Watching Greta Thunberg deliver a speech to an elite gathering of power brokers, I ask myself what I was doing when I was her age.
“My name is Greta Thunberg. I am 15 years old. I am from Sweden. I speak on behalf of Climate Justice Now. Many people say that Sweden is just a small country and it doesn’t matter what we do. But I’ve learned you are never too small to make a difference. And if a few children can get headlines all over the world just by not going to school, then imagine what we could all do together if we really wanted to. But to do that, we have to speak clearly, no matter how uncomfortable that may be.” — Greta Thunberg
When I was 14 years old, I got myself kicked out of a private, Seventh Day Adventist School. I did everything I could think of to escape that prison for my soul. I was sick of the conservative politics, sick of the oppression of free thought, and sick of the judgmental, hateful God who was running the joint, allowing all the suffering and injustice in the world.
In my rebellious search for some kind, any kind, of meaning, I tried marijuana with Darryl and Juan behind the big red gymnasium at the back corner of the playground. I took the Lord’s name in vain at every opportunity. I read Carlos Castaneda, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. and Aldous Huxley. I slapped a “McGovern for President” bumper sticker on my school binder cover. Once, I raised my hand in Bible class to ask a question I had heard on a George Carlin album: “If God is all-powerful, can he make a rock that he himself cannot lift?”
The other students gasped, chuckled, and looked away from Mr. Mason’s enraged eyes as he hardened his jaw and said, (as I imagined his feeble brain exploding from the brilliant hand grenade of my inquiry), “Go to the principal’s office…NOW!”
I was suspended for a week. I followed this defiant blasphemy by joining Darryl and Juan in vandalizing the science teacher’s classroom (including writing ”F*** you, (teacher’s name)” on his 18-foot-wide chalkboard), stealing all the math answers for the remainder of the year from the math teacher’s desk (a brilliant Mission Impossible move, we thought, picking his desk drawer lock with a penknife and a paper clip), and finishing our act of liberation against our oppressors by breaking into the gym and stealing 3 grocery bags of canned goods and cereal boxes meant for the poor (hey, we were poor too, I rationalized).
We tore out of there and ran to our homes, adrenaline, laughter, and our spilling loot making us look like drunken teen pirates hitting the shore after months of marauding at sea.
It was glorious!
“You only speak of green eternal economic growth because you are too scared of being unpopular. You only talk about moving forward with the same bad ideas that got us into this mess, even when the only sensible thing to do is pull the emergency brake. You are not mature enough to tell it like is. Even that burden you leave to us children. But I don’t care about being popular. I care about climate justice and the living planet.” -Greta Thunberg
Two weeks later, after we had proudly boasted of our courageous exploits to a classmate, who we thought was “cool” but turned out to be a rat, my father was standing in front of the school board, explaining that I really wasn’t like this. That I had recently survived a diabetic coma and been resuscitated from the brink of death on an emergency room table. That I would have to give myself shots for the rest of my life. That my grandfather had just committed suicide after a years-long struggle with stomach cancer. And that he and my mom were in the middle of a rough divorce.
But they had no mercy. They voted, 7–1, to expel me.
Oh miraculous universe…maybe there was a god!
Although now I see that trauma ignited my adolescent rage, at the time I could only see that the machine was broken and I wanted out. 45 years later, I know that both are true. My personal pain sought its cause, and it sure looked like that cause was the system, perhaps even put into motion by God Himself.
My atheism, radicalism, and fight for justice was born. As the last American troops had returned from Vietnam a few years prior, there was no more war to protest and my attention turned to the system itself.
Our civilization is being sacrificed for the opportunity of a very small number of people to continue making enormous amounts of money. Our biosphere is being sacrificed so that rich people in countries like mine can live in luxury. It is the sufferings of the many which pay for the luxuries of the few. The year 2078, I will celebrate my 75th birthday. If I have children maybe they will spend that day with me. Maybe they will ask me about you. Maybe they will ask why you didn’t do anything while there still was time to act. You say you love your children above all else, and yet you are stealing their future in front of their very eyes. -Greta Thunberg
Now, I watch, enthralled, as Greta Thunberg educates the rich and powerful. And I realize that’s what I was trying to do — articulate the failures of culture and point humanity in another direction.
As a hormone-filled teen, my purpose could only be expressed as tearing down the structures of religious orthodoxy and authoritarian control. Greta has somehow seen a possible alternative future, or several possible futures, and leads us toward one that could — possibly — allow us to hospice the peaceful death of the old stories of competition, predatory capitalism, and oppression of the powerless and help midwife the birth of a new and ancient story of cooperation, peace, and regeneration.
But I hold no hope for a Utopia.
It will be messy, maybe even painful. It already is. Millions have died and millions have mourned as our hierarchies struggle to remain intact, buttressed with border walls, immigration officers, child soldiers, profit motives and economic theories dreamed up to control productive slaves who point at each other as the causes of their own misfortunes.
This will not be easy. Polarization, our predilection for reactive thinking and the scarcity that comes as a system collapses may bring out the worst in us.
