Greta Thunberg grew out of five decades of environmental youth activism in Sweden
After an 18-month digital campaign, young people are taking to the streets again and demanding climate justice, with attention focused on the UN climate summit in Glasgow and a protest march on November 5th.
When a 15-year-old Greta Thunberg began her School Strike for the climate outside the Swedish Parliament in 2018, few had anticipated that her initiative would stimulate worldwide protests. Due to its rapid international impact, this movement has been described as one new form of political mobilization, but such generalizations do not take into account the much longer history of young people’s global awareness and action. As a historian who has done research environmental youth activism in Sweden “before Greta”, we claim that what you see today has its roots in a Scandinavian tradition of young people’s autonomy and global awareness.
We would first like to note that children’s participation in social and political issues has been facilitated by specific notions of childhood in the Nordic countries. The idea of the autonomous and competent child has been described by researchers as a characteristic feature of “Nordic childhood model”, Which has influenced child rearing and public policy for decades. Although the elements of this model are not unique to the region, the performance has had a lasting impact on several generations of Swedish children, teaching them the value of independence and making their voices heard.
There has also been a long-term ambition in Sweden to promote young people’s global awareness. Today, climate change dominates the political agenda, but this is not the first global issue to engage young people. In the early post-war period, children and young people played a key role when development assistance became a new area in Swedish foreign policy. Surveys showed that young people were more receptive to the message of international solidarity than older generations and thus became crucial target groups for efforts to increase popular support for development aid policy.
Elderly people on trial
With the rise of modern environmentalism and “ecological turnaround“Around 1970, when the knowledge of a global environmental crisis became more widespread, children and young people were mobilized to act.
One of the first major Swedish initiatives was the campaign “Front against environmental degradation”, which the insurance company Folksam launched in 1968. The company had strong ties to the Social Democratic government and started a national competition where young people were commissioned to document the environment. problems in their local communities. These inventories formed the basis of a series of public hearings in 1969, in which young people pitted an older generation of politicians, public officials and industry leaders against the wall. With an average attendance of 500 people, these hearings were considered a public success.
From a contemporary point of view, the young interrogators’ demands for clean air and sewage treatment appear modest, but during the campaign final – an “environmental parliament” in January 1970 – the Swedish Minister of Agriculture considered it ungrateful of the younger generation to also demand change. Quickly. With stubborn and tireless work, he argued, further environmental degradation would be prevented in due course.
Youth-led activism
Modern Swedish history provides several examples of youth-led activism in global issues. While the Folksam initiative was adult-organized, other campaigns and initiatives have relied on the younger generation’s self-organization. An early example of this was the Field Biologists (literally: “field biologists”), the Swedish Department of Nature Conservation’s youth department, which became a breeding ground for environmental activism.
In addition to hiking in the wilderness, field biologists began to demonstrate and make spectacular direct actions. They marched under banners such as “killing nature is suicide” and “your children are protesting against your short-sightedness”. In the early 1970s, they sent disposable bottles and cans to the authorities to stimulate a transition to recycling.
Another striking example was the annual Operation Dagsverke campaign, the “Operations Dagsverke”, which emerged in the early 1960s. Led by fairly loosely organized student unions, the campaign expanded rapidly and soon involved tens of thousands of school children raising money for projects in the global south.
This campaign relied on two of the main resources that children have often been mobilized in efforts to create change: time and spontaneous activity. By devoting a whole day to fundraising, children took time off from school to invest in the future of humanity – a way of thinking that has also been important in the school strike movement. The field biologists and the operation day’s work both included a kind of age integration, where older teenagers organized and coordinated the efforts of younger children, a trait they share with contemporary activism.
One year after Greta Thunberg started protesting outside the Swedish parliament, climate protests took place globally and she got the name “person of the year”By Time magazine. This impact was made possible by digital technology and social media platforms, but the emergence of this movement should also be understood in the light of a more than 50-year-old political culture of environmental activism for young people.
This story is part of The Conversations’ coverage of COP26, the Glasgow climate conference, by experts from around the world.
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