The Swedish teenager who launched the school strike movement this week urged MEPs to ‘wake up and take action’. Here are five of her most inspiring quotes
1. Addressing COP24 in Katowice, December 2018
Until you start focusing on what needs to be done rather than what is politically possible, there is no hope. We can’t solve a crisis without treating it as a crisis. We need to keep the fossil fuels in the ground, and we need to focus on equity. And if solutions within the system are so impossible to find, maybe we should change the system itself
Image: Markus Spiske
2. Addressing a special meeting of the European parliament’s environment committee, April 2019
Our house is falling apart and our leaders need to start acting accordingly because at the moment they are not. If our house was falling apart our leaders wouldn’t go on like we do today. If our house was falling apart, you wouldn’t hold three emergency Brexit summits and no emergency summit regarding the breakdown of the climate and the environment
Image: Markus Spiske
3. Speaking to political and business leaders in Brussels, February 2019
If you still say that we are wasting valuable lesson time, then let me remind you that our political leaders have wasted decades through denial and inaction
Image: Markus Spiske
4. Rounding on the global business elite in Davos, January 2019
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
Image: Markus Spiske
5. Addressing a special meeting of the European parliament’s environment committee, April 2019
It is still not too late to act. It will take a far-reaching vision, it will take courage, it will take fierce, fierce determination to act now, to lay the foundations where we may not know all the details about how to shape the ceiling. In other words, it will take cathedral thinking. I ask you to please wake up and make changes required possible
Image: Mika Baumeister
Featured image: Greta Thunberg, photographed outside the Swedish parliament building in August 2018 by Anders Hellberg. Published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license
Read more: the student climate strikes