Criticisms of Greta Thunberg:
“Targets reachable only possible through a green dictatorship.”
“Greta is a shamefully manipulated victim of criminal child abuse.”
“The Green Movement is a conspiracy of ‘deadly utopias’.”
https://notrickszone.com/2019/03/19/french-doctor-calls-instrumentalization-of-greta-thunberg-irresponsible-moral-error-revealing-neuropsychiatric-state-to-media-should-be-a-crime/
“Climate-change alarmism is becoming ever stranger, borderline religious, obsessed with doomsday prophecies.”
“The entire point of the green movement is to disrupt ordinary people’s lives, and even to immiserate them.”
“They celebrate Thunberg because she tells them how horrible they are: it is an entirely S&M relationship, speaking to the deep self-loathing of the 21st-century elites.”
https://www.spiked-online.com/2019/04/22/the-cult-of-greta-thunberg/
And then there are the comments following the Facebook videos posted by Greta:
“JUST refusing to go to school, is not DOING anything.. do something.. clean a creek or roadway.. pass information.. help a business go greener.. etc etc.”
“This poor child is being exploited and should be quietly taken aside and told to calm down and get on with her school work. She should leave politics to those who have to pay for it.”
“Girl stop stupidity go to school and get a life.”
I classify the above critiques as arguments for maintaining the status quo, and the logical outcome of thinking that the progress of civilization is for the good of most, and that billions have been brought from the drudgery of hunter-gatherer and/or impoverished populations and that science and some form of capitalism and manifest destiny are the best we can hope for.
As a human diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes, I am in a quandary about these opinions. I am so grateful for modern medicine, especially the discovery of insulin therapies and particularly genetic manipulation to produce “Humalog”, a near-perfect replacement for human-pancreas-produced insulin. Science has no doubt extended my life for 45 years — and counting.
Nevertheless, specific advancements, life-saving medicines, and increases in comfort for many populations do not mean we must accept the lot of it. We have been in ecological overshoot since 1987. It is a common trope to blame greed, wealth disparity,
and corruption for this fact. I don’t. The cause is a set of unexamined assumptions that all of us have adopted to live on this earth, in this human culture. One need not even believe in global warming to realize that we humans are creating suffering with our extractive, destructive technologies.
In these two videos, Lynne Twist and Annie Leonard discuss a few of those assumptions.
We must change. Retool. Reimagine factories. Instead of buying steel and minerals from far-off places, can we refabricate factories to recycle dead cars and demolished buildings? Can we reinvent our economy to make plastic more valuable to recycle than to dump into the ocean? Can we share more? Can we grow our food closer to home?
Charles Eisenstein, in his book, “Climate: A New Story”, outlines prescriptions that don’t call for a belief in global warming, climate change or any other globally-catastrophic theories. They call for a relationship of love with our Living Earth:
1. Promote land regeneration as a major new category of philanthropy: fund demonstration projects, connect young farmers to land, and help farms transition to regenerative practices. Provide public funding and government support for this transition as well by shifting agricultural subsidies away from conventional crops.
2. Institute a global moratorium on logging, mining, drilling, and development of all remaining primary forests, wetlands, and other ecosystems.
3. Expand the land protected in wildlife refuges and other reserves. When possible, enlist local and indigenous people in protection efforts to align their livelihood with ecological health.
4. Establish new ocean marine reserves and expand existing ones, with the goal of placing a third to half of all oceans, estuaries, and coastline into no-take/no-drill/no-develop sanctuaries.
5. In the rest of the oceans, establish strict bans on driftnets and bottom trawling.
6. Ban disposable plastic bags for retail purchases. Phase out plastic beverage containers in favor of a refillable bottle infrastructure.
7. Reconstitute the World Bank to serve ecological healing rather than development. Start by declaring the Amazon and Congo rainforests global treasures, purchasing the external debt of countries where the rainforests grow, and canceling the debt at a rate equivalent to the potential income from now-banned logging, mining, and drilling in those areas.
8. Promote afforestation and reforestation projects globally with an emphasis on ecologically appropriate native species.
9. Establish an “eco-corps” to address youth unemployment and restore ecological health by planting trees, building water retention features on public land, deconstructing dams, etc.
10. Change building codes, sanitation codes, and zoning regulations to allow higher density development, tiny homes, composting toilets, aquaculture wastewater treatment, etc. Nullify all land use covenants that prohibit vegetable gardens.
11. Reintroduce and protect keystone species such as (in North America) beavers, wolves, and cougars.
12. Carry out water restoration projects worldwide through water retention landscapes (swales, ponds, check dams, etc.), regenerative grazing and horticulture, and the strategic removal of dams, canals, and levees.
13. Relocalize the food system and promote economic localization generally, first by nullifying free trade treaties and replacing them with “fair trade treaties” that protect local economic sovereignty.
14. Institute a negative-interest financial system through international agreement to impose liquidity fees on bank reserves, along with complementary measures such as Georgist land taxes and other anti-speculative taxes.
