LEADERSHIP COMES from unlikely places—Christians know that better, perhaps, than anyone else. So as we face the savage crisis of climate change, a crisis made far worse by our inaction, it is very good news that a 15-year-old autistic Swedish girl has shown the rest of us new directions in this battle.
When school began in the fall, Greta Thunberg decided not to go. Inspired in part by the Parkland students and their school walkouts over gun violence, she sat down on the steps of the Swedish parliament in Stockholm every morning and stayed there the entire school day. Every day. Her argument, at its core, was that if the country’s politicians couldn’t be bothered to fix climate change, there was no real reason for her to be studying, since the world she would inherit would be so fatally compromised.
Her protest drew widespread attention in Sweden, in part because her father is a well-known actor and her mother a famous opera singer (albeit one who has given up her international performing career, persuaded by her daughter that flying to concerts was a waste of carbonw). Others noticed too. She came to Finland this fall to address the largest climate rally in Helsinki history, and then to London for the launch of a civil disobedience movement called Extinction Rebellion.
Part of her appeal is her completely straightforward and no-nonsense take on our predicament. “Some people say that we should study to become climate scientists so that we can ‘solve the climate crisis,’” she said recently. “But the climate crisis has already been solved. We already have all the facts and solutions. All we need to do is to wake up and change.” Which is essentially true. The engineers have brought down the price of solar and wind power to the point where there is no logical reason not to be deploying them at rapid pace; only inertia, and the illogical power of the fossil fuel industry, keep us from making progress.
It’s apparent that Thunberg’s autism has played some role in her clarity. “I see the world a bit different, from another perspective,” she told New Yorker reporter Masha Gessen. “I have a special interest. It’s very common that people on the autism spectrum have a special interest.”
It also means she’s not very good at the compromises most of us make: Since she started focusing on climate change at the age of 9, she told Gessen, she’s stopped eating meat, stopped buying anything that she doesn’t consider necessary. She was, obviously, willing to part with her school friends, though since the Swedish parliamentary elections she has returned to class four days a week, saving Fridays for her protest.
I think we are extraordinarily lucky to have Greta Thunberg among us at this moment. Clearly our leaders have done little, if anything, despite plenty of warning from scientists. The rest of us have not roused ourselves sufficiently to force their hand. God works in mysterious ways, and if it takes a child to lead us, then so be it.
Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org, is the author most recently of The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back at his Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened.
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