Greta Thunberg

On 20 August 2018, a fifteen-year-old girl sits outside the Swedish Parliament in Stockholm. Her sign is handmade: Skolstrejk för klimatet, School Strike for Climate. She has brought her schoolwork and plans to stay for the whole school day. Other young people were hesitant to join, so she came alone.

Four years earlier, she had stopped going to school and spoke to almost no one outside her family.

Greta Thunberg grew up in Stockholm with her mother, opera singer Malena Ernman, her father, actor Svante Thunberg, and her younger sister, Beata.

Greta was about eight when her class had a lesson on what people were doing to the environment. She couldn't stop thinking about it. If climate change was as dangerous as the adults said, why was nobody acting like it? Her classmates forgot about it by the next lesson. Greta didn't. She kept reading and asking questions, and it made less and less sense to her that scientists said one thing while everyone else did another.

School was hard. She was bullied and found it difficult to be around other kids. At eleven, she fell into depression. She stopped eating properly, lost a lot of weight, and stayed home from school for a long time. Because of selective mutism, she spoke almost only with her parents and sister.

Her parents looked for help. Greta was diagnosed with Asperger syndrome, as autism was then called, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Her mother later wrote about this time in the family memoir Our House Is on Fire. Her father stayed home with her for about a year, helping with meals and daily routines, and the family found a school that suited her better.

The diagnosis didn't make things easy. But it changed how Greta and the people around her understood what was happening. In 2021 she told The Guardian:

“It helped me get the support I needed and made me understand why I was like this.”

Her interest in the climate stayed. She studied the science, questioned the choices people around her were making, and persuaded her family to change some everyday habits. Her mother eventually stopped flying, a decision that affected her international career.

In May 2018, Greta was one of the winners of an environmental essay competition run by the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet, and her essay was published. Climate campaigners got in touch, and she joined their discussions about public action. When she decided on a school strike, the others weren’t ready to take part. On 20 August she went ahead anyway.

She wasn’t alone for long. Other students came, and the strike turned into a weekly Friday protest. It grew into Fridays for Future, with young people organizing strikes in countries far from Sweden.

For someone who had once found it very hard to speak to strangers, the new public role meant giving interviews and talking to audiences. At TEDxStockholm in November 2018, she spoke openly about depression, autism, selective mutism and why she had started protesting.

Greta has said that her ability to stay absorbed in one subject can be useful, especially when the circumstances and the people around her are right. She has said just as plainly that autism has at times limited what she could do. A strong interest didn’t make support unnecessary. Over time, it became part of a life with more room to act and to be with other people.

In 2019 she spoke at the UN Climate Action Summit in New York, and TIME named her Person of the Year. She was the youngest individual ever to receive the title.

She and Fridays for Future received Amnesty International’s Ambassador of Conscience Award, and she received the Right Livelihood Award. By then, millions of people had taken part in climate strikes around the world.

She also wrote and worked on public education. The Climate Book, first published in 2022, brings together contributions from more than one hundred researchers and other experts. The Greta Thunberg Foundation, set up by her parents while she was still a minor, directs proceeds from awards, publications and donations to environmental and social causes. Greta supports its work but doesn’t run it.

The attention also brought criticism and threats, and put pressure on her family’s privacy. In the same 2021 Guardian interview, she described a public life that left little room for being an ordinary, anonymous teenager. Her father remembered the long periods of travel and campaigning as exhausting and said that time at home gave her a break she needed.

Other things were changing away from the podium. As a child, Greta had often been alone among her peers. Through Fridays for Future she found friends who cared about the same things. She talked about joking around with them, chatting online, spending time with her dogs, and doing embroidery and puzzles.

By eighteen she was living on her own. In interviews she spoke about how much friendship meant to her and about being part of a community where she felt welcome. She still takes part in public activism. Her work now covers climate policy, humanitarian issues and education.

The difficult years are part of her story. So are the people who helped her and the decisions she made herself.

In 2021 she was asked whether friendship was the best thing her activism had brought her. She said yes.

She said she was happy.