File photo of Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg
Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg announced that her era of "school strikes for the climate” is winding down after 251 weeks as she wraps up her secondary education.
The environmentalist has gone on a weekly school strike every Friday since August 2018, when she was 15. It’s helped thrust her into the global spotlight as one of the most prominent activist voices on climate issues.
While many of Thunberg’s strikes have been on the steps on the parliament in Stockholm, her "Fridays for Future” initiative has gathered millions of like-minded activists demanding climate justice in weekly events around the world.
"When I started striking in 2018 I could never have expected that it would lead to anything. After striking every day for three weeks, we were a small group of children who decided to continue doing this every Friday,” tweeted the now 20-year-old.
Thunberg took a year-long break from the classroom that ended in August 2020, during which time she traveled the world - including sailing on a zero-emissions yacht from the UK to the US - and spoke at United Nations climate summits and other venues to raise awareness of her message. She was named Time’s "Person of the Year” in 2019.
During the almost five years of protests, the world’s efforts to hasten a shift to climate-neutral energy solutions have accelerated, but Thunberg and other activists have regularly lambasted governments and companies for doing too little, too late.
Along the way, Thunberg has become a vocal supporter of indigenous rights as companies and governments scour the world for locations to place renewable energy projects. In March, Thunberg was carried away by Norwegian police after protesting wind farms to be built on indigenous lands. It wasn’t her first forced removal: in January the activist was detained after protesting a coal mine expansion in Germany.
Thunberg said she isn’t planning to stop her Friday protests. "We’re still here, and we aren’t planning on going anywhere. Much has changed since we started, and yet we have much further to go,” she tweeted.
Her future educational plans are unclear.
