Fearless Thunberg proves she’s worthy of Time honor

President of the United States and inspired 4 million people to join the global climate strike on September 20, 2019, in what was the largest climate demonstration in human history. Her image has been celebrated in murals and Halloween costumes, and her name has been attached to everything from bike shares to beetles. Margaret Atwood compared her to Joan of Arc. After noticing a hundredfold increase in its usage, lexicographers at Collins Dictionary named Thunberg’s pioneering idea, climate strike, the word of the year.”

As the magazine points out, Thunberg’s mission is a galactic undertaking.

“The politics of climate action are as entrenched and complex as the phenomenon itself, and Thunberg has no magic solution,” Time writes. “But she has succeeded in creating a global attitudinal shift, transforming millions of vague, middle-of-the-night anxieties into a worldwide movement calling for urgent change. She has offered a moral clarion call to those who are willing to act, and hurled shame on those who are not. She has persuaded leaders, from mayors to Presidents, to make commitments where they had previously fumbled: after she spoke to Parliament and demonstrated with the British environmental group Extinction Rebellion, the U.K. passed a law requiring that the country eliminate its carbon footprint. She has focused the world’s attention on environmental injustices that young indigenous activists have been protesting for years. Because of her, hundreds of thousands of teenage ‘Gretas,’ from Lebanon to Liberia, have skipped school to lead their peers in climate strikes around the world.”

I can’t think of a better example of anger management, to be honest. What better way to channel the dread and fury and sorrow and panic you feel when you begin to grasp the scope of a catastrophe, than to get to work chipping away at it?

Of course people who don’t want your solutions, who don’t like what you’re proposing, who stand to lose — profits, power, face — if things go your way would prefer you chill. Watch a good old fashioned movie. Ignore the problems looming outside your window, or, at the very least, numb yourself to them.

Thunberg has shown no appetite for such complacency.

She’s the youngest person ever named Time’s Person of the Year, a 92year-old feature that annually designates a powerful individual who the magazine believes most significantly shaped the world that year.

“Meaningful change rarely happens without the galvanizing force of influential individuals,” Time’s editor in chief Edward Felsenthal wrote, “and in 2019, the earth’s existential crisis found one in Greta Thunberg.”

She may be just the ally this earth needs.

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