Whitney Houston once beautifully sang (and a toddler-aged me once—more endearingly than beautifully—squeaked out for the cassette recorder), “I believe the children are our future./ Teach them well and let them lead the way.” After seeing determined high schoolers lead the charge for gun control the past year and a half, the world now marvels at another student-led groundswell, this time in support of taking action against climate change.
If you weren't already familiar with Greta Thunberg and #FridaysForFuture or #ClimateStrike before last Friday, September 20th, you probably are now. And in case you still aren’t, here’s your crash course from fridaysforfuture.org:
#FridaysForFuture is a movement that began in August 2018, after 15 years old Greta Thunberg sat in front of the Swedish parliament every schoolday for three weeks, to protest against the lack of action on the climate crisis. She posted what she was doing on Instagram and Twitter and it soon went viral.
On the 8th of September, Greta decided to continue striking every Friday until the Swedish policies provided a safe pathway well under 2-degree C, i.e. in line with the Paris agreement.
The hashtags #FridaysForFuture and #Climatestrike spread and many students and adults began to protest outside of their parliaments and local city halls all over the world. This has also inspired the Belgium Thursday school strikes.
This particular Friday was a special one, kicking off the Global Week For Future, also known as the Global Climate Strike. Running from September 20th through the 27th in order to coincide with the United Nations Climate Summit on the 23rd, strikers, many of them students skipping school, hope to convince all involved parties, especially governments, to take swifter and more meaningful action on climate change.
How did things escalate so quickly from a single 15 year old sitting on a sidewalk to a mass movement numbering in the millions? It’s a long story, but a good place to start is Emily Bloch’s December 2018 article in Teen Vogue, “15-Year-Old Activist Greta Thunberg Schooled World Leaders on Climate Change at a United Nations Summit.”
The movement’s founder, the steadfast Greta Thunberg (who, incidentally, says she was inspired by the March For Our Lives movement created in the wake of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High mass shooting), has endured a great deal of criticism and taunting, much of it sexist in nature. I recommend reading Marin Gelin’s excellent article “The Misogyny of Climate Deniers” in The New Republic, which lays out how “the idea that white men would lead the attacks on Greta Thunberg is consistent with a growing body of research linking gender reactionaries to climate-denialism.” The article cautions:
As conservative male mockery of Thunberg and others shows, climate politics has quickly become the next big battle in the culture war—on a global scale.
As conservative parties become increasingly tied to nationalism, and misogynist rhetoric dominates the far-right, Hultman and his fellow researchers at Chalmers University worry that the ties between climate skeptics and misogyny will strengthen. What was once a practical problem, with general agreement on the facts, has become a matter of identity.
And we all know what an uphill battle challenging entrenched identities can be . . .
Sadly, attacks against the teenaged activist have also been centered on her being neuroatypical. She herself has said that her Asperger’s syndrome is "not a 'gift'" but "CAN be a superpower," but while such a mature and self-accepting outlook is to be commended, this manner of so-called criticism also “create[s] collateral damage for others.” For more on how “her detractors increasingly rely on ad hominem attacks to blunt her influence” and on how that fact might influence individuals with autism and others, check out Scientific American’s August 9th article “Climate Deniers Launch Personal Attacks On Teen Activist.”
Nevertheless, Ms Thunberg has persisted. And Friday’s gigantic global show of support (it’s already been named the largest climate march in history, with as many as 4 million participating) may well have given her reason to hope.
So to round out this diary, here is a sampling of feel-good internet content on the topic of Greta Thunberg and the climate strikes.