Five years ago, Greta Thunberg held a climate rally for the first time while at school. After 251 weeks, school strikes are over for her: the Swede has finished high school. She wants to continue protesting.
It all started five years ago with a big white protest sign that read “Skolstrejk för klimatet” – with a similar poster, Greta Thunberg last appeared at a Friday school strike today. The reason for the breakup: The 20-year-old graduated from high school, which means her time as a bitch is over after 251 weeks of strikes. She can no longer skip classes to protest in front of the Swedish parliament because she no longer goes to school, wrote the young Swede on Twitter.
But she still wants to protest on Fridays – it’s not a real “school strike” anymore. “We simply have no choice but to do what we can. The fight has just begun,” wrote Thunberg. Furthermore, she provided a group photo of her regular protest in front of the Swedish Reichstag and another of herself in the cap typical of Scandinavian high school graduates.
First a lonely protest, then a worldwide movement
Thunberg was just 15 years old when she sat alone outside Parliament in Stockholm in August 2018, during school hours, to protest her country’s climate policy. Teenagers around the world followed her lead – in a very short time, the worldwide “Fridays for Future” movement developed out of lone protest.
It all started five years ago with a lonely protest: Greta Thunberg at age 15 during her strike in front of the Swedish parliament
“When I started the strike in 2018, I never expected it to lead to anything,” said Thunberg. Suddenly, their protest morphed into a global movement that grew by the day. In 2019, millions of children and young people in over 180 countries went to demonstrations instead of going to school. Then you had to find new forms of protest in the corona pandemic, but over time you returned to the streets.
“A lot has changed since we started and we still have a lot to do,” wrote Thunberg. The world is still moving in the wrong direction. Those in power will be able to sacrifice marginalized people affected by the climate crisis and the planet in the name of greed, profit and economic growth. This brings us closer to potential ecological and climate tipping points beyond human control.
Meeting with Obama and Merkel
The core messages of “Fridays for Future” have always remained the same: the world must listen to scientific discoveries, phase out fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas, and finally start treating the climate crisis like a real crisis. Thunberg herself became world famous with her protest and her frightening words. She traveled by yacht to a climate summit in New York, met personalities such as former US President Barack Obama and Hollywood star Leonardo DiCaprio. Along with her German comrade in arms Luisa Neubauer and two Belgian activists, she also met Angela Merkel at the Chancellery in Berlin in the summer of 2020 to demand more courage and commitment from the then Chancellor when it came to climate protection.
Thunberg received prominent support for her latest “school climate strike”: musician Patti Smith, who was in Stockholm for a concert, attended the demonstration. Smith told the newspaper Dagens Nyheter that she had tears in her eyes when she met Thunberg. On Twitter, the singer acknowledged the 20-year-old Swede’s fight for the climate and congratulated her on graduating from school.
With the diploma, Thunberg can now start studying. Its exact plans are not yet publicly known.