★★★★★ (of 5)

• Full Title: No One Is Too Small To Make A Difference
• Author: Greta Thunberg
• Year: 2019
• Pages: 106
• Genre: Environment, activisim
• Publisher: Penguin Books
• ISBN 978-0-14-313356-8 (paperback)
• Wikipedia page
• Author’s Wikipedia page

 

Summary

This small book is a collection of 16 short speeches delivered by climate activist Greta Thunberg in 2018 and 2019. Thunberg began her climate activism at age 15 when, as a student in Sweden, she began striking — “School Strike For Climate” (Skolstrejk för klimatet), skipping school every Friday to protest in front of her country’s Parliament. Today, millions of students around the world have taken up the cause. The largest (so far) climate strike in history took place on my 47th birthday, perhaps the best birthday gift I’ve ever claimed, in which upward of six million people protested around the world.

My copy of the book is an expanded edition, published late in 2019 and including five later speeches that weren’t in the original May 2019 edition. Some have been translated into English from her native language. For example, the first one (see video) was originally delivered in Swedish. Others were originally in English, such as when she spoke to the Ways And Means Committee (see video) in Washington, D.C., or when she angrily addressed the United Nations’ Climate Action Summit in September 2019 (read transcript and/or watch video).

 

Praise

The speeches in the book are brief, simply constructed, brutal, inescapably factual, and yet have been shrugged off by smiling and wealthy world leaders. The moment I began reading, I knew without a doubt I would give this book five stars.

“So please, treat the climate crisis like the acute crisis it is and give us a future.”

—page 4

“I think in many ways that we autistic are the normal ones and the rest of the people are pretty strange. They keep saying that climate change is an existential threat and the most important issue of all. And yet they carry on like before. If the emissions have to stop then we must stop the emissions. To me that is black or white. There are no grey areas when it comes to survival. Either we go on as a civilization or we don’t.”

—page 6

“Some people say that I should be in school instead... Why should I be studying for a future that soon will be no more, when no one is doing anything whatsoever to save that future?”

—page 10

“We have not come here to beg world leaders to care. You have ignored us in the past and you will ignore us again. You’ve run out of excuses and we’re running out of time. We’ve come to let you know that change is coming whether you like it or not.”

—page 14

“We live in a strange world, where we think we can buy or build our way out of a crisis that has been created by buying and building things.”

—page 40

If it was legal, this review would simply be a blockquote of the entire book.

 

Points Off For...

I have no criticisms for this book. I wish the speeches had been better received, but there is no way Thunberg could have made these speeches more easily receivable. I wish governments had acted on the climate crisis years ago, but they didn’t, and that can’t be blamed on Thunberg.

 

Conclusion

The book is short enough that I easily read it in two brief sittings. Though the feedback loops and albedo effects and other aspects of the climate crisis are complex, the issue itself is not. The Earth is dangerously warming. Most of the blame can be placed on humans. We are doing little or nothing about it. History will judge us for knowing this was happening and letting it go on. Thunberg adroitly and poignantly puts these facts perfectly into perspective.

It sucked that I read this on a day when I was already feeling overly cynical about politics and already dejected about life in general, yet I could still be impressed by the crystal clear writing (and delivery, because I watched the speeches too), the perfect choices of words and phrases, and the book as a whole.

 

 

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