Last month, I joined one of the Youth Climate Marches. It was a festive occasion, as school children skipped classes and gathered with their parents and others to march a mile or so through town. Home-made placards calling for action on climate change bobbed along to chants of 
Say Hey! Say Ho!
Climate change has got to go!
The mood was upbeat and positive, and it felt good to be doing something. Marching is a fine British tradition and an expression of citizenship, and it’s good to see a shopping street briefly transformed into a true public space.
The following week, a video of Greta Thunberg addressing the UN went viral. “You look to us children for hope,” she says, her voice shaking with emotion and her face distorted with anger. “How dare you! You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words.”
This is disturbing and it calls for some investigation. Have we destroyed the hopes of an entire generation? It’s true in a way that older generations have not done as much as they (we) could have done, and future generations will pay the price. It is likely to be a very high price, too. But true as that is, it isn’t the whole truth.
Another view of the youth strikes was put forward in a Facebook post from Australia, which went viral and was endorsed by Senator Pauline Hanson. It begins:
To all the school kids going on “strike” for Climate Change. You are the first generation who have required air-conditioning in every classroom. You want TV in every room and your classes are all computerised…
The writer goes on to point an accusing finger at their addiction to technology, their energy-guzzling lifestyles and concern for fashion, and suggests that they start walking to school and swap fast food for home-made sandwiches.
It is an unkind post, but it contains a truth that is perhaps a little different from what the writer had in mind. Those of us, of all ages, who protest that we want to see action on climate change are also enjoying unprecedented levels of health and comfort, all paid for by fossil fuel. Protesting is not enough; real change is required from everybody.
The point is that we are all the beneficiaries of earlier generations who wanted a better future for their children and so invented cars, washing machines, vaccines, central heating and TV. We take these things for granted. Now that we know the environmental cost of course, we wonder if we ought to stop. But how can we give all this up? Where would we even start?
That is why it doesn’t help to divide humanity up into generations and have one blame the other. The youth strikers would not even know about climate change if older people had not researched atmospheric physics, monitored the health of ecosystems, made donations to the likes of Greenpeace, and – crucially – made sure it was on the school curriculum. Because climate change is too big for anyone – and especially young people with their very limited life experience – to see it unless someone points it out to them.
As a thoughtful piece by Andy West argues, Greta Thunberg is not speaking from direct experience. She is rather expressing a fear that she has picked up from the culture around her. She is very different from Malala Yousafzai, say, whose message is grounded in the fact of her having been shot in the head by the Taliban.
Expressing cultural fears is not a bad thing, as long as they are recognized as such. Greta is picking up on the contrast between what people say and what they actually do, and like the little boy who pointed out that the Emperor had no clothes, we need people who will do this – and the young are good at it.
We are also inclined as a society to listen to young people in a certain way. The Biblical phrase ‘out of the mouths of babes and sucklings’ expresses the notion that their innocence embodies a special wisdom. Maybe that is why politicians will listen to a Swedish teenager when they will not listen to adult campaigners, who have long been saying the same thing with greater knowledge and experience.
So we should listen to young people without defensiveness, and not let it turn into an intergenerational conflict. Instead we should stand with them and help them see the bigger picture. Older generations have this to offer, that we know something of how the current crisis came to be, and so we have some wisdom to hand down before we go.
Climate change is a much bigger story than the three or four generations that are alive now. It has unfathomably deep roots in the past and it will reach far into the future. If we are to respond to it with courage, we must resist easy formulations and open ourselves to the mystery of life. Nobody has stolen anyone else’s childhood; we are all in this together.
Finding Our Power 