Climate activist
Persistent fighter – Greta Thunberg turns 19
The Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg turns 19. Photo: Steffen Trumpf / dpa
© dpa-infocom GmbH
It all started a good three years ago with a strike in front of the Swedish parliament. Meanwhile, Greta Thunberg is one of the most influential climate activists worldwide. Today she celebrates her birthday.
She is the initiator of “Fridays For Future”. While Greta Thunberg became a role model for her generation, she has also received a lot of criticism from older generations.
But no matter how you feel about her, she and her supporters have given politics more than just food for thought. Today the Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg turns 19 years old.
Sheltered childhood
Thunberg was born in Stockholm in 2003. In addition to her mother, who is an opera singer, it is mainly actors who accompany her life. Her father and grandparents are particularly well known and successful in Sweden. Greta Thunberg has a younger sister. At school she first learned about climate change at the age of eight. She fell into depression and lost weight significantly. When she was 12 she was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome.
She started a vegan diet and avoided air travel, which helped her overcome depression and eating disorders. Since then she has devoted herself to the problems surrounding climate change. A few weeks before the Swedish parliament elections on September 9th
In 2018 Thunberg strikes for the first time in front of the Swedish Reichstag and carries out the action until the vote. After that, she went on strike every Friday and did not attend school. Schoolchildren around the world imitated her: “Fridays for Future” was born.
Global climate strikes and the rise to icon
The movement developed and found huge popularity in almost all parts of the world. In March 2019, almost two million people worldwide took to the streets in the global climate strike. Greta Thunberg was invited to congresses, gave speeches and was regularly named by magazines as one of the most influential women in the world, such as in 2019 by Time magazine.
She got an audience with the Pope and met high-ranking politicians such as Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron. After the World Economic Forum in Davos, she was even known to the then US President Donald Trump.
On September 23, 2019, she gave her most legendary speech at the UN climate summit. In this she attacked the great leaders of the world, emphasizing her “How dare you” accusations with anger and tears in her eyes. She wanted to draw attention to the catastrophic state of the earth from her point of view and confront the politicians with their responsibility and the failures. On December 4, 2019, she received the Right Livelihood Award, also known as the Alternative Nobel Prize.
Thunberg herself has not only been criticized by many people since her speech. She is accused of scaremongering, assuming a disrespectful demeanor and that “Fridays For Future” is only a movement of the first-world population and has little interest in the situation of financially and socially weaker people. But even in spite of the criticism and the corona pandemic, which in some cases has slowed down the strikes, she remains true to herself and continues to fight for the goals of her generation.