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Friday, March 15, 2019
Becoming Greta
Becoming Greta: ‘Invisible Girl’ to Global Climate Activist, With Bumps Along the Way
Greta Thunberg, center, skips school on Fridays to demonstrate for climate action at the Swedish Parliament in Stockholm.
Credit Elisabeth Ubbe for The New York Times
Greta Thunberg, center, skips school on Fridays to demonstrate for climate action at the Swedish Parliament in Stockholm.CreditCreditElisabeth Ubbe for The New York Times
By Somini Sengupta
STOCKHOLM —
It’s complicated being Greta
Small,
shy, survivor
of crippling depression, Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old Swedish girl
skipping school to shame the world into addressing climate change, drew a
parade of fans one Friday in February on a frozen square in Stockholm.
Six
Swiss students had traveled 26 hours by train to seek her support for
their petition for a tougher Swiss carbon emissions law. An Italian
scientist told her she reminded him of his younger, activist self. A
television news crew hovered around her. Women from an antismoking group
came to give her a T-shirt.
Greta nodded, whispered, “Thanks,” posed for pictures. Made exactly zero small talk.
All
this attention, she said out of earshot of the others, is great. It
means “people are listening.” But then, a knife-blade flash of rage
revealed itself.
“It’s sometimes
annoying when people say, ‘Oh you children, you young people are the
hope. You will save the world’” she said, after several grown-ups had
told her just that. “I think it would be helpful if you could help us
just a little bit.”
This is signature Greta. Wry. Blunt. Sometimes sarcastic. The opposite of sweet.
It
surfaced again on Friday, when Prime Minister Theresa May’s office
dismissed school walkouts in Britain as a distraction that “wastes
lesson time.” Greta swiftly struck back on Twitter: “But then again, political leaders have wasted 30 yrs of inaction. And that is slightly worse.”
Margot Wallstrom, the deputy prime minister of Sweden, left, met with Greta on a recent Friday.
Credit Elisabeth Ubbe for The New York Times
Margot Wallstrom, the deputy prime minister of Sweden, left, met with Greta on a recent Friday. Credit Elisabeth Ubbe for The New York Times
Like a modern-day Cassandra for the age of climate change, her solitary
act of civil disobedience — this was the 25th time that she skipped
school to protest at Parliament — has turned her into something of a
global commodity. It has inspired huge children’s demonstrations
elsewhere, prompted a debate about whether children should skip classes
for climate action, and invited trolls, haters and skeptics who wonder who profits from Greta.
The
last six months have been, as she said, “a weird contrast.” They have
compelled her to talk, talk a lot, which is something she is not
accustomed to.
“All my life I’ve been
invisible, the invisible girl in the back who doesn’t say anything,”
she said. “From one day to another, people listen to me. That’s a weird
contrast. It’s hard.”
“It’s
sometimes annoying when people say, ‘Oh you children, you young people
are the hope. You will save the world,’” Greta said. “I think it would
be helpful if you could help us just a little bit.”
“It’s
sometimes annoying when people say, ‘Oh you children, you young people
are the hope. You will save the world,’” Greta said. “I think it would
be helpful if you could help us just a little bit.”
At midday, as the sky turned
gray, her father, Svante, brought lunch. Chickpeas and rice, which she
ate, standing, alone in the crowd, in minute forkfuls, like a bird,
before receiving a gaggle of third-graders in snowsuits. By the end of
the afternoon, a full 7 hours standing outside in the cold, she was very
tired. All she wanted to do, she said, was to go home and lie on the
couch with her dogs.
Greta Thunberg is an unlikely, though not entirely accidental, activist.
The
eldest of two girls, she grew up in Stockholm. She studied piano and
ballet and theater. She did well in school. Like many children, she
watched educational films about the melting Arctic and the fate of the
polar bears and the marine mammals bloated with plastic. But unlike
other children, she couldn’t let them go. “I became very affected. I
began thinking about it all the time and I became very sad,” she said.
“Those pictures were stuck in my head.”
Adolescence brought social pressures. She wasn’t into the things that many other kids
were into. Mobile phones. Clothes. None of it interested her, her
father recalled. “I think she was very isolated and very lonely,” Mr.
Thunberg said.
By age 11, Greta had
fallen into a deep funk. She stopped going to school. She stopped
eating. She stopped growing. She spoke only to family, and, at school,
only to one teacher, Anita von Berens.
“Before, my own world was very big,” she recalled. “I was all alone.”
Is the alone-world still there?
“Yes,” she readily replied. “But it’s getting smaller and the real world is getting bigger.”
“I’m happier now,” she added. “I have meaning. I have something I have to do.”
