No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference (Green Ideas)

by Greta Thunberg

Because the climate and the biosphere don’t care about our politics and our empty words for a single second.

I think in many ways that we autistic are the normal ones and the rest of the people are pretty strange. They keep saying that climate change is an existential threat and the most important issue of all. And yet they just carry on like before.

So, why are we not reducing our emissions? Why are they, in fact, still increasing? Are we knowingly causing a mass extinction? Are we evil? No, of course not. People keep doing what they do

because the vast majority doesn’t have a clue about the consequences of our everyday life. And they don’t know the rapid changes required.

And why should I be studying for a future that soon will be no more, when no one is doing anything whatsoever to save that future? And what is the point of learning facts within the school system when the most important facts given by the finest science of that same school system clearly mean nothing to our politicians and our society?

The bigger your carbon footprint – the bigger your moral duty. The bigger your platform – the bigger your responsibility.

Adults keep saying: ‘We owe it to the young people to give them hope.’ But I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is.

And I agree with you, I’m too young to do this. We children shouldn’t have to do this. But since almost no one is doing anything, and our very future is at risk, we feel like we have to continue.

Once again, they sweep their mess under the carpet for our generation to clean up and solve.

Some people say that we are fighting for our future, but that is not true. We are not fighting for our future, we are fighting for everyone’s future.

We live in a strange world. But it’s the world that my generation has been handed. It’s the only world we’ve got. We are now standing at a crossroads in history. We are failing but we have not yet failed. We can still fix this. It’s up to us.

Our civilization is so fragile it is almost like a castle built in the sand. The façade is so beautiful but the

foundations are far from solid. We have been cutting so many corners.

This ongoing irresponsible behaviour will no doubt be remembered in history as one of the greatest failures of humankind.

The climate crisis is both the easiest and the hardest issue we have ever faced. The easiest because we know

what we must do. We must stop the emissions of greenhouse gases. The hardest because our current economics are still totally dependent on burning fossil fuels, and thereby destroying ecosystems in order to create everlasting economic growth.