Tariq Al Banna
The young generation of the world is set to draw global attention by enforcing the biggest ever street demonstration on climate justice in human history today (Friday).
Today, the scheduled day for the weekly demonstration of ‘Fridays For Future’ movement, students and workers from over 3,400 cities in 150 countries are expected to take to streets, to make sure that sparks of protest become wildfires of action in bringing forth the climate justice.
From Sydney to New Delhi, Nairobi to New York, millions of people around the world are expected to walk out of school and work Friday to join the latest protests against the climate crisis, according to the global media.
The weekly school strike for climate justice, launched by a Swedish teen climate activist Greta Thunberg in August 2018, has reached to such a proportion that thousands of workers all over the world are now joining the movement, leaving the workplaces and joining street agitations on every Friday, demanding action be taken to combat the climate crisis.
Last week on September 20 was already a landmark. In an unprecedented expression of solidarity, an estimated four million people, mostly students, from over 2000 cities in 130 countries across the globe took to streets to enforce the biggest climate strike ever, joining the ‘Fridays for Future’ movement that was started single-handedly by Thunberg.
People demonstrated across the world demanding urgent action to tackle global heating, as they united across timezones and cultures to take part in the biggest climate protest in history. People took part in the historic strike from the Pacific islands, through Australia, across South East Asia and Africa into Europe and onwards to the Americas. Thunberg lead from the front, delivering her historic speech before an estimated 2.5 million strikers in New York. In Bangladesh, youths staged demonstrations in 14 cities including the capital.
On September 20, for the first time since the school strikes for climate began last year, young people called on adults to join them – and they were heard. Trade unions representing hundreds of millions of people around the world mobilised in support, employees left their workplaces, doctors and nurses marched and workers at firms like Amazon, Google and Facebook walked out to join the climate strikes.
Through her extraordinary determination, the Swedish teen has succeeded school students who, leaving the classes, staged demonstrations at more than 2000 cities across the globe on last Friday.
“We are out here to reclaim our right to live, our right to breathe and our right to exist, which is all being denied to us by an inefficient policy system that gives more deference to industrial and financial objectives rather than environmental standards,” told Aman Sharma, a young protester in Delhi, to UK-based The Guardian on last Friday.
It all began a year ago, when Greta, deeply worried over what might happen to her future due to the adverse impact of climate change, tried to convince some of her classmates to stage a strike to press climate justice, but in vain. The failure in convincing her classmates, however, contributed to her determination as in August 2018, when she was 15, she decided to move on singularly against all odds.
From August 20, 2018, Greta skipped school for three weeks at a stretch, staging a sit-in inform of Swedish Parliament. The ninth-grader used to sit against the stone facade of the Swedish Parliament’s main building in central Stockholm from morning to afternoon every day. Placing a placard in front of her that reads ‘School Strike for the Climate’, she used to distribute a leaflet that read: “We kids most often don’t do what you tell us to do. We do as you do. And since you grown-ups don’t give a shit about my future, I won’t either.”
From the second day, like-minded students started joining her in the protest. After 3 days she had 35 other strikers with her and after 3 weeks she had 10,000. Greta's actions attracted heaps of attention. The protest started creating numerous news stories in national newspapers and on TV. Thunberg started receiving thousands of messages of love and support on social media.
Soon, other students engaged in similar protests in their own communities. Together they organised a school climate strike movement under the name Fridays for Future. After the first three week, she decided to protest weekly, on every Friday, and during the last one year, the movement spread everywhere.
Greta Thunberg first heard about climate change in 2011, when she was 8 years old, and could not understand why so little was being done about it.
Three years later she became depressed and lethargic, stopped talking and eating, and was eventually diagnosed with Asperger syndrome, obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD) and selective mutism. While acknowledging that her diagnosis ‘has limited me before’, she does not view her Asperger's as an illness and has instead called it her ‘superpower’.
After Thunberg addressed the 2018 United Nations Climate Change Conference, student strikes took place every week somewhere in the world. In 2019, there were at least two coordinated multi-city protests – one on March 15 and the other on September 20. Thunberg is known for her blunt, matter-of-fact speaking manner, both in public and to political leaders and assemblies, in which she urges immediate action to address what she describes as the climate crisis. At home, Thunberg convinced her parents to adopt several lifestyle choices to reduce their own carbon footprint, including giving up air travel and not eating meat.
In May 2019, Thunberg was featured on the cover of Time magazine, which named her a ‘next generation leader’ and noted that many see her as a role model. Some media have described her impact on the world stage as the ‘Greta Thunberg effect’.
In August 2019, to join the UN Climate Summit as well as to take part in street demonstrations, Thunberg sailed across the Atlantic Ocean from Plymouth in UK to New York in US, in a yacht equipped with solar panels and underwater turbines. The trip was announced as a carbon-neutral transatlantic crossing serving as a demonstration of her declared beliefs of the importance of reducing emissions.
Mentionable, in their first global protest on March 15, about 1.6 million students in more than 125 countries around the world took to the streets demanding real climate action. Since then, the number of strikers increased steadily.
On May 24, students went on strike again in over 90 countries across the world. On September 6, more than 2.5 million people in 95 countries on 7 continents came together to rise for climate justice.
