‘Realistic’ Greta Thunberg wants a normal teenager’s life again

Greta Thunberg is looking forward to going back to school and becoming a ‘normal teenager’ … but not until August.

Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg. Picture: AP

Greta Thunberg is looking forward to going back to school and becoming a “normal teenager”.

The climate change activist, 16, has been taking a gap year during which she has addressed world leaders at conferences in the US and Europe and sailed across the Atlantic to avoid flying.

Now Miss Thunberg says that she is looking forward to returning to lessons with other teenagers in August.

“I’m really looking forward to going back to school,” she told Today on BBC Radio 4, which she guest edited this morning.

“I just want to be like anyone else, I want to have a normal life not having to organise marches. I want to educate myself and to be a normal teenager.”

She hit back at world leaders who have criticised her, such as President Bolsonaro of Brazil, who called her a brat, and President Trump, who said that she had an “anger management problem” and suggested she “chill” by going to a film with a friend.

“They are terrified of young people bringing change which they don’t want,” she said, describing the attacks as funny. “That is just proof we are actually doing something and that they see us as some kind of threat.”

Miss Thunberg, who glared at Mr Trump in the lobby at the United Nations in New York in September, said that talking to him would have been a waste of time. She said: “He is obviously not listening to scientists and experts. Why would he listen to me?”

She said that she feels climate activists are being listened to, although the science is being ignored by politicians and those in finance and the media.

Miss Thunberg said that going into the new year she was feeling “realistic”, adding: “It is not like it is going to change overnight.”

The teenager, who has Asperger’s syndrome, said she had suffered with depression and felt her activism had been a medicine. “It really helps in getting out of that depression because it gives a feeling you are having an impact,” she said.

She thanked the broadcaster Sir David Attenborough, who had inspired her to take action. Watching documentaries about the natural world when she was younger had “opened her eyes” to the climate change crisis, she said.

She spoke to Sir David on Skype for the first time in a conversation recorded by the BBC. She said: “Thank you for that because that was what made me decide to do something about it.”

Sir David, 93, described the impact she has made as “astonishing”, adding: “She has achieved things that many of us who have been working on it for 20-odd years have failed to achieve.”

Miss Thunberg started a school “strike for the climate” outside the Swedish parliament in August last year. It has since spread all over the world.

The teenager’s campaigning message that the world belongs to young people is “a very powerful one”, according to Sir David, who told her: “You have made it an argument that people have not been able to dodge.”

Her father said in a separate interview that she became ill three or four years before the school strikes, and stopped eating and talking to others. Svante Thunberg, an actor, said that he and Miss Thunberg’s mother, the opera singer Malena Ernman, made changes in their lives, such as turning vegan and not flying, to “save” their daughter, rather than the world. Their actions had given Miss Thunberg energy.

Mr Thunberg said of her climate change activism: “We thought it was a bad idea, your own daughter sort of putting herself at the front line of such a huge question like climate change. You wouldn’t want that as a parent.”

The Times