Selection of Greta Thunberg as Time magazine's person of the year let the world know a little more about this remarkable teen activist.
The magazine profiled the young Swede, illustrating how her concern about climate change has grown, transforming the teenager into a spokesperson for her generation and for anyone concerned about the planet.
Time called her ascent to global influence one of the "most unlikely and surely one of the swiftest" in history.
It has been that. Greta Thunberg is just 16, having become a world figure in little more than a year.
In August 2018, she began a solitary protest outside the Swedish Parliament. She skipped school to hold that lonely vigil, her "School Strike for Climate."
Yet, her example has since helped spark a movement of millions of people around the globe to speak out about climate change.
"This is not fearmongering; this is science," Time wrote, explaining the urgency that drives Thunberg to speak truth to power about the global warming that threatens the planet.
"She has offered a moral clarion call to those who are willing to act, and hurled shame on those who are not. She has persuaded leaders, from mayors to presidents, to make commitments where they had previously fumbled."
Notably, she hasn't persuaded the U.S. president, who greeted her selection as Time's person of the year by mocking her in a tweet. But she and those she has inspired to join her protests have influenced other leaders to refocus on the issue.
Listen to French President Emmanuel Macron: "When you are a leader and every week you have young people demonstrating with such a message, you cannot remain neutral. They helped me change."
Sometimes, Time wrote, the best way to change a mind "is to see the world through the eyes of a child."
The magazine quoted former Vice President All Gore, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his climate advocacy over decades, as saying this moment feels different as Thunberg and legions of other young people raise their voices.
"Throughout history, many great morally based movements have gained traction at the very moment when young people decided to make that movement their cause," Gore said.
What Thunberg is doing builds on the message that hundreds of thousands of scientists and activists around the globe have been spreading for many, many years.
Somehow, the voice of this otherwise ordinary teenager has pierced the public conscience.
Her story is meticulously detailed in the latest issue of Time and is available online at time.com. It is full of vignettes of this emerging leader and the message she preaches.
"I want you to panic," Thunberg told an audience of world leaders in Switzerland early this year. "I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act."
It is that straightforward sense of responsibility that sets her apart from others.
Thunberg has been feeling the fear since she was much younger and learned in class of climate change and its effects, such as starving polar bears, extreme weather and flooding.
Her concerns triggered a deep depression for Thunberg, who has Asperger's syndrome. Her school strike got her out of her depression, she said, because she realized "there were things I could do to improve the situation."
She could not have imagined then just how much she could do -- and has done at the tender age of 16.
Greta Thunberg is fittingly Time's youngest person of the year, recognized for "sounding the alarm about humanity's predatory relationship with the only home we have, for bringing to a fragmented world a voice that transcends backgrounds and borders, for showing us all what it might look like when a new generation leads."
Commentary on 12/25/2019