“How dare you?” thundered Greta Thunberg at the United Nations General Assembly during the Climate Action Summit in 2019, then all of 16 years old. Arguably the most famous teen today, Thunberg founded the Fridays For Future movement, in which children skip school to drive home the point that world leaders are only paying lip service to what is a full-blown existential crisis. She has inspired hundreds of young people in India, who have been striking every week since last September.
But why has this job been left to kids like Thunberg in the first place — why have they been saddled with a disproportionate burden of care, and what is the effect it is having on them?
“I became depressed. I saw that everything was just so wrong, and nothing mattered,” says Thunberg in the I Know This To Be True book that profiles her and was published by the Nelson Mandela Foundation in collaboration with Blackwell & Ruth. “How I got out of that depression was by thinking to myself, ‘I can do so much, one person can do so much. And so I should try to do everything I can to change things, instead of just doing nothing’,” she adds.
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