28 new york | september 16–29, 2019
Yousafzai, now a student at Oxford, was celebrated more in news-
magazines and on conference stages than in the streets.) In a way
that is perhaps possible only in the social-media age, Greta has
become almost a synecdoche for the global climate movement: its
mascot, its theorist, its revolutionary, and a representative “victim”
of generational malice. A well-off white girl, she has even been
called out by fellow activists for embodying the movement’s blind
spots and shortcomings—though she has been conscientious, in
ascending the world stage, to praise the work of all the other teens
striking from school now each Friday.
Within four months of beginning her strike, Greta had spoken at
the U.N.’s climate-change conference in Katowice, Poland, excoriat-
ing the crowd for its nihilistic self-interest:
You only speak of green eternal economic growth because you are too
scared of being unpopular. You only talk about moving forward with the
same bad ideas that got us into this mess, even when the only sensible
thing to do is pull the emergency brake. You are not mature enough to tell
it like it is. Even that burden you leave to us children. But I don’t care
about being popular. I care about climate justice and the living planet.
Our civilization is being sacrificed for the opportunity of a very small
number of people to continue making enormous amounts of money.The language was hot, relatively speaking, but Greta has Asperg-
er’s, and her delivery was cool, flat, almost blank in its affect—some-
how flatter even when performed aloud before an audience than
when read on the page.
The year 2078, I will celebrate my 75th birthday. If I have children,
maybe they will spend that day with me. Maybe they will ask me
about you. Maybe they will ask why you didn’t do anything while
there still was time to act. You say you love your children above all
else, and yet you are stealing their future in front of their very eyes.A month later, at the World Economic Forum’s orgy of plutocratic
comity at Davos, where she traveled by train and slept in a small tent
in the Swiss winter, she used even more direct language:
Adults keep saying we owe it to the young people to give them hope.
But I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful; I want you
to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want
you to act, I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act
as if the house was on fire, because it is.In March, an estimated 1.4 million schoolchildren did just that,
following Greta’s lead, walking out of classrooms and marching in
cities and towns around the world: 300,000 students in Germany,
200,000 in Italy, 150,000 in Quebec. There were strikes in Delhi,
Seoul, and Cape Town; London and San Francisco and Washington,
D.C.; Melbourne and Brussels, Lisbon and Taipei, and Quezon City
in the Philippines, and Kenya and Namibia and Ghana; Edinburgh
and Dublin and Sydney and Prague; Paris and Reykjavík and Tokyo.
Greta stayed home, leading the strike in Stockholm. She had only
just turned 16.
But the strikes themselves are only part of what Greta has
achieved. In February, the president of the European Commission
committed to spending fully a quarter of the E.U. budget on climate
mitigation over seven years, following a meeting with her. And
shortly after she visited the British Parliament, its Conservative
majority voted to declare a climate emergency, then promised it
would zero out on its carbon emissions by 2050 (and this amid the
long, consuming drama of Brexit).
These were just pledges and may soon prove illusory, like every
other pledge that has ever been made to fight climate change. But
all are far more ambitious than would have seemed even conceiv-
able a year ago. After all, when Greta began her school strike, late
in August 2018, the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change had not yet released its “doomsday” SR15 report, which
would arrive that October festooned with alarm bells and produce
a sea change in public concern; the British protest movement
Extinction Rebellion had not yet launched, which it would in
November, blockading five bridges across the Thames and effec-
tively stopping traffic in parts of London; hardly any American
had heard of the Sunrise movement, which would make itself
known when it occupied Dianne Feinstein’s Senate office in Feb-
ruary 2019 and later forced two single-issue climate town halls
onto the Democratic primary calendar; Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
had not yet been elected to Congress or introduced the crusade
toward a Green New Deal. It has been a dizzying year for climate
mobilization, in other words, and improbably but inarguably,
Greta Thunberg has become its face.THE ANNOUNCEMENT OF the boat trip itself occasioned a
huge f lurry of media attention on both sides of the Atlantic. In
the photos she shared on Twitter and Instagram along the way,
Greta looked not entirely comfortable at sea. In New York,
where she disembarked from the boat at Brookfield Place’s
glitzy North Cove Marina, she took the stage wearing blister-revealing Crocs and a two-piece, water-resistant matte-black
sailing outfit, printed on the back like an athletic jersey with
her name (greta), as though anyone onboard or off would need
help identifying her. On the front, a nameplate read g. thun-
berg, as it would on a military uniform. The crowd that wel-
comed her was made up of television and print media, activists
pumping in the air signs like there is no planet b, and proud
parents and teenage climate strikers she’d inspired, singing in
rounds, to the tune of “Frère Jacques,” “Welcome, Greta, wel-
come, Greta / To New York.”
Greta hung back nervously as she was introduced by two local
climate strikers: Alexandria Villaseñor, a 14-year-old who moved
to New York from California last fall for a single school year while
her mother pursued a master’s degree at Columbia and quickly
started striking weekly in front of the U.N., inspired by Greta’s
December call to action, and Xiye Bastida-Patrick, a 17-year-old
from Mexico who moved to the U.S. because of her parents’ work
on climate change and whose phone bore the sticker greta has
a posse. Onstage, both towered over Greta, each more charis-
matic and typically adolescent in their affect than the headliner—
a little more demonstrative, burning with considerably more per-Arriving in Davos, Switzerland, to protest outside of the World Economic Forum.PHOTOGRAPH: VALENTIN FLAURAUD/KEYSTONE VIA AP IMAGES