15. Apply pollution taxes to make companies internalize the social and ecological costs of toxic waste, radioactive waste, air pollution, and water pollution.
16. Impose a deposit system for most manufactured goods so that manufacturers have an incentive to create durable, repairable products with easily recoverable materials.
17. Turn away from pesticides.
18. Demilitarize society.
As Charles points out in his book, none of these are easy, or perhaps even likely. But they are possible, and none of them requires anything more than loving our beautiful home planet, our fellow beings, and our own back yards. And this, beyond the reality of climate change or global warming or any other issue people might be trolling each other over in the comments section, is what Greta is talking about: possibility. I encourage her to read Charles Eisenstein’s book.
As I listen to Greta, speaking to the elite and powerful who politely applaud her consternation, I am moved by her sincerity, earnestness, and straightforwardness — qualities lacking in this self-aware, everything-is-ironic, nihilistic war-for-entertainment culture. I love her and it occurs to me that she has an advantage.
She has an advantage, even greater than her sincerity and directness — something she and her generation have that neither I nor anyone else from my generation had, as we rebelled against the war, poverty, hunger, and the elite few holding power over the oh so many.
Something she has that we could not even conceive of as we tried to somehow march, protest, and stumble towards the more beautiful world our hearts knew must somehow be possible.
Something she has that our parents may have wished they could be, as they watched us chant “no more war”, write “flower power” on home-made signs and listen to Lennon sing “Imagine” but they could not be because they simply had no language for understanding our movement.
But we, the parents and grandparents now, do have that language, and a deep understanding that the system is broken for most of us, and, with ecological disasters and the unrelenting consumption of the Earth, will sooner or later collapse for us all. We realize, as we come nearer to the end of our time here, that Earth gives us our very lives with a love and beauty that lies both at the edge of our comprehension and the center of our hearts.
We stand in a different place now than did our parents and grandparents, even as we learn to give thanks to them for the life they gave us — as they fought wars, worked thankless jobs, survived dust bowls, and passed on all the knowledge of previous generations — even if we sneered at their fuddy-duddy ways and their blind adherence to ”the rules”.
We stand now, a bridge between our ancestors, Greta and her descendants.
We know what she is saying as she lectures us is that we must wake up. We may have already blown it when we sacrificed our ideals for the need to survive in the money culture. When we dissolved our hippie solidarity into the game of competition and more for me is less for you. When we traded marijuana for cocaine, communes for real estate acquisition, and stewardship of Mother Earth for stock options. When we substituted the love of money for the love of each other.
Yes, we might have given up. It looked like an “Us vs. Them” game which we had to play to survive. And the world seemed to make a compelling case for us to give up and roll over into the illusory and evasive comfort of struggling for the legal tender.
November 22, 1963, JFK was shot.
April 4, 1968, MLK was shot.
June 6, 1968, Bobbie Kennedy was shot.
August 9, 1974, Nixon resigned.
September 8, 1974, Gerald Ford gives Nixon an unconditional pardon.
The game was so obviously rigged and even if we didn’t believe in the conspiracy theories, wasn’t it just too much for us to have every idealistic leader killed, or at the very least marginalized?
Then, on December 8, 1980, in the archway of his home, in New York City, where he had come home early enough to say good-night to his young son, Sean rather than dining out that evening, John Lennon was shot.
For many, this was the final death rattle of the Sixties. John, who had never seemed to give up the hippie hope, who fought against the man, personally and politically, was gone.
Hippie Dippie Love Power was gone.
Better to just put our heads down, and, at best, work within the system for incremental changes.
Better to promote entrepreneurship than fight for social justice.
Get that haircut. Get that job.
Until you start focusing on what needs to be done rather than what is politically possible, there is no hope. We cannot solve a crisis without treating it as a crisis. We need to keep the fossil fuels in the ground, and we need to focus on equity. And if solutions within the system are so impossible to find, maybe we should change the system itself. We have not come here to beg world leaders to care. You have ignored us in the past and you will ignore us again. We have run out of excuses and we are running out of time. We have come here to let you know that change is coming, whether you like it or not. The real power belongs to the people. Thank you.” -Greta Thunberg
Our generation cheers on Greta because once we were there too — speaking from our hearts. Begging for action. Calling for a different way of being. We might not have had it all figured out but we were on to something, sticking those flowers into the ends of gun barrels. Greta might not have it all figured out either. But she is on to something when she looks unflinchingly into the eyes of the elite at Davos or the UK House of Parliament and tells them to stop making next month’s election or profit and loss statement more important than the future of her generation.
We hold her as our parents could not. She and her generation may not know this. They may not even care. But unlike when we were demanding transformation, and our moms and dads just didn’t have the ability or experience to help see us through, we do have the language, the ability, and the love to give her a ground to stand upon.
We did not have that, we had nothing to stand on but our own imagination, sense of justice and, sometimes, blind anger. Whether she is aware of it or not, she does have something that we yearned for but could not possibly have had.
She has us.