Their photos often appear side by side, like bookends
framing the long campaign by young people to persuade
adults to take significant steps to fight climate change. Greta
Thunberg, the Swedish teen activist, is the latest child to
sound the alarm. Severn Cullis-Suzuki, the daughter of an
environmental scientist in Vancouver, Canada, came first.
In 1992, when Severn was 12, she traveled with three other
young activists to the United Nations climate conference in
Rio de Janeiro. The science of global warming had just begun
to resonate. The UN had created the Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change, now the leading authority on climate
science, just four years earlier, and world leaders weren’t
accustomed to listening to children lecture them.
Severn became known as “the girl who silenced the world
for six minutes,” setting a precedent for young activists to
express their sense of impending doom in the clear-eyed way
that only children can. “You must change your ways,” Severn
told the delegates. “Losing my future is not like losing an
election or a few points on the stock market.”
When Greta delivered her scold at the UN’s climate sum-
mit in New York City last September, the similarities were
striking. One could be forgiven for concluding that nothing
at all had occurred in the intervening 27 years to stave off the
existential threat to humanity.
Yet much has changed that might finally prompt action.
The accelerating number and intensity of catastrophes not
visible three decades ago has focused global attention on
BEFORE GRETA, THERE WAS SEVERN.72 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC