Greta Thunberg - Our House Is on Fire - Scenes of a Family and a Planet in Crisis

That’s the title of one of the current American president’s bestselling books.

Think BIG!

Donald Trump embodies some of the worst parts of our society. He is the end of the road for our time, but what he represents is of course nothing new. We’ve all been living in his world for a very long time. In the winner’s world. A world where everything must expand.

The world is like a carousel spinning at increasing speed – faster and faster.

But how fast is fast enough? Are we ever going to reach a critical point, a point where we can no longer close our eyes to all those who aren’t able to adapt to the speed; the ones who get flung off in the middle of the ride? All those we sacrifice in favour of a society with endless economic growth? Which, to be fair, leads to a higher standard of living because the driving force to be a little bit better off and get a little closer to the dizzying upper echelons drives everything forward. And sure, that all might sound pretty reasonable sometimes, if you just close your eyes to the fact that we are well on our way to sawing off the branch we are all living on.

For the fact is that, in the midst of all the upward-trending growth curves, a great many people are feeling worse and worse. Involuntary solitude has become a chronic public-health issue. Burn-out and mental illness are no longer a global ticking health bomb – the bomb has already exploded.

In Sweden, mental-health issues in children aged 10 to 17 have increased by over 100 per cent in 10 years. According to the Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare’s report of December 2017, almost 190,000 children and young adults in Sweden suffer from some form of mental illness. Girls and young women fare the worst, with 16 per cent having had some form of contact with adolescent psychiatry services. That’s almost one in six girls in Sweden.

The number of ADHD and autism diagnoses have each more than doubled in the past five years.

There is talk of tens of thousands of stay-at-home children. The grey zone, where these children reside, is enormous and the number of unreported cases is huge – because no one wants to be here, no one wants these figures to exist since they speak of fundamental failure for everyone involved. But in the incomplete statistics we sense the contours of a catastrophe.

And nowhere are there any signs that the trend is in decline. Or levelling out.

It’s accelerating.

We try to find out why this is the state of things. We search and think that nowhere on earth are women equal to men and that the evidence of this is everywhere, all the time. Certain examples are more obvious than others, but once you start looking there seems to be no end to the discoveries.

To generalize, the strongest woman cannot equal the strongest man in terms of muscle mass or lung capacity. But that’s not to say women aren’t stronger than men.

It’s all about how we perceive strength and which qualities we value most. But no one can deny that the qualities we traditionally associate with success and happiness are strongly linked with male physiology.

Higher, bigger, faster, stronger. More.

And when we say that we want an equal society, what this often means in practice is that, if women are going to succeed, we must embrace those male qualities that in reality we are never going to be able to fully appropriate. We have to become like men.

We have to compete against men on men’s terms. Just like the iconic image of the woman who has rolled up her sleeves and is flexing her biceps, we all have to become women in skirts and boxing gloves: symbols for a struggle that in the end we can never overcome. And if, against most expectations, we do so anyway, we’re probably going to be perceived as unwomanly – too strong, too educated – and whatever we do will almost always be wrong in one way or another. And society will no doubt continue in exactly this way until we start to seriously expose the structures that rule this world.

The structures that for every passing second fling more and more people off this merry-go-round. The structures that often expose us to real physical danger because we are forced to become something or someone that we are not in order to be classified as successful. Or to simply fit in.

According to the Swedish Social Insurance Agency, the number of people on medical leave with chronic fatigue has doubled six times since 2010. Over 80 per cent are women.

These figures speak for themselves. It’s a dramatic language.

And the fact that they don’t take up more space in public debate and the media also tells a story. A story that – once again – explains to future generations what and who are prioritized.

And what and who aren’t.

Feminism, on the other hand, means many different things to many different people, and many are taken aback when it is mentioned in a sustainability or environmental context. The connection deserves a separate section in every well-stocked library, but here it is probably enough to say that women and highly sensitive people are gravely over-represented in those bleak statistics that constitute the downside of our competitive society.

As we’ve said, we find ourselves in a sustainability crisis. But we also find ourselves in an acute climate crisis. There is almost no one who still denies this crisis, which is a good thing. However, the problem is that it’s a big step from acknowledging the existence of the crisis to understanding what it actually means. A very big step.

We as human beings are currently in the middle of that step – in a void where everything can continue as usual.

We think we know what the crisis means.

Everyone assumes that everybody knows.

My name is Greta and I am fifteen years old. My little sister, Beata, will turn thirteen this autumn. We can’t vote in the parliamentary election even though the political issues now at stake are going to affect our whole lives in a way that can’t be compared with previous generations.

If we live to be a hundred then we’re going to be here well into the next century, and that sounds really strange, I know. Because when you talk about the future today, it usually means in just a few years’ time. Everything beyond the year 2050 is so distant that it doesn’t even exist in our imaginations. But by then my little sister and I – hopefully – will not even have lived half our lives. My grandfather is ninety-three and his father lived to be ninety-nine, so it’s not an impossibility that we’re going to live long lives, too.

In the years 2078 and 2080 we will celebrate our seventy-fifth birthdays. If we have children and grandchildren, perhaps they’ll celebrate those birthdays with us. Perhaps we’ll tell them what it was like when we were children. Perhaps we’ll tell them about all of you.

Perhaps they are going to wonder why you, who had the chance to be heard, didn’t speak up. But it doesn’t have to be that way. We could all start acting as if we were in the middle of the crisis we are in fact in.

You keep saying that the children are our future, and that you would do anything for them. Such things sound full of hope. If you mean what you say, then please listen to us – we don’t want your pep talks. We don’t want your presents, your package holidays, your hobbies or your unlimited options. We want you to seriously get involved in the acute sustainability crisis going on all around you. And we want you to start speaking up and telling it like it is.