It Took a Child: Greta Thunberg and the Call for Climate Action

Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg forced the world to pay attention to our ecological emergency after she initiated an international youth movement protesting the escalating effects of climate change. Being the youngest “Person of the Year” emblazoned on the cover of Time magazine, she has become an icon for radical reform in environmental policy and climate action. Initially sitting on the steps of the Swedish parliament holding a sign reading Skolstrejk för klimatet (school strike for climate), this sparked other students to engage in similar protests in their own communities, which eventually led to an international, organized school climate strike movement under the name “Fridays for Future.” By 2019, student strikes took place every week throughout the globe, involving coordinated multi-city protests that attracted over a million students.

Sailing to North America to avoid flying and becoming an idol for shaming United Nation’s world leaders due to their inertia surrounding the climate crisis, Thunberg’s 2019 illustrious speech given at the U.N.’s Climate Action Summit in New York City is worth quoting:

"My message is that we’ll be watching you. This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you! You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you! . . . You are failing us. But the young people are starting to understand your betrayal. The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us, I say: We will never forgive you. We will not let you get away with this. Right here, right now is where we draw the line. The world is waking up. And change is coming, whether you like it or not."

Having participated in global climate strikes in North America and Europe and now a famous public figure, Thunberg has generated a social media frenzy and inspires many environmental activist groups throughout the world with her protest speeches and call to arms against governmental climate inaction. Recipient of numerous honors and awards, including an honorary doctorate at the age of 16 and four Nobel Peace Prize nominations, she has been received by world leaders and noted figures such as Pope Francis and the naturalist Sir David Attenborough.

The relatively new discipline of ecopsychology teaches us that the physical health and psychological well-being of human beings are intrinsically connected to the health of the planet. As empirical evidence mounts worldwide on the deterioration of our ecosystems and natural environments, increasing numbers of people report suffering from fear, anxiety, depression, anger, and helplessness over our climate emergency. Thunberg has done us a great service to help us begin to break away from our collective denial and start considering in concrete ways how we may subvert our looming catastrophe.

Because planetary change is an enormous undertaking, involving communicative discourse in all spheres of globalized societies—from the personal, collective, systemic, geopolitical, and wholescale foundations that undergird our being in the world — mapping out all the intersystemic issues at play, let alone their solutions, is beyond the scope of this project. But a concentrated and concerted effort by many global ecology organizations and green movements are working together toward this direction in efforts to confront the reality of the Anthropocene that we as humanity have caused.

From the standpoint of our overall worldviews, our immediate social consciousness is not up to par. We currently live according to an attitude of immediate gratification and absorption in our own personal and social lives that revolve around utility, production, profit, economic gain, self-interest (individualistic, familial, communal, national), intellectual property, abnegation of responsibility for greater matters outside of our control, and psychological desires and defenses such as hedonism and denialism under the sway of the pleasure principle. Ecological consciousness is foreign territory despite international efforts to address the environmental crisis. But anyone can get involved in their own way, and that begins with a vision of the future we want to bring about.

Visions of the future are fluid and pliant. We can never know what will happen or transpire in all potential worlds outside of reason, logic, and sensible predictive science. But empirical facts and abductive speculation point us toward many foresight narratives and portentous scenarios we can intercede. Could the future be replete with flourishing ecologies (posthuman or otherwise), sustainment, universal equity initiatives, planetary justice, new world order Enlightenment paradigms, and global egalitarian values adopted by all? Will there be ecological healing, rectification, rehabilitation, restoration, and environmental management? This is where Gaia emerges from the ashes of a suffocating sickness and where overheating, deterioration, and ecocide are evaded for a foresight narrative of nurturance, health, and flourishing.

Bringing about desired futures requires shared aspirations, values, cooperation among social collectives, and good governance. It starts with preferred images of our future environments, ones that are possible to achieve through education, social self-consciousness, innovation, and even revolution. It starts with visions of reparation and wholeness that guide political systems toward collective unity in transforming forethought into concrete, tangible practice that enables humanity to approach global problems with greater ecological awareness, maturity, moral responsibility, and strategic efficacy.

Rather than viewing our current ecological crisis as pointing to a used or disowned future that has been written off as waste with the foregone conclusion of doom, we can change the landscape through ethical agency and action by propelling our being and moral duty to the world and future generations to come. We already see this happening in millennial and postmillennial culture, embodied by the youth climate change protests, school strikes for climate, and the Extinction Rebellion (XR) movements and other groups that have transpired all over the world using non-violent civil disobedience in an attempt to pre-empt mass extinction and minimize the risk of societal collapse. Not only have these social consciousness movements inspired protest and narrative foresight change, but they also spur concrete action directed toward governments failing to protect the citizenry from current and future environmental conditions the youth do not want to inherit. These discourses and actions are progressive ethical corrections to our global bystander syndrome that may affect a future sea change in international politics, public policy, Earth science research, and environmental protection.

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This post is adapted from End of the World: Civilization and Its Fate.