard about climate change, I was a climate denier,” she recalls. “I didn’t think it was happening. Because if there really was an existential crisis like that, that would threaten our civilisation, we wouldn’t be focusing on anything else. That would be our first priority. So I didn’t understand how that added up.”

She says her despair at the state of the planet contributed to the deep depression she experienced when she was 11. “I was so sad because the world was so wrong, everything was so wrong, and then I thought there is no point in living . . . I became depressed, I stopped eating, and I stopped talking, and I stopped going to school.” She lost 10 kilos, and her growth was stunted as a result. Realising that she could do something about climate change was part of what helped her recover, she explains.

As we talk I realise that, the harder the question, the more she seems to open up. She is not one for chit-chat. I ask about her Asperger’s diagnosis, a label she proudly displays on her Twitter handle. She has previously said that Asperger’s is “a gift” — why is that?

“If I would have been normal like everyone else, I could just continue like everyone else,” she begins. “And get stuck in the social game, and just continue like before. But since I was different, I see the world from a different perspective, I see things very black and white.”

Unlike most environmental speakers, Thunberg doesn’t believe in offering cheery prescriptions for change. The world she sees is a dark one, and she wants other people to feel the same way.

“I often talk to people who say, ‘No, we have to be hopeful and to inspire each other, and we can’t tell [people] too many negative things’ . . . But, no — we have to tell it like it is. Because if there are no positive things to tell, then what should we do, should we spread false hope?” her voice takes on a more determined edge. “We can’t do that, we have to tell the truth.”

For her that includes lambasting her audiences — such as when she told the UN climate conference that everything they had done for the past three decades had been a failure. She told Davos grandees they were to blame for emissions. “Some people, some companies, some decision makers in particular know exactly what priceless values they have been sacrificing to continue making unimaginable amounts of money, and I think many of you here today belong to that group of people,” she said.

I ask what reaction she faces when she says things such as that. “They are surprisingly supportive,” she says. “They take in what I say. Or, when I say these things, people sort of laugh nervously and they don’t know how to react, and that is pretty fun,” she grins.

She says her dad often asks her to tone down her speeches, which she writes herself. “He becomes scared when he reads it, he is like, you shouldn’t say this, it is too provocative,” she says proudly. As we near the end of the meal, it becomes clear the gloomy images in her speeches are if anything rather gentler than the analogies in her own head.

“If you have a child that is standing in the middle of the road, and cars are coming at full speed, you don’t look away because it is too hard to see, you run out and get that child away from there.” Too much green pep talk has become part of the problem, she adds.

When it comes to the climate science, her arguments are solid. She often cites the recent report from scientists convened by the UN, who found that the world is fewer than 11 years away from irreversible climate change impacts. The world needs to cut carbon dioxide emissions by 50 per cent in that period, she adds, pointing to their findings. As our conversation unfolds she displays a geek’s total mastery of her subject.

But the black-and-white logic she employs can gloss things over. The policy hurdle no one has really solved is how, exactly, to cut emissions that quickly, and who will pay for it all. With today’s technology, designing a world with 50 per cent less carbon emissions will be very costly. Pulling the “emergency brake”, as Thunberg advocates, is easier said than done.

I ask why she thinks the world has been so slow to act. If only everybody knew what she knew, she says, then they would do the right thing.

“People are unaware of what is going on. When I talk to people, they know the basics, they know the planet is warming because of greenhouse gases . . . but they don’t know the actual consequence of that.” Her plan is to keep stirring people up to put pressure on their politicians.

If you have a child standing in the middle of the road, and cars are coming at full speed, you don’t look away

“People tell me that they are so hopeful when they see me, and other children ‘school-striking’, and they say, ‘Oh the children are going to save us,’” she says. “But no, we aren’t. We are too young to be able to do that. We don’t have time to wait for us to grow up and fix this in the future.” Her placid face doesn’t alter its expression, but there is a quiet anger in her words. “The people who are in power now need to do this now.”

Just a few spoonfuls of rice remain on her plate. “I’m full but I don’t want to waste food,” she says, gazing down at it. My bowl of mushrooms and quinoa was delicious, but I haven’t been able to finish it either.

Thunberg is considering taking a sabbatical from school next year to focus on climate issues. The past few months have been “quite exhausting”, she says. “I don’t really like being in the centre of attention. I’m not used to that. All my life I have been like the invisible girl at the back that no one sees or listens to. ”

Her phone rings — her father is calling. As she talks to him, I wonder what it says about the climate change movement that it’s taken this shy 16-year-old to become its voice. Perhaps the debate had become so tired and self-referential that an outsider was needed.

