Greta Thunberg, the activist who crossed the Atlantic twice by sail rather than board a plane

Greta Thunberg

Photo: Shane Balkowitsch / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	January 3, 2003 Stockholm, Sweden
Occupation	Climate activist
Known for	Breaking Boundaries: The Science of Our Planet, I Am Greta
Awards	TIME Person of the Year · Right Livelihood · Amnesty International Ambassador of Conscience · Rachel Carson Prize · Fritt Ord · International Children's Peace Prize · Geddes Environment Medal · Gulbenkian Prize

The most revealing thing Greta Thunberg ever did was not a speech. It was a boat ride. Invited to address the United Nations in New York, she refused to fly and crossed the Atlantic on a racing yacht with no shower and a bucket for a toilet, fifteen days at sea to make a single point about carbon. When the climate summit she was heading to next moved at short notice from Chile to Spain, she did not buy a ticket. She posted that she needed a ride, and a pair of Australian sailors living aboard a catamaran took her back across the ocean.

That stubbornness is the whole method. Thunberg has built a public life on refusing the convenient version of things: the flight, the photo opportunity, the prize that comes with a ceremony, the compromise that looks good in a communiqué. It has made her the most recognisable activist of her generation and one of its most divisive figures, and she has never shown much interest in resolving that tension. She treats being disliked as a side effect of being accurate.

A silent child in Stockholm

Greta Tintin Eleonora Ernman Thunberg grew up in Stockholm, the elder daughter of the opera singer Malena Ernman and the actor Svante Thunberg; her paternal grandfather, Olof Thunberg, was an actor and director, and her middle name comes from Hergé’s boy reporter. She was eight when she first heard about climate change at school and could not understand why adults who apparently knew about it were carrying on as normal. The question did not stay abstract. Around the age of eleven she largely stopped speaking, ate very little and lost ten kilos in two months.

The diagnoses that followed were Asperger syndrome, obsessive-compulsive disorder and selective mutism, which she later described as meaning that she only speaks when necessary. She has consistently refused to treat autism as a handicap in her story. She calls it a superpower, and argues that it is precisely the inability to look away, to accept the gap between what is known and what is done, that pushed her into activism. Her mother made the diagnosis public in Sweden in 2015 to help other families.

Before the world heard of her, Thunberg ran her campaign at home. For roughly two years she lobbied her parents with graphs and data to cut the family’s footprint. They became vegan and stopped flying, a decision that effectively ended Ernman’s international opera career. The family told that story in Scener ur hjärtat, published in 2018 and later expanded in English as Our House Is on Fire: Scenes of a Family and a Planet in Crisis, credited to all four of them.

The sign outside the Riksdag

In May 2018 she won a climate essay competition run by the newspaper Svenska Dagbladet, writing that she wanted to feel safe and could not, knowing the scale of the crisis. The essay put her in touch with a small local group, Fossil Free Dalsland, where one member floated the idea of a school strike, borrowed from the American students who had walked out after the Parkland shooting. Nobody else wanted to do it. So she went alone.

On 20 August 2018, at the start of ninth grade and after the hottest Swedish summer on record, she sat down on the cobblestones outside the Riksdag with a hand-painted sign reading “Skolstrejk för klimatet”, school strike for climate. She stayed every school day until the general election on 9 September, then cut it back to Fridays. A photo on Instagram and Twitter did the rest. By December more than 20,000 students in at least 270 cities were striking, and the weekly ritual had a name: Fridays for Future.

What followed was an acceleration few activists ever experience. At the COP24 climate conference in Katowice she told delegates they were not mature enough to tell it like it is. At the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2019 she said the words that became her signature, “Our house is on fire”. She addressed the British, European and French parliaments, and met Pope Francis. When the United States House committee on the climate crisis invited her to testify, she read eight sentences and submitted the IPCC report on 1.5 degrees of warming as her evidence, a gesture that summed up her line that the science should be doing the talking.

“How dare you”

The sailing trip on Malizia II, from Plymouth to New York in August 2019, ended at the UN Climate Action Summit, where her furious, tearful speech to world leaders went around the planet within hours. On the same day she and fifteen other young people filed a complaint with the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child against five countries over their emissions. That week’s global climate strikes, on 20 and 27 September, drew more than four million people according to the organisers; she led the Montreal march and received the freedom of the city. In December, Time magazine named her Person of the Year, the youngest ever and the first born in the 21st century.

Culture absorbed her almost as fast as politics did. Her voice closes The 1975, the opening track by the band of the same name, where she tells listeners it is time for civil disobedience; at her request the proceeds went to Extinction Rebellion. She appeared as a fortune teller in Pearl Jam’s video for Retrograde, guest-edited the BBC‘s Today programme with an interview with David Attenborough, and was painted by Elizabeth Peyton. Scientists named a Kenyan beetle, Nelloptodes gretae, after her, its long antennae said to resemble her braids; a spider genus and a Panamanian frog followed.

