ESSA Stockholm: Greta Thunberg

Greta Thunberg is a young, Swedish activist drawing worldwide attention to the question of climate change and what can be done to prevent it. She was born Greta Tintin Eleonora Ernman Thunberg on January 3rd, 2003 in Stockholm, Sweden. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greta_Thunberg) She has been concerned about climate change for a very long time and she started voicing her concern by convincing her parents to adopt lifestyle changes that would reduce their family’s carbon footprint, namely flying less. After this Thunberg moved on to skipping school in August 2018 to protest at the Swedish Parliament building. (https://time.com/person-of-the-year-2019-greta-thunberg/) From then on, her voice has only grown louder.

She is now 21 years old, but she started protesting when she was only 16 (and she likely looked even younger than that). The power of physically protesting something--that is, to physically show up somewhere and protest--is extremely powerful but it is also dangerous, especially for her. Protesters are often hurt by law enforcement officers or by those who disagree with them, so the message that one 16-year-old girl shows physically sitting outside the parliament building with a sign that says “Skolstrejk för klimatet” (“School Strike for Climate”) is incredibly strong and demonstrated a lot of bravery on Thunberg’s part. 

Her influence is bending politician's ears (and sometimes their arms, too) across the globe but when asking whether or not she has been commemorated well, interesting questions are raised. The main complication in my mind is the fact that she is very much still alive. She doesn’t need us to build statues so people remember her, she’s doing a fine job of that on her own. Her achievements, however, can be commemorated and I think they are, though not physically. She has received numerous honors including Nobel Peace Prize nominations in 2021, 2022, and 2023, the Ambassador of Conscience Award in June 2019 (Amnesty International's most prestigious award), and was TIME Magazine’s Woman of the Year in 2019. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greta_Thunberg#Honours_and_awards) This I think is as close as we can get to commemorating someone well while they’re still alive.

(Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Greta_Thunberg_4.jpg)