Her father soon arrives along with their black labrador, Roxy. Thunberg lights up when she sees the dog — who also solves the problem of what to do with the left-over food.

They invite me to come back to the protest at 2pm, when a choir and some grade-school children will be arriving. The next time I see Thunberg she is surrounded by her throng. Some supporters have started a drum circle on the other side of the street. Students are handing out tulips. A journalist clips a mic to her scarf. She just nods and smiles, like a tiny queen.

Leslie Hook is the FT’s environment and clean energy correspondent

Illustration by Ciaran Murphy

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International Edition

Greta Thunberg: Saving the Climate Means Changing How We Live

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“The American way of life is not up for negotiation. Period.”

These are the words of U.S. President George H. W. Bush ahead of the 1992 United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. In retrospect, it turns out he was speaking on behalf of the entire Global North. And this remains our position to this very day. The solution to this crisis is not exactly rocket science. What we have to do is to halt the emission of greenhouse gasses , which, in theory, is a pretty easy thing to do—or at least it was, before we let the problem spiral out of control. It is solving the climate crisis while maximizing economic growth that is the hard part. So hard as to be near impossible.

A stable climate and a well-functioning biosphere are basic conditions for life on earth as we know it. That requires an atmosphere that does not contain too many greenhouse gasses. The carbon dioxide safety level for such climate stability is often considered to be around 350 parts per million (ppm)—a level we passed in around 1987. In February 2022, we surpassed 421 ppm. At current emission levels, our remaining carbon budgets for a decent chance of staying below 1.5°C (and minimizing the risk of setting off irreversible chain reactions beyond human control) will be gone before the end of this decade. There are no effective policies in place. And there is no silver bullet or magic technological solution in sight.

Read More: Investors Are Betting Big on Carbon Removal Technology. The Reality Is More Complicated

Since the President spoke those words defending how Americans live, our annual global CO2 emissions have gone up by more than 60%, turning what was then a ‘big challenge’ into an existential emergency. We have developed impressive creative accounting, loopholes, outsourcing, and greenwashing PR narratives that make it seem as if real action is being taken when in fact it is not. Continued economic growth, on the other hand, has been hugely successful—at least for a small number of people who boast a carbon footprint the size of entire villages. Nevertheless, economic growth since the 1992 Earth Summit has at least brought us one major advantage—it has proved beyond all reasonable doubt that our ambition was never about saving the climate, it was all about saving our way of life. And it still is.

More from TIME

Until recently, you could argue that it was possible to save the climate without having to change our behavior. But that is no longer possible. The scientific evidence is crystal clear: our leaders have left it too late for us to avoid major lifestyle and systemic changes. There simply are not enough resources left. If we are to have a chance of minimizing further irreparable damage, we now have to choose: either we safeguard living conditions for all future generations, or we let a few very fortunate people maintain their constant, destructive search to maximize immediate profits. If we choose the first option and decide to go on as a civilization, then we must start to prioritize. In the years, decades, and centuries to come we will no doubt need many transformations that will have to stretch across our whole societies. And since our resources are limited, we must start getting our priorities straight.

Read More: From Private Jets to Superyachts, Here’s the Climate Impact of the Rich and Famous

Beyond the very basics, our top priority must be to distribute our remaining carbon budgets in a fair and holistic way across the world, as well as to repay our enormous historical debts. That means those who are most responsible for this crisis must immediately and drastically reduce their emissions. We understand that the world is very complicated and there are countless important variables. That is exactly why we have to start as soon as possible. This will require a whole new way of thinking for our societies, at least in the affluent parts of the world.

People keep asking us climate activists what we should do to save the climate. But maybe the question itself is wrong. Maybe, instead, we should start asking what we should stop doing. Sometimes you hear people say that we already have all the solutions to the climate crisis and all we need to do is to implement them. But this is only true if we consider not doing something to be a valid solution. If we choose to accept that idea, then we will still be able to get out of this mess.

There is, in reality, absolutely no reason to believe that the necessary changes will make us less happy or less satisfied. If we manage to do this right, then our lives will be given more meaning than selfish, shallow over-consumption can ever give us. Instead, we can make time and space for community, solidarity, and love—the true tenets of a good life.

