Greta Thunberg is 'Time' magazine's Person of the Year 2019
In August 2018, Greta Thunberg sat alone outside the Swedish parliament flanked only by a black and white sign which read: "Skolstrejk för klimatet."
Almost a year and a half after her first climate strike, 16-year-old Thunberg has just been named Time magazine's Person of the Year 2019.
The news was announced just as Thunberg addressed a UN climate change summit in Madrid, Spain, and accused world leaders of "creative PR" to evade tangible action on climate change.
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"We can’t just continue living as if there was no tomorrow, because there is a tomorrow," Thunberg told Time in an interview accompanying the announcement. "That is all we are saying."
That simple statement uttered by the Swedish teenager has proved hugely impactful.
"For decades, researchers and activists have struggled to get world leaders to take the climate threat seriously. But this year, an unlikely teenager somehow got the world's attention," Time magazine wrote.
Thunberg's lone climate strike in 2018 was the beginning of a global movement.
In the 16 months that followed, Thunberg has inspired young people around the world to join climate protests and on Sept. 20, 2019, 4 million people joined the global climate strike.
"Thunberg is not a leader of any political party or advocacy group. She is neither the first to sound the alarm about the climate crisis nor the most qualified to fix it," Time notes.
"She is not a scientist or a politician. She has no access to traditional levers of influence: she’s not a billionaire or a princess, a pop star or even an adult. She is an ordinary teenage girl who, in summoning the courage to speak truth to power, became the icon of a generation."
Topics Activism Social Good
Rachel Thompson is the Features Editor at Mashable. Rachel's second non-fiction book The Love Fix: Reclaiming Intimacy in a Disconnected World is out now, published by Penguin Random House in Jan. 2025. The Love Fix explores why dating feels so hard right now, why we experience difficult emotions in the realm of love, and how we can change our dating culture for the better.
A leading sex and dating writer in the UK, Rachel has written for GQ, The Guardian, The Sunday Times Style, The Telegraph, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Stylist, ELLE, The i Paper, Refinery29, and many more.
Rachel's first book Rough: How Violence Has Found Its Way Into the Bedroom And What We Can Do About It, a non-fiction investigation into sexual violence was published by Penguin Random House in 2021.
