“Our house is burning”

Greta Thunberg won’t be hitting Canberra any time soon. Beijing and Washington too are off limits. The sixteen-year-old environmental prophet, whose weekly sit-downs outside Sweden’s parliament since last August have inspired a transnational “school strike for climate,” shuns air travel. That, and becoming vegan are modest steps in the change she is sure the world must make to avert ecological breakdown. Her family has taken her lead, at some cost to the career of her mother, an opera singer who — somehow, inevitably — once represented Sweden in the Eurovision song contest.

Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg speaks to
BBC television journalist, Nick Robinson outside
the Houses of Parliament in London on 23 April 2019. 

Yet judging by her March–April procession through Berlin, Strasbourg, Rome and London — all journeys made by rail — Thunberg also needs to go (or at least talk) to those capitals and their hinterlands if her message that “our house is burning” is to take effective hold. This is but one paradox in a meteoric rise that seems already to hold both room for lasting good and risk of early burn-out.

Read the Inside Story by David Hayes - “Our house is burning”.”