From The Climate Book by Greta Thunberg, to be published on Feb. 14, 2023 by Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2023 by Greta Thunberg.

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Greta Thunberg facts!

Discover how a young eco-activist from sweden inspired a global movement….

Meet the teenager whose one-person protest sparked a worldwide climate revolution! Discover more about this young eco-hero in our top ten Greta Thunberg facts…

Who is Greta Thunberg?

1) Greta Thunberg is an environmental activist. She was born in Stockholm, Sweden, in 2003. When she was eight, she started learning about climate change. The more she learned, the more baffled she became as to why so little was being done about it.

2) At the age of 11, Greta became so sad about climate change that she temporarily stopped speaking!

3) Greta has Asperger syndrome, a condition that affects how people socialise. But Greta views her condition as a positive, calling it her “superpower”! She says it helps her see the world in black and white, and that there are “no grey areas when it comes to climate change.”

4) In August 2018, Greta decided to take action. Instead of going to school, she made a large sign that read ‘ SCHOOL STRIKE FOR CLIMATE ’, and calmly sat down outside the Swedish parliament. Her aim? To make politicians take notice and act to stop global warming. 

5) Greta was inspired by teenage activists in Florida, USA, who were protesting to end gun violence. Read more about the School Strike for Climate protests that Greta inspired!

6) Greta’s strike was picked up by the Swedish media, and the word started to spread. Soon enough, tens of thousands of students from around the world joined her #FridaysforFuture strikes – skipping school on Fridays to protest against climate change.

7) In March 2019, climate campaigners across the world, and inspired by Greta, came together to co-ordinate the first Global Strike for Climate. It was huge – over 1.6 million people from 125 countries took part! There are further global strikes planned for September this year.

8) Since her strike began, Greta’s life has become a whirlwind! She’s given rousing speeches to politicians, to the EU parliament, the UK parliament, to protesters and more. She’s appeared in documentaries and had loads of books and articles written about her. She’s even been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize! 

9) In August 2019, Greta travelled on a wind and solar-powered boat from Plymouth, UK, to New York, USA – the journey took 15 days! Greta will be at the United Nations Climate Action Summit in New York, where she’ll demand action from world leaders.

10) Greta has named Rosa Parks , the civil rights activist, as one of her greatest inspirations. In the 1950s, Rosa sparked a civil rights movement that improved the lives and treatment of millions of African Americans.

What do you think of our Greta Thunberg facts? Let us know by leaving a comment, below!

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WELL DONE, YOUR COMMENT HAS BEEN ADDED!

I think we should take action and do our part to save our world. ✊

i feel like this is something that the world needs to see

this is so cool of what she did!

Let's take action!

that was a very interesting article

thanks this helped me with my homework

were learning about greta!

lets take action

greta is a big caring girl with a big heart

thos ws helpfull

Cool I can not wait for an other story

great stuff

Cool beans such a inspiration! Greta is a true notable!

she is so cool!!

I’m making signs and trying too help you too help save the world.

she Is a really good person because she wants to save the planet.

So amazing what kids and girls can do!

So amazing what kidz can do especially grlz

wow thanks Greta your helping the world with a simple sign

lets take acton now while we can

i hope people realise that climate change isnt something u can forget

i like greta thunberg

lets help greta Thunberg save the ocean

this site is amazing WOW!!!!

Nice to learn something New Everyday.

Can't wait!

Greta has inspired me to take action!

Wow I didn't realise

Cool website, nice topic to talk about.

We have to stop global warming !!!

Save the enviroment!

lets take action!

Thanks for the great info.

that is interesting

[…] Greta Thunberg facts! […]

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Greta Thunberg: A Complete Biography of the Climate Change Activist Kindle Edition

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• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0CTTMKBJ5
• Publication date ‏ : ‎ February 1, 2024
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Apr 22, 2024 Filiberto Hargett

Greta Thunberg- Biography, Boyfriend, Net Worth, Height, Career

Swedish environmental campaigner greta thunberg. she is well recognized for her numerous efforts and rallies against climate change. she is a young woman who has gained political and public recognition for being open and honest with public figures and leaders in the political arena..

Thunberg has drawn a lot of attention for her numerous effective attempts to protect the environment and slow down climate change.

Greta started protesting and calling for the world to take immediate action to combat climate change when she was 15 years old. She began her demonstration in front of Sweden’s Parliament and afterward went to other important gatherings and venues to publicize her protest and causes.