Greta with Roxy, her Labrador retriever. Credit Elisabeth Ubbe for The New York Times
It
was a cold, silver Saturday morning, the day after her weekly school
strike. Mr. Thunberg had brought her to see the horse her family keeps
and shares with other children in a stable outside the city. Greta
brushed the animal, an Icelandic horse named Freyja. “Like a massage,”
she said. She cleaned the gunk from its hooves. “Mostly poop,” she said.
She tried to keep her black Lab, Roxy, from gobbling the stuff off the snow. “Hopeless,” she grumbled.
Freyja,
she said, is very stubborn, and it took her some time to get the bit
into the horse’s mouth before taking her for a slow ride in the woods.
Being with her horse calms her, Greta said. The trees should be covered
in snow by this time. It has snowed less than normal this year, she
said.
She
remains tiny for her age, a consequence of barely eating during her
struggle with depression. She doesn’t laugh much, or make small talk.
Or, as she puts it, “I only say what’s necessary.”
She prefers the company of adults and animals to children of her own age. Bullying and depression have taken a toll.
Getting
through the rough patch took months. Greta said what made her feel
better was to be heard, first by her parents. She goaded them to stop
eating meat. Then she goaded them to become vegan, which they also did,
except that, according to Greta, her mother, Malena Ernman, continues to
sneak in cheese. “At night, so I won’t see it,” Greta said.
Her
most important victory came when, in 2016, she persuaded her mother to
stop flying, which was a big deal because Ms. Ernman is an opera singer well-known
in Sweden whose career depends on traveling widely. Soon came a flurry
of attention to the no-fly decision and, eventually, a book that Ms.
Ernman and Mr. Thunberg wrote about how their child had changed them.
“It felt very good to be listened to,” Greta said.
“One of the pros of having a famous mother,” Greta said, is that “I’m quite familiar with the media and how it works.”
Credit Elisabeth Ubbe for The New York Times
“One of the pros of having a famous mother,” Greta said, is that “I’m quite familiar with the media and how it works.”CreditElisabeth Ubbe for The New York Times
On
Monday, Aug. 20, around the time her parents’ book came out, she sat in
front of the Swedish Parliament. Word quickly spread. Soon came an
invitation to the United Nations climate conference and another to the
World Economic Forum, in Davos, Switzerland, where she told a roomful of
business leaders that their financial success had “come with an
unthinkable price tag” for the planet.
Greta, for her part, has told her mother not to join her
at the protests. She said she does not want anyone to think her mother
put her up to it. (Through her husband, Ms. Ernman declined to be
interviewed.)
Being Ms. Ernman’s
daughter prepared Greta for this role. “That’s one of the pros of having
a famous mother,” she said. “I’m quite familiar with the media and how
it works.”
Only
once, when she confronted journalists lined up to interview her at
Davos, did she freeze. Like before, the words didn’t come.
These
days, she said, she thinks carefully about everything she does — what
she wears, what she says, whom she connects with on Facebook. She
curates her social media carefully, posting a picture of herself riding
back from Davos by train, which drew attention to the conference
participants who had chartered private jets.
Sometimes,
her public role brings unwelcome attention. A plastic-wrapped sandwich
in one of the pictures on the train brought criticism. A German
politician, Paul Ziemiak, challenged her on Twitter recently by posting an unflattering emoji of a monkey covering its eyes. He was roundly criticized for picking on a child.
And an investigation by the newspaper Svenska Dagbladet asserted that Greta’s name and photograph had been used to raise money for a start-up.
(Mr. Thunberg said the family had not been informed; the start-up
founder, Ingmar Rentzhog, confirmed that Greta’s name and photo had
appeared in a financial prospectus for the start-up without the family’s
prior knowledge but he denied that her name had been used to raise
capital.)
It prompted Greta to write a
long Facebook post, declaring that she is acting independently and that
neither she nor her family are accepting any money.
Her
former teacher, Ms. von Berens, marveled at her transformation. She
also wondered what would happen next, when the attention fades. “I don’t
think this will be forever,” she said.
As
for Greta, this is her last semester of 9th grade. She is weighing
whether to take a year off to pursue her activism full time.
Asked
if she would go to New York in September for the United Nations climate
summit if invited, Greta said she would not fly. But, she could sail
there on a ship. And she’s learned that going on a container ship would
have the smallest carbon footprint.
Credit Elisabeth Ubbe for The New York Times
Melissa Eddy contributed reporting from Berlin and Christina Anderson from Stockholm.
Correction:
An
earlier version of this article misstated the timing of Greta
Thunberg’s first protest at the Swedish Parliament. While the date was
correctly given as Aug. 20, it was a Monday, not a Friday.
Somini Sengupta covers international climate issues and is the author of "The End of Karma: Hope and Fury Among India's Young."
A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: From an ‘Invisible Girl’ to an Outspoken Climate Crusader. Order Reprints | Today’s
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