Opinions may differ, but I think the choice of Greta Thunberg for the Time Person of the Year works for me. She is young, but she doesn't come to play when it comes to her message--the planet is fucked unless we start getting serious about reversing what we are doing to it.
It isn't doom-saying. It isn't apocalypse-fiction. She's deadly serious. The denialists are unseriously looking for silver linings in clouds that are actually the haze of wildfires. They want to say that Thunberg's seriousness is her own fault, or that of her parents or "handlers".
I don't think this young woman is being handled. I've written not long ago that it is the adults who want to feel affronted by her who are in need of getting a handle on themselves. It is certainly true that when she says her childhood was stolen from her, that she could have had it another way--that children exist today who don't notice or at least aren't obsessed or even moved by the gathering ecological dangers posed by the realities of the sixth extinction which we are now experiencing, and all because of human activity.
Knowing something is funny, though. When one more than casually knows that ocean acidification could eventually choke out the oxygen we breathe here on land, it has an effect. When the ecosystems human life depend upon are eroding, it is hard to unknow that. She chose action. She wasn't handled into that--she chose.
She makes people uncomfortable because some have chosen not only not to act, but not to even really know--to try and find happy stories about how people are surviving climate disasters because we humans have adapted to adversity through technology, without understand the message that we alone do that, and other species cannot. And that we are connected to this other life on earth, and that the costs of our survival will mount.
Her message is uncomfortable, but must be addressed.
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