She started by getting youngsters from different groups to support Greta’s efforts by holding their hands. Before recognizing the people of the globe, Greta began by making her parents eat veg food, cycle, and minimize their use of emissions like carbon dioxide.

What is the Net Worth of Greta Thunberg? Salary, Earnings

Greta Thunberg’s Net Worth Well-known campaigners routinely donate significant quantities of money to numerous international organizations working to combat climate change. She is highly recognized for giving honest statements about the environment whenever she wins numerous prizes and medals.

She never spends money on herself and instead contributes it to charitable causes like fighting climate change. When Greta won the Gulbenkian Prize for Humanity in 2020, she announced that she would donate the entire €1 million prize money through her numerous charitable endeavors and projects to assist people all over the world who were impacted by various climate problems.

Greta Thunberg’s net worth is only thought to be $1 million as of November 2022, despite her charitable donations.

Where was Greta Thunberg born? Ethnicity, Nationality, Family, Education

I was made on January 3, 2003. Greta Thunberg was born into a Swedish family in Stockholm, Sweden. Her full name is Greta Tintin Eleonora Emman Thunberg. She hails from a famous acting and acting-acting family in Hollywood. When she first learned about climate change and its detrimental effects, she was eight years old.

After learning about climate change, Greta’s life was completely altered because, at the age of 11, she developed depression due to her inability to stop thinking about it. She was depressed for over three to four years before she started cutting back on her eating and speaking.

She received a diagnosis of Asperger syndrome, a form of OCD, throughout these four years. ( obsessive-compulsive disorder).

Greta never saw her OCD issue as a disease, but rather as a superior trait, she possessed over others. Miss. Greta is working as an activist while completing her degree. She attended Franska Skolan, a private school in Stockholm, from 2010 to 2018. Later, she was accepted into Sodertalje’s Kringaskolan school.

Her grandfather, mother, and father are all string musicians. Svante Thunberg, her father, is an accomplished actor with a long filmography. Malena Emman, Greta’s mother, is a well-known opera and jazz performer who has been on albums for firms like Sony.

The first person to formally acclaim Greta as Miss was her mother. 2015 will see her raising awareness of Asperger syndrome among other parents’ children. Wikipedia also has a biography of Malena Emman. Greta’s grandfather, Mr. Fritz Olof Thunberg, was a Swedish voice actor and director.

Greta accomplished what no other child could have imagined at the age of 15. He was well-known for lending his voice to several cartoon characters, but he passed away in 2020. Greta has two further siblings, but nothing is known about them at this time.

Greta Thunberg, who is 18 years old, has a boyfriend, relationship, and a husband. She is single. Greta Thunberg spends little time in romantic relationships because she is always presenting her advocacy work at numerous international levels.

She is concerned about defending the earth against various climatic effects. Numerous prizes have been given to her in recognition of her environmental conservation initiatives.

Quick Facts

How did greta thunberg start her professional career.

She started the protest in August 2018 by holding the signed School Climate Strike in her hands, and as a result, she gained attention as a climate activist on a global scale. She published an essay about climate change in a Swedish publication that same year, 2018.

After the essay was published in the newspaper, Greta was named the contest’s winner, and Bo Thorén later acknowledged her from Fossil Free Dalsland, an organization noted for its efforts on climate change.

Also meeting with them, Thunberg concluded that schoolchildren should strike to protest climate change. Greta did everything she could to convince classmates to join her in the strike, but she was unsuccessful and went on it alone.

Greta also held daily protests in front of the structure, urging a decrease in carbon emissions in the wake of the catastrophe.

Later, Thunberg started sharing updates on her protest on Twitter, Instagram, and other social media sites. One day after publishing on her social media, she got the hands of another activist. Famous individuals from around the world who supported Thunberg tweeted about her protest. Popular social media platforms like their various social media outlets supported Greta.

After giving numerous well-known speeches in October 2018, Thunberg’s protest expanded across the nation. The march continued after that, and Thunberg visited other nations to spread awareness of climate change.

In August 2019 Greta Thunberg crossed the Atlantic Ocean on a boat to spread awareness about lowering carbon dioxide emissions.

She was present when it was announced that five countries had been accused of failing to reduce their emissions by September 2019.

Additionally, she received honors, and her protest was broadcast throughout Canada. Throughout her career as an activist, Greta has won a great deal of recognition, including the following and many others.

