Greta's Growth

And our own

In a striking scene, Greta Thunberg was arrested on Wednesday as she participated in an anti-genocide protest at the University of Copenhagen, the sort that has catapulted the student movement to the forefront of the solidarity struggle for a Free Palestine. The 21-year-old activist, alongside five others with Student Against the Occupation, was demanding that the school enact a full academic boycott of Israel. Some blocked the entrance to a building while others went inside. A statement from the student organization reads, in part, “While the situation in Palestine only gets worse, the University of Copenhagen continues cooperation with academic institutions in Israel.” Photos and video of Greta being arrested while wearing a keffiyeh rapidly made the rounds.

This was not the first time she’s protested for Palestine. Greta marched in solidarity with Gaza last December, this past May, and has spoken out about the genocide many times. And an arrest won’t stop her. Almost immediately after getting released yesterday Greta could been seen handcuffing herself to the mic in the Danish P3 radio station, repordedly in order to amplify her support for Palestine beyond the intended runtime of the show. I would know more, but it’s difficult to find any media coverage of this event. And that leads us into the first point of this piece.

When I saw Greta’s arrest this week I was struck, as others have been over the last year or more, by how little I see of her these days. Thinking back to the time, not so long ago, when she was everywhere: sailing across the Atlantic, leading tens of thousands in climate protest in New York, or even the simple image of her sparking a student climate protest wave with her one-person protests in Sweden, I posted something pretty straightforward: “It’s been said before but the second Greta started making connections between climate change and capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism the media coverage came to a screeching halt.”

Simple though it may have been, the sentiment resonated, racking up over 7 million views. There’s a few reasons for this, I think, the first being that we all can remember the period when Greta was synonymous with the climate movement, and student walkouts in particular. She was inescapable in the media and on social media for a time, and her absence, when our attention is drawn to it, is conspicuous. When you have it pointed out to you it becomes hard to shake the notion that Greta Thunberg crossed an invisible line at some point.

As Greta’s politics have grown and evolved, they reached a point where they now make billionaire media owners, milquetoast executives of major non-profits, and more than a few politicians a little uncomfortable. All she’s done is follow the science, but over time the science has led her to see that the climate crisis doesn’t exist in a vacuum. There are massive monetary incentives to destroy the planet in this capitalist system. ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, and BP made over $100 billion in profits in 2023 alone. And those numbers were down from 2022. So, naturally, in following the science Greta had to start examining the capitalist system if she wanted to really get down to the root of the climate crisis. After all, as Chico Mendes said, “Environmentalism without class struggle is just gardening.”

But Greta kept going. At the 2022 launch of her book, aptly titled “The Climate Book” the then 19-year-old activist had some words for the entire system we live under today:

“We are never going back to normal again because ‘normal’ was already a crisis. What we refer to as normal is an extreme system built on the exploitation of people and the planet. It is a system defined by colonialism, imperialism, oppression and genocide by the so-called global North to accumulate wealth that still shapes our current world order. If economic growth is our only priority, then what we are experiencing now should be exactly what we should be expecting.”

That was two years ago, and it’s no surprise she hasn’t been given the spotlight nearly as often since. In fact, in the wake of that book launch she’s been the subject of countless hit pieces, and her Palestine solidairty activism has been denegrated as well. Greta went from a cute kid saying that climate change is bad to a young adult rightly charging global systems with not only fueling the climate crisis but also being oppressive and grossly harmful to life in numerous other ways. And, perhaps most importantly, she sees these systems as interconnected and knows that radical change is necessary for the future of life on this planet.

Photo by Li-An Lim on Unsplash

There’s more than one lesson to learn here. The first is grim, but one we mostly already know. People who begin to threaten the ruling class will not be celebrated in billionaire-owned media. It’s an obvious one, but one to remember. Greta is now attacked in these outlets for being a radical lefty more than she’s lifted up. There's a price to pay for speaking the truth, but as she knows there’s a much larger price for all of us to pay, in terms of our ecological future and the mass violence of empire, if we remain silent – whether it be on the capitalist underpinnings of the climate crisis or the genocide in Gaza.

There are other lessons here too. One I hope we take to heart today is the very real possibility of growth. Greta Thunberg has been in the process of growing up and coming to understand the world in recent years, and it’s led her to seek the truth about the systems she hopes to change. But, for those of us who are older, it’s also not too late to learn and reach new conclusions. Very, very few of us were taught much about the global systems of imperialism or colonialism or the truth of capitalism. So we should be clear that we never need to remain stuck in the deceptive narratives we were taught, or taught to ignore, as children. We can, and must, keep learning and adapting to new information. Our future is too precious to set aside the truth.

Photo by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash

It’s not just incumbent on us to learn, but to teach. We can both build practices of teaching and find moments to help others grow as we continue our own trajectories of change. Millions of people out there are hungry for the truth – and unfortunately we see too many turn towards all sorts of manipulative sources in search of knowledge. But at the heart of the search, for so many people, is a sense that something isn’t right, that the true nature of how the world operates isn’t what we were taught. And, in many ways, they’re right. That of course doesn’t mean six people who live under a volcano are running world governments, and we should shut down those conspiracies. What it does mean is that systems we were taught to worship and obey are hurting us in countless ways, and have put us all on a path that’s rushing towards catastrophe.

If we want to win, if we want to avert climate collapse, eliminate poverty, and build towards liberation we need to bring a whole lot of people along. A lot of them are currently like young Greta, five years ago, wanting to do right but not yet able to see the true nature of our fight. I know that five years ago I knew much less than I do now. I had been working as a teacher for several years at that point, and rarely found myself with the energy to be as politically active as I wanted to be. The first few years of teaching I was in night school to get a degree in the field, and the last few I was working multiple part-time jobs in education. I knew money and power were lopsided in this country, I knew climate change was happening and the police got away with all manner of atorocities, but I didn’t know much about how we should respond to all that. Learning solutions, learning about organizing and building power takes time and energy, time and energy some people just don’t have.

So we have to be kind and gentle and generous in helping folks along. Demeaning those who haven’t yet learned what we know, or haven’t unlearned a whole lot, yet, will get us nowhere. I know all our friends won’t all become revolutionaries exactly, but we can teach people about how Palestine is an environmental issue, how direct action is necessary, how capitalism underpins so many of our problems, how colonialism and imperialism persist and must be addressed, and how we can and must organize to defend our future. We can do our best to hand friends and neighbors and coworkers the tools and knowlege they’ve been searching for. We can teach people, and we can continue to learn. In the process we can grow and foster and build an unstoppable movement that gets down to the root of what ails us, and has the power to pull those roots up as we build something new.