Greta Thunberg, a sixteen-year-old Swedish girl, has captured the world’s attention with her year-long climate change activism. She is the genesis of “Fridays For Future” as more than 2 million teenagers have followed her lead and taken part in “climate strikes”.
The movement began in August 2018 when Thunberg began skipping class to sit outside Sweden’s Parliament, holding placards saying climate change had reached a crisis point. She came up with the idea while speaking with like-minded peers who were inspired by students in Parkland, Florida, who walked out of their classrooms in protest of the lack of action on gun control after a shooting there left 17 people dead in February 2018.
NBC News, How teen Greta Thunberg shifted world’s gaze to climate change, August 17, 2019
As of August 29th, there have been 5,202 #ClimateStrikes in more than 170 countries.
“We know that our future is at risk. We would love to go back to school and continue with our everyday lives, but as crucial as this situation is, as serious as this situation is, we feel like we must do something about this now.”
Greta Thunberg, Summer Meeting in Lausanne Europe (SMILE) at the University of Lausanne, August 2019
Today, Greta completed her two week trans-Atlantic sail from Plymouth, England, to New York.
Fridays for Future… as well as a number of other youth activist groups, are organizing a climate strike on September 20. Adult organizations are also getting into the mix, helping plan a global strike on September 27. Sandwiched between that, world leaders will meet at the United Nations for a one-day climate summit in the run-up to a major climate conference in Chile known as COP 25 later this year. Thunberg’s message to those leaders in clear: “COP 25 must be a breaking point” she said at a press conference.
Brian Kahn, Gizmodo Eather, Greta is Here, August 28, 2019
