Not just Greta

[Boyd Roberts]

Not just Greta

 

While we will all have been impressed by the actions and leadership of the teenage Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, a recent article in The Guardian highlights the important work of young activists in the developing world which receives far less media attention.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/oct/05/greta-thunber...

5 October 2019

 

In the article Nigerian author Chika Unigwe comments:

 

“Ridhima Pandey was just nine years old in 2017 when she filed a lawsuit against the Indian government for failing to take action against climate change. Pandey’s fierce, astounding passion for the environment is not accidental. Her mother is a forestry guard and her father an environmental activist; and the whole family was displaced by the Uttarakhand floods of 2013, which claimed hundreds of lives.

 

In Kenya Kaluki Paul Mutuku has been actively involved in conservation since college, where he was a member of an environmental awareness club, and has been a member of the African Youth Initiative on Climate Change since 2015. Raised in rural Kenya by a single mother, Mutuku’s vigorous activism, like Pandey’s, was inspired by the direct challenges his family (and wider community) faced from the effects of climate change: “Growing up, I witnessed mothers cover kilometres to fetch water,” he says.

 

(T)eenager) Aditya Mukarji, in March 2018 began a war against plastic straws. Within just five months, he had already helped replace more than 500,000 plastic straws at restaurants and hotels in New Delhi. “People listen more to children bringing up environmental concerns,” he says.

 

Last year Nina Gualinga, an indigenous activist from the Ecuadorian Amazon since the age of eight, won the WWF’s top youth conservation award.

Nina Gualinga, the recipient of the 2018 WWF International President’s Youth award, has been an advocate for climate justice and indigenous rights since the age of eight.

 

 

At 15, Autumn Peltier from the Anishinaabe people of Canada, is a veteran clean water and climate advocate. And Leah Namugerwa is a 15-year-old Ugandan activist.”

 

Yet these activities do not get the international media coverage that Greta receives – although she is keen to acknowledge the work and efforts of others when she speaks.

 

Chika Ungive comments that the focus on Greta Thunberg, to the exclusion of other activists, many from the developing world, helps to perpetuate the “white saviour” idea – that it is Western white people who must lead and come up with solutions to issues. (This is particularly inappropriate in the case of climate change, where it is Western societies and companies that are historically responsible for the change.”

 

Please share any stories of young activists who are taking environmental action. Especially interesting are young people undertaking activities as part of the IGCA.

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