Also Read: Wife, Girlfriend, And Family Of Adam G. Sevani

Theodore Miller Edison

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When is Earth Day 2024? How the day raises awareness about climate change, our environment

Earth day started over 50 years ago, on april 22, 1970, and the celebrations are still going strong..

Earth Day is today. But what does the day even mean? Here's what you need to know about the annual commemoration and how to celebrate our planet while fighting climate change .

"For me, every day is Earth Day," Leila Yassine, Rainforest Alliance's global advocacy engagement manager, told USA TODAY. "But I think it's really important to have this Earth Day as a yearly wake-up call for everyone."

She goes on to say that the day itself brings attention to organizations that are working to bring attention to climate change and what folks can do to help the Earth recover.

Earth Day 2024: In honor of Earth Day, today's Google Doodle takes us on a trip around the world

When is Earth Day?

Earth Day falls on April 22 every year. This year, however, it falls on a Monday and shares the date with the start of the Jewish holiday, Passover.

The day has been celebrated for over 50 years, but isn't federally recognized, as previously reported by USA TODAY .

Why do we celebrate Earth Day?

The first Earth Day was celebrated in 1970 when 20 million people went to inaugural events at schools, universities and other public areas around the country, according to the Library of Congress's website .

Senator Gaylord Nelson advocated for Earth Day and called on "students to fight for environmental causes and oppose environmental degradation with the same energy that they displayed in opposing the Vietnam War," states the library.

Then, the library adds, in July of 1970, the Environmental Protection Agency was created after the public demanded cleaner water, air and land as more disasters caused by climate change and pollution impacted the country.

How can we celebrate Earth Day 2024?

Yassine said her favorite way to celebrate Earth Day is by taking a walk through nature.

"It just reminds us how the earth is beautiful and how nature is powerful," said Yassine. "So I think for me this is a way of celebrating Earth Day."

But, she adds that it isn't the only way to celebrate Earth Day, and there are simple things folks can do, too.

She said people can do something as small as going to the grocery store and buying sustainable produce.

Since Earth Day falls on a Monday, it can also be celebrated by participating in Meatless Monday. The movement, according to its website, was started in 2003 by Sid Lerner, with the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future. It aimed to reduce the amount of meat in one's diet to improve health and the health of the planet.

According to a study published by the National Library of Medicine , a more plant-based diet would not only improve environmental health, but human health too.

But, if that's not your cup of tea, there's always the option to go to a local park, beach clean-up or attend an Earth Day event in your area.

"Everyday actions count," said Yassine. "Fighting climate change doesn't always require that we have ground-breaking innovation or technology."

Folks can also research news regarding climate change and the work that needs to be done. But, Yassine says it's important to look at positive news regarding the situation, too.

Have a positive outlook on Earth Day 2024

According to Yassine, sharing positive news about the climate crisis and avoiding doom-scrolling on social media can encourage others to tackle the issue and keep folks optimistic about the future of the climate crisis.

No matter how one chooses to celebrate Earth Day or fight against climate change, Yassine said it's important to stay positive about the future.

"Share ideas and this will really cultivate collective optimism," she said. "It's like you have little seeds and then you're feeding it. You're feeding it until gives you this beautiful tree of hope."

Julia is a trending reporter for USA TODAY. She has covered various topics, from local businesses and government in her hometown, Miami, to tech and pop culture.   You can follow her on  X, formerly known as Twitter ,  Instagram  and  TikTok : @juliamariegz

Greta Thunberg Charged For Ignoring Police Orders Over Climate Protests

"The court date has been set for May 8," a court clerk told AFP on Tuesday.

She has been charged with two counts of civil disobedience (File)

Swedish prosecutors have charged climate campaigner Greta Thunberg with civil disobedience for ignoring police orders to leave two climate demonstrations blocking Sweden's parliament in March, court documents showed.

Thunberg, 21, and other activists blocked the main entrance to Sweden's parliament in a protest that began on March 11 and was repeated over several days.

Politicians were still able to enter parliament through side entrances.

Thunberg was physically removed by police on March 12 and 14 after refusing to obey their orders to leave the scene.

She has been charged with two counts of civil disobedience, and has denied the charges, according to court documents seen by AFP.

In February, a London court threw out a public order case against Thunberg and four other protesters, ruling that police at an environmental protest in October had attempted to impose "unlawful" conditions before officers arrested dozens of demonstrators.

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Thunberg has twice been fined by Swedish courts, in July and October 2023, for civil disobedience at climate protests.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

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