Who created Greta the Great?
The family behind the teen phenomenon
As anybody who has followed his political career will know, it takes a lot for Michael Gove to feel shame. On Tuesday, though, after hearing the arguments of 16-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, the Environment Secretary was unusually contrite.
“As I listened to you I felt great admiration but also a sense of responsibility and guilt... I recognise we have not done nearly enough to deal with the problem of climate change,” he said. Thunberg – her hair in pigtails and a metal water bottle at her side – looked on. “Suddenly, thanks to the leadership of Greta and others, it has become inescapable that we have to act.”
Earlier in the day, Thunberg had received a standing ovation from the 40 MPS and more than 100 guests she addressed inside Parliament. John Bercow had introduced her as an “enthusiastic and dedicated environmental campaigner” when she appeared in the Commons.
Not for the first time, her name trended on Twitter. Journalists queued to interview her. In Hyde Park, where she spoke earlier in the week, Extinction Rebellion protesters spoke of her as a nascent church would its patron saint. And through it all, the girl in the middle remained cool, calm, and remarkably composed. It was another extraordinary day in the life of an increasingly extraordinary teenager.
Until last summer, the name Greta Thunberg was relatively unknown outside her family and friends. The eldest of two girls, she is the daughter of actor Svante Thunberg and Malena Ernman, a well-known opera singer who came 21st in the 2009 Eurovision Song Contest. (She is also distantly related to Svante Arrhenius, the first scientist to predict that carbon emissions would lead to warming.)
Growing up with the family’s two labradors, near the capital, Thunberg was academically sound but quiet, and became interested in climate change when she was just nine.
“[Teachers] were always talking about how we should turn off lights, save water, not throw out food. I asked why and they explained about climate change,” she said last year. “And I thought this was very strange. If humans could really change the climate, everyone would be talking about it and people wouldn’t be talking about anything else. But this wasn’t happening.”
Images of melting ice and polar bears in peril stuck in Thunberg’s mind. Aged 11, she was uninterested in mobile phones or the trends other children followed, and her sadness turned to a crippling depression; stopping her from going to school, eating and – aside from family and one particular teacher at school – speaking.
Around the same time, she and her younger sister, Beata, were diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, ADHD and other conditions. Thunberg says that her autism has helped her to focus on doing something about the subject so close to her heart.
“[Autism] makes me different, and being different is a gift, I would say. It also makes me see things from outside the box,” she told the BBC this week. “I don’t easily fall for lies, I can see through things.”
Having a “special interest” she says, is “very common for people on the autism spectrum”, and it means she can concentrate on “the same thing for hours”. And so she researched climate science, pressuring her family to change their ways. She stopped them eating meat, turned them vegan, and, in 2016, convinced her mother to stop flying. That victory was a turning point: it brought interest from the media, and led to Thunberg’s parents co-authoring a book, Scenes From The
Heart, about how their children’s mental health diagnoses made them more aware of the planet’s health.
By last summer, Thunberg’s focus had outgrown the home. Frustrated by what she saw as weak-to-non-existent policies on climate change from the Swedish government, she resolved to skip school and sit alone, every Friday, in front of the country’s parliament. “I am doing this because you adults are s------- on my future,” said leaflets she handed out.
Students in other countries followed, including the UK, and soon tens of thousands had joined the strike. Thunberg was invited to the UN climate conference and the World Economic Forum in Davos. At the latter, she told business leaders that their financial success had “come with an unthinkable price tag” for the planet.
It is Thunberg’s refusal to defer to the authority of anybody she speaks to that has made her so effective. She is more than happy to tell people “Sweden is not a green paradise” and explain its crimes against the ozone layer. On Tuesday she told British MPS: “You lied to us. You gave us false hope. You told us that the future was something to look forward to. And the saddest thing is that most children are not even aware of the fate that awaits us. We will not understand it until it’s too late.”
She has met Pope Francis and Jean-claude Juncker, earned social media endorsements from Barack Obama and Leonardo Dicaprio. Like the Parkland shooting survivors now fighting for gun control, 18-year-old US transgender activist Jazz Jennings and Malala Yousafzai, Thunberg is proof that the fearlessness of youth can be more effective than decades of political experience.
There has, of course, been backlash. Not everybody is keen to have a teenager – one compared to Joan of Arc and Pippi Longstocking, no less – tell them what to do, and not everybody thinks she is picking on the right foes (arguing that China, the US and other powers’ emissions would be better challenged).
There have been suggestions that having famous parents means Thunberg is the product of a wellorchestrated PR campaign. It is true that she started her school strike around the time their book was published. It’s also true that she was forced to distance herself from We Don’t Have Time, a climate change start-up run by a PR consultant, after it had used Thunberg’s image to gain funds. But there is no suggestion she is anything other than independent. Others have picked on her delivery: she speaks fluently in a second language, with a wider vocabulary than most have in their first, and articulates complex political issues with simplicity.
Yesterday, a surely exhausted Thunberg left London and returned home – by train. It has been reported that her parents and teachers would like her to stop protesting and go back to school, but there is the possibility of a trip to the UN climate summit in New York in September. If invited, she plans to get there on a container ship.
“All my life I’ve been invisible, the invisible girl in the back who doesn’t say anything,” she said last year. No longer: “From one day to another, people listen to me.” For all our sakes, let’s hope that’s true.
‘[Autism] makes me different, and being different is a gift, I would say’