On Monday, April 15, 2019 a sixteen year old schoolgirl from Sweden said politicians were failing to take enough action on climate change and the threats to the natural world.

She told a room full of MEPs and EU officials in Strasbourg, “Our house is falling apart and our leaders need to start acting accordingly because at the moment they are not.”

When the young climate activist spoke of a “sixth mass extinction”, her voice faltered. “The extinction rate is up to six times faster than what is considered normal, with up to 200 species becoming extinct every single day,” she said. “Erosion of fertile topsoil, deforestation of the rainforest, toxic air pollution, loss of insects and wildlife, acidification of our oceans – these are all disastrous trends.”

Who is Greta Thunberg?

Greta Thunberg gained notice when she began a solo climate protest by striking from school in Sweden in August of 2018. She has since been joined by tens of thousands of school and university students in Australia, Belgium, Germany, the United States, Japan and more than a dozen other countries.

In December of 2018, at the United Nations climate conference, she said world leaders were behaving like irresponsible children.  And in January 2019 she hit on the global business elite in Davos: “Some people, some companies, some decision-makers in particular, have known exactly what priceless values they have been sacrificing to continue making unimaginable amounts of money. And I think many of you here today belong to that group of people.”

Thunberg said “you are never too small to make a difference,” she said. Her protests have been inspired by US students who staged walk-outs to demand better gun controls in the wake of school shootings.