Who is Greta Thunberg?

On August 20, 2018, a Monday morning in Stockholm, Sweden, a girl in a blue hoodie and yellow raincoat hopped on her bike and rode from her home to the Swedish parliament building- the meeting place of the country’s government.

     She was barely five feet tall and wore her hair in two long braids.

    Her name was Greta Thunberg. She was fifteen years old, and she was skipping school.

Was she doing it for fun?

No. Just the opposite. She had a very serious purpose. She was going to the government building to protest what she saw as a deadly climate crisis. A few months before, a newspaper had run an essay she wrote about her fears for the environment. “I want to feel safe,” she wrote.

      “How can I feel safe when I know we are in the greatest crisis in human history?”

So, she decided to take action.

      Greta bought a hundred flyers to give out to people. She also had a wooden sign that her father ad helped her make. It was painted white and in black letters, the message in Swedish read: “School Strike for Climate.”

Her strike meant that, in protest, she refused to go to school.

    This was the very first day of her strike.