Importance of Greta Thunberg

What have a fifteen year-old schoolgirl from Sweden and anti-imperialist fighter Mohandas Gandhi got in common? And what sets them apart from others who actively work to promote causes they support from the environment or to rid themselves of the yolk of imperialism?  

In August 2018, a 15-year-old Swedish schoolgirl, Greta Thunberg began spending her school days outside the Swedish parliament to call for stronger action on global warming by holding up a sign saying (in Swedish) “School strike for climate”. Her’s was originally a lone protest. Soon other students began similar campaigns in their communities and together they organised a school climate strike movement under the name ‘Fridays for Future’.  

By December 2018, with growing numbers of people following her lead, she was invited to address the United Nations Climate Change Conference. In September 2019, Ms. Thunberg was invited to address the United Nations Climate Summit in New York. Greta has today become the face of efforts to curb climate change and global warming.  

In India, unknown to most of the world, Saalumma Thimmakkal, born around 1910/1911- a daily paid Indian casual labourer - over the years has singlehandedly planted over 8,000 trees in her village. She used her her own meagre earnings to pay for her campaign.  

In Sri Lanka, over the years, long before the issue of climate change was raised as an international issue, thousands of environmental activists planted hundreds of thousands trees and implemented scores of programmes country-wide aimed at combating climate change.  

Way back in the 1930s in India, on March 12 to be exact, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi set off on a 240-mile walk from his Sabarmati Ashram to the sea with 80 followers to make salt. Gandhi was on a mission to make salt! Protesting the stringent salt taxes imposed by the imperial Britain on locally-made salt and demanding an end to British salt monopoly. The walk took 24 days and covered 240 miles. Within days, thousands joined him in his campaign to break the unjust law. Tens of thousands of Indian protestors were badly beaten and around 60,000 jailed. But the momentum of his simple campaign grew India-wide.  

In the end the British administration eventually relented and invited Mahatma Gandhi to England to attend the Second Round Table Conference. Gandhi’s salt march got wide news coverage and proved to be a turning point in the history of India’s independence movement.  

The difference between these two activists and thousands of others who worked silently and unobtrusively to bring about change or others who chose to violently enforce their ideals, was that Greta and Gandhi took a stand against what they perceived was wrong. They challenged the powers that be in the full glare of media publicity, and by their actions drew in thousands of others to join their cause, forcing the media to spotlight the issues they were espousing. That has been the basic difference between the local activists as well as others elsewhere on the planet.

Our own President has long been a very vocal supporter of environment concerns. He also holds the portfolio of the Minister of Environment. Sadly, unlike Greta, our President has not been seen to stand up to actions designed to degrade the environment.

Our sister paper the ‘Sunday Times’ highlighted that emissions from burning a lump of coal or a gallon of gas has an effect on the climate 100,000 times greater than the heat given off by burning fossil fuels itself. To make matters worse, the heat trapped by those emissions can be felt within a few months of the fuel being burned.

Burning fossil fuels, according to the the Carnegie Institute for Science is the Globe’s biggest source of human-caused greenhouse gases and primary cause of climate change. Yet, while most countries around the world are phasing out coal-fired power generation and the United Nations itself, via its Secretary General is promoting an end to coal-fired power generation by 2020, our electricity board is proposing to set up another coal-fired power plant in 2039!

Climate change causes rising sea levels. Some areas of our country are barely six inches above sea level. What would be the fate of the yet unborn generations of this country? 

Is there a ‘bard’ among us willing to stand up and be counted? Is there a Greta Thunberg somewhere among our silent environment activists?