The filmmaker Nathan Grossman had been filming her since the first lonely days at the Riksdag, operating camera and sound himself. The result, I Am Greta, premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2020 and shows the side the speeches never did: the exhaustion, the routines, her father quietly handling the logistics. The BBC followed with the series Greta Thunberg: A Year to Change the World.

Books instead of summits

By 2021 she had lost patience with the summit circuit. At COP26 in Glasgow she dismissed the leaders’ promises as “blah blah blah” and greenwashing, and she has boycotted several conferences since. Her answer was a book. The Climate Book, published by Penguin’s Allen Lane imprint in 2022, gathers more than a hundred contributors, from oceanographers and economists to Indigenous leaders, with her own essays threaded between them. She gave the copyright and all royalties to her foundation. Her earlier collection of speeches, No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference, also went to charity.

Money has been a recurring test of her consistency. She declined the Nordic Council Environment Prize in 2019, saying the Nordic countries were not cutting emissions fast enough, and routinely skips award ceremonies that would require a flight. When she received the Gulbenkian Prize for Humanity in 2020, she gave the full million euros to climate projects and to people facing the worst impacts in the Global South. The Right Livelihood Award, Amnesty International’s Ambassador of Conscience honour and repeated Nobel Peace Prize nominations sit on a list she rarely mentions.

Where the admiration stops

The critical case against Thunberg has changed shape over the years. Early on it was condescension: she was a child, she was being used, she did not understand economics. Some of it was uglier. An Alberta oil services company distributed a sticker depicting a sexual assault on a girl labelled “Greta”, and later apologised. Margaret Atwood, on the other hand, called her the Joan of Arc of the environment, and researchers coined the term “Greta effect” for the measurable rise in climate concern and flight shame that followed her in 2019, when Sweden’s domestic air travel fell by four per cent.

The sharper criticism arrived when she widened her focus. From October 2023 she began bringing pro-Palestinian signs to her Friday protests, and was attacked for not immediately condemning the Hamas attacks of 7 October; she added the next day that she opposed them. Israel’s education ministry removed references to her as a role model from its curriculum. Former allies in Germany distanced themselves. Thunberg’s position is that there is no climate justice without human rights, and that a movement for justice cannot pick which suffering to notice. Her critics answer that she has diluted a cause that once united people across political lines. Both sides agree on one thing: she has not moderated to keep her audience.

Arrested, fined, deported

Thunberg finished secondary school in June 2023 with one last school strike, wearing the white dress and cap of Swedish graduation, and later enrolled at Stockholm University. Her activism by then had moved from the pavement to the front line of civil disobedience. German police detained her briefly at the edge of the Garzweiler lignite mine near Lützerath. A Malmö court fined her twice for blocking oil tankers at the port, and within hours of the first verdict she was back on the same road. A London case over a protest outside an oil industry forum collapsed in early 2024 when the judge found the prosecution had not proved its case.

In 2025 she joined two aid flotillas bound for Gaza. In June the Israeli military boarded the Madleen in international waters and she was deported within a day; when Donald Trump called her strange and angry, she replied that the world needs more young angry women. In October the far larger Global Sumud Flotilla, which had sailed from Barcelona, was intercepted and she was held and deported again; she and other participants alleged mistreatment in detention, which Israel denies. In November she helped Extinction Rebellion dye the Grand Canal in Venice green at the close of COP30 and was banned from the city for 48 hours. In December City of London Police arrested her for holding a placard in support of jailed Palestine Action activists; she was released on bail.

Back to Sweden, and back to court

For all the travel by sea and rail, 2026 has pulled Thunberg back towards the fight where she started. In March she spoke outside the Danish parliament at Copenhagen’s People’s Climate March, and in July Berlin police detained her during a blockade of the arms manufacturer Rheinmetall. On 24 August, three weeks before Sweden’s general election, she addressed some 10,000 marchers who walked from Vasaparken to Gustav Adolfs torg, in front of the parliament building where she had once sat alone.

Then, in September, she returned to the courts. In 2022 she had joined more than 600 young people in the Aurora case, a class action accusing the Swedish state of an inadequate climate policy. The Supreme Court dismissed it in February 2025, ruling that it could not order the government to act, while signalling that a differently framed claim might succeed. On 22 September 2026 Thunberg announced that Aurora had filed a second lawsuit, arguing that Sweden is failing its legal duty to protect children and young people from climate harm and demanding it count emissions it currently leaves out, such as the burning of imported biomass. The campaign has crowdfunded more than £180,000.

It is a very Thunberg move: slow, procedural, unglamorous, and aimed at the one government she can never be accused of lecturing from afar. The girl who stopped talking at eleven now speaks for a living, but the logic has not changed since the sign on the cobblestones. She still thinks the problem is that adults know and do not act, and she still intends to make them explain why, this time before a judge.

Tags: climate change, Greta Thunberg, activism, Fridays for Future, I Am Greta, Malena Ernman