The Column with Canon Rev Dr Rod Garner We ignore the voices of the next generation at our peril
AYEAR ago we had never heard of her. Now she is known by millions as the teenage climate activist, Greta Thunberg, who has set sail on a zero-carbon journey across the Atlantic to attend two important environmental conferences in the USA.
She will be facing a potentially hazardous journey in a slender craft and, assuming a safe crossing, she can expect hoorays and boos when she finally makes dry land.
This will not deter her.
She is determined to be heard, she has the ear of influential people and the future of the earth is her consuming passion.
At an age when teenagers are often preoccupied with acne, heartache and the opposite sex, she has seen the future.
It is not pretty and for the sake of those who will one day inherit the earth she is prepared to suffer.
I guess many find her disconcerting and would like her to shut up. What does youth know about such complex things?
And critics suspect her science, think she is naïve and attention-seeking and, frankly, a bit solitary and
odd. Few of us want to relinquish or even moderate the practices she insists we must now give up if the planet is to remain sustainable.
If we keep telling ourselves she’s weird and wrong and will grow out of it, we can put the future on hold and let the next generation do the worrying.
What has the future ever done for us?
I’m beginning to think that she is in her own inimitable way a small prophetic voice.
I can be sceptical about some of her more radical claims but she has placed her finger on something fundamental in our midst that is not going away.
Unless we change some of our habits – flying, driving, eating and energy sources to name the obvious – in a relatively short period of time we face the prospect of an uninhabitable earth.
She seems to see this with a frighteningly clear eye as the rest of us remain preoccupied with other issues that are deemed more pressing and important or simply unconvinced that climate change is as serious as she insists.
She is not silly.
Her writing on the subject is being read by thousands.
I suspect that many more are coming to realise that from a quite unexpected source we are receiving a wake-up call that should not be ignored.
It has about it the ring of truth.
Sometimes it is the children and the young who lead the way: certainly that’s a truth contained in the life and teaching of Jesus.
Conversely, too often, unremarkable or selfish adults close their ears to what they find inconvenient.
The Bible has plenty to say about people who turned their backs on the prophets who had come to warn them.
Again, it’s not pretty.
They paid a price for their hardness of heart or indifference and had to suffer before they found favour with the creator and the creation again.
Prophets come among us and are raised up for a purpose: to speak a necessary word and save us from selfseeking or foolishness. Some die with broken hearts, unheeded or unheard. Others change the destiny of nations.
I cannot imagine what the world will have made of Greta Thunberg a generation or so from now.
But there are compelling reasons to consider her demands and what they require of us – primarily to ensure that there will still be a world worth living in when history records its verdict on the antics of a teenager who was not at ease with crowds yet spoke with a quiet but mesmerising authority.