REBEL FOR GOOD
What a rebellious teenager, a pop band, and scientists have in common, but the politicians don't!
At the age of 15, she was participating in demonstrations in front of the Swedish parliament as a climate activist.
“It was slow, not fast enough. So I thought of doing it on my own” she said after attending demonstrations post school hours.
Greta Thunberg’s story is very inspirational. She suffered from depression at around 12 years of age after knowing about climate change and seeing people being too busy to even acknowledge it. At the age of 8, she first heard about climate change in 2011, and since then she has persistently tried to understand and do something about it.
Even after being diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and selective mutism, she did not give up. Instead she took it as a “super power” and turned it into an opportunity to work on what she believed. She came back thinking, it would be better to do something rather than wasting time just sitting around.
“The more I do, the more I feel better. The more I get involved in the climate change movement, I feel happier.”
I feel she is an inspiration not only for the climate change movement but for people to channelize their energy into something they believe in and find purpose above negativity.
Many ask, what do kids have to say and why are they protesting when they should be attending school. Greta addressed this at the School Strike for Climate protests,
“We children don’t usually do what you adults tell us to do, we do as you do. So since you don’t give a damn about my future, then I won’t either.”
This is classic parenting 101 and majority of modern parents fail at it. Children don’t do what parents ask them to do, but they imitate their parents and if they themselves behave like they don’t care for the environment, kids won’t either. This behavior puts the entire ecosystem into a jeopardy by resulting into a disastrous downward spiral.
For her parents, she was a troublemaker but not like other kids. Her demands were benign and just supporting her cause like not flying anymore and turning vegan. It used to disrupt their travel / vacation plans but soon she convinced her family in reducing their carbon emissions for the good. They all now support Greta in this fight for climate change :)
Greta Thunberg gave an emotional speech to the EU leaders, and it left me in tears. I feel this is the level of empathy that we all need.
Over the 1975’s minimal orchestral backing
While the Shawn Mendes and Camilla Cabelo collaboration was climbing charts in the music world, a new kind of collaboration was taking birth - The 1975 English pop-rock band and the 16 year old climate activist Greta Thunberg.
The voiceover by Greta Thunberg with The 1975’s music is a tour de force.
Music enriches my soul and helps me explore different emotions. The power of music is boundless. That’s the reason why artists from Michael Jackson (Earth Song, 1995) to Radiohead (Idioteque) have released songs on environment and climate change to inspire people and raise awareness.
Thunberg said: “I’m grateful to get the opportunity to get my message out to a broad new audience in a new way. I think it’s great that the 1975 is so strongly engaged in the climate crisis. We quickly need to get people in all branches of society to get involved. And this collaboration I think is something new.”
The proceeds from the track will go to Extinction Rebellion at Thunberg’s request. The environmental group released a statement welcoming the collaboration: “Music has the power to break through barriers, and right now we really need to break through some barriers if we are to face this emergency.”
Thunberg is the first outside party to feature on a recording by the band. The track was recorded in Stockholm in late June and is the first song to be released from the 1975’s forthcoming album, Notes on a Conditional Form.
The band manager and founder of the label Dirty Hit, Jamie Oborne, said the group and the label were making efforts to minimise their environmental impact. Dirty Hit’s office has phased out all single-use plastic, will no longer produce plastic products including CD jewel cases and is working to minimise the impact of vinyl production.
“Rather than ignoring that it’s a pollutant, we’re minimising it by only doing lightweight vinyl from now on,” Oborne said. “That isn’t very trendy, but one heavyweight LP is the equivalent of making two or three [standard thickness LPs].”
It’s good to see famous artists take up the responsibility of passing on such an important message to a large audience in an interesting manner.
[In a bid to cut down on waste, The 1975 had the novel idea of recycling merchandise by printing new designs on unsold t-shirts and inviting fans to recycle their own at Reading and Leeds 2019 ahead of their headline set.]
When doing good is not good enough!
As scientists, we tend to operate under an unspoken assumption – that our job is to provide the world with factual information, and if we do so our leaders will use it to make wise decisions. But what if that assumption is wrong? For decades, conservation scientists like us have been telling the world that species and ecosystems are disappearing, and that their loss will have devastating impacts on humanity. Meanwhile, climate scientists have been warning that the continued burning of fossil fuels and destruction of natural carbon sinks, such as forests and peatlands, will lead to catastrophic planetary heating.
We have collectively written tens of thousands of peer-reviewed papers, and shared our findings with policymakers and the public. And, on the face of it, we seem to have done a pretty good job: after all, we all know about the environmental and climate crises, don’t we?
But while we’re now well informed, we haven’t actually changed course. Biodiversity loss proceeds apace, to the extent that a million species face extinction in the coming decades, and we continue to pump carbon into the atmosphere at ever faster rates. We have emitted more greenhouse gases since 1990, in full awareness of its impacts, than we ever did in ignorance. It seems that knowledge alone cannot trigger the radical global changes we so urgently need.
It was this realisation that incited us both to embrace activism, and to take to the streets and engage in non-violent civil disobedience as members of Extinction Rebellion. The refusal to obey certain laws has a long and glorious history: from the suffragettes to Rosa Parks and Gandhi, many of the 20th century’s greatest heroes engaged in non-violent civil disobedience to win their rights.
Today, civil disobedience is again on the rise. And it is working. The protests that shut down four sites in London in April raised the climate crisis rapidly up the political agenda, and into the public consciousness. The environment is now the third most pressing issue for British voters, above the economy, crime and immigration: the UK parliament and half the country’s local councils have declared a climate emergency, and a zero-carbon target has been enshrined into law. We don’t know what policy change will follow, but it is an encouraging start. (Full Article on the guardian)
“If we don’t protect nature, we can’t protect ourselves” - Harrison Ford
“Stop, for god sake’s, the denigration of science. Stop giving power to people who don’t believe in science or worse than that , pretend they don’t believe in science for their own self-interest. They know who they are, we know who they are.”
The Green Letter features stories at the intersection of Environment, Society and Culture from a millennial perspective. Subscribe this Sunday newsletter to receive inspiring, positive stories whilst educating ourselves about the world we live in :)
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