Greta Thunberg, No One Is Too Small

She's right, of course, Greta Thunberg, and not just in the title of this wee book: No One Is Too Small To Make a Difference.

As she notes repeatedly here, Thunberg has been treated terribly by people opposed to her message, by people who felt their decisions and lifestyles dismissed, and above all by bots and rage-farming tech machinery able to spark up pointlessly the hate of actual humans. No one is too small to be the victim of social-media rage, I guess, even if they can make a difference.

And really, it all reminds me a bit of how Douglas Adams long ago glancingly mentioned Christ while discussing something else entirely: two thousand years ago, a fellow got nailed to a tree for suggesting we could all be nicer to each other. Thunberg has been out here saying that we need to make some changes if we want to sustain a good life for ourselves, and although she has found a large and enthusiastic following, there's a whole lot of hatred out there.

Anyway.

The book appeared originally in 2019, before we'd ever heard of COVID, from the early days of Extinction Rebellion and during the first Trump presidency, when Thunberg was still only 16. It collects together some of her speeches and a few Facebook posts, and even with slightly larger font and slightly small pages, it's barely 100 pages, so it's the kind of thing that one can imagine putting into the pockets of as many young people as possible. It's repetitive, some of them using precisely the same wording, but that's no bad thing. After all, repetition is a key part of the learning process, and as she keeps saying, none of this is complicated except for the social changes necessary to respond to the science.

But social change is hard to generate, unless you've got enough billionaires behind it (especially when they're as scruple-free as the ones peppering the Epstein files, about which/whom I'm finding myself incandescently angry, when I can bring myself to think directly about it, because .... no. Another time).

And we're seven years further down the path since this book was published, which Thunberg's rhetoric here would say is seven years closer to the likelihood of crossing a catastrophic tipping point or threshold.

Again: she's right. So: what is to be done?