Stockholm on November 7

After 18 months of 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 5 November.

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 a 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 historians who have researched environmental activism for young people in Sweden “before Greta”, we claim that what you see today has its roots in a Scandinavian tradition of youth power 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 the “Nordic childhood model”, which has influenced child rearing and public policy for several 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 emergence of modern environmental protection and the “ecological turn” around 1970, as knowledge of a global environmental crisis became more widespread, children and young people were mobilized to take action.

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 launched a national competition where young people were commissioned to document environmental 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, civil servants 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 most important resources that children have often mobilized 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 feature that they share with contemporary activism.

One year after Greta Thunberg began protesting outside Sweden’s Riksdag, climate protests were taking place globally and she was named “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. – The conversation