Why Is Everyone Afraid Of Greta Thunberg?

The Australian - Nikki Gemmell*

Greta Thunberg speaks at the Climate Action Summit at the UN last month. Picture: Stephanie Keith/Getty Images/AFP

Passivity is written into the Australian vernacular. No worries. She’ll be right mate. Throw another shrimp on the barbie. For most of us, our default is passivity; or it’s at least how we want the world to see us. Laid-back, chilled, relaxed. Passivity is easy, non-threatening. Deadening. Because it means an acceptance that someone is going to look after us; we let go, we trust. “Passivity may be the easy course,” Noam Chomsky wrote, “but it is hardly the honourable one.”
And so to honour. To seizing the truth and the lies and shaking them up. To the valuing of those who live with dynamism and courage and grit; who refuse to be passive. Because by succumbing to it we’re supporting the status quo — even when that status quo could be leading us down a path of irreversible destruction.
A short 14 months ago a young, awkward, Anne of Green Gables-like girl sat outside the Swedish parliament holding a hand-drawn sign that read Skolstrejk för klimatet (school strike for the climate). She seemed haloed by alone-ness, on her little blue mat with her grimly determined face and plaits. Yet in just over a year Greta Thunberg has created a worldwide movement galvanising millions of people, forcing the world to listen to the children — and what an indictment that is on the elders of this planet. What a moment in history. When the young turn on the old; with history on their side.
Thunberg has demonstrated the heroic opposite of passivity. How worlds can be changed by the lone action of a single voice. Yet there are those who cannot bear her; the outspokenness, the audacity, the persistence, the fact this young woman will not stay in the meek, quiet little box expected of her. There are people afraid of the power she’s unleashed. And she hasn’t done it by shouting or haranguing; she’s merely talked powerful truths, and people naked in their insecurity have tried to silence her. Yet she endures.
Thunberg has not only history but science on her side. There’s change to the very texture of our air, from decades ago; we who are old enough know this to be true. We can swim in our seas earlier in the season, bushfires are encroaching on our winters, our windscreen wipers no longer slough off great swathes of insects out bush. All the little signs, all the little pricks. Bigger picture: a struggling reef. Regional towns gasping for water. Dry lightning strikes igniting fires in old-growth forests in Tasmania, destroying trees that have endured for thousands of years. In the Gold Coast hinterland, bushfires too early in the season in places not meant to be burning like this.
This feels like national vandalism. Government-enabled, national vandalism. We cannot trust our government to look after us on this one. Its climate change policy is, woefully, almost non-existent. And this is no time for repose, for she’ll be right mate and no worries. “The biggest lesson is you get the country you work for,” novelist Mohsin Hamid said. “If you sit back and simply allow your country to be, it is highly unlikely to be the kind of country you want. You have to be active.” The issue matters, to a lot of Australians. Climate denialists are the dinosaurs of our world, which is why perhaps they’ve been squealing so loudly and viciously about a 16-year-old girl in plaits. What are they afraid of? The truth? Effectiveness?
I hope that year after year these protests continue; and of course all the galvanised, angry young Australians are getting closer to becoming voters. Passivity is too easy. As Hannah Arendt said, “It is quite conceivable that the modern age — which began with such an unprecedented and promising outburst of human activity — may end in the deadliest, most sterile passivity history has ever known.”

*Nikki Gemmell is a bestselling author of thirteen works of fiction and five non-fiction books. Her work has received international critical acclaim and been translated into many languages. 

Links

• Timeline: Greta Thunberg's Rise From Lone Protester To Nobel Favorite
• Greta Thunberg’s Radical Climate Change Fairy Tale Is Exactly The Story We Need
• Cyclone Greta Shakes Up The Climate Change Debate
• Greta Thunberg Condemns World Leaders In Emotional Speech At UN
• Greta Thunberg To Congress: ‘You’re Not Trying Hard Enough. Sorry’
• Climate Activist Greta Thunberg On The Power Of A Movement
• Teen Climate Activist Greta Thunberg Wins France's First Freedom Prize
• Greta Thunberg: ‘They See Us As A Threat Because We’re Having An Impact’