“People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction. And all you can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth. How dare you?” Greta Thunberg said in the UN Climate Action Summit 2019. September 2019, Greta Thunberg sailed a yacht, not flying in a plane, to New York to deliver the UN address. She sailed for 15 days across the Atlantic Ocean using a solar yacht which would have taken no more than half a day with flight. She said it was to warn of the climate crisis caused by carbon emissions.

           In 2011, when Greta Thunberg was 8 years old, she first heard about the seriousness of climate change. Later, despite such climate conditions, she wondered why people are not doing anything. She began to study climate change for herself. However, the more she continued her studies, the more she felt hopeless. After experiencing the heat wave and forest fires in Sweden in the summer of 2018, she decided to take action. Instead of going to school, every Friday in August and September 2018, when the general elections were held, Thunberg began a one-man demonstration in front of the Swedish parliament calling for countermeasures against climate change, called a “school strike for climate change.” The protest received much attention and led to the “Friday for the Future” movement involving students from more than 100 cities around the world. Thunberg participated in the 24^th Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Katowice, Poland, in December of the same year to call for preparations to deal with climate change. The following year, she spoke out at the Davos Forum in January and the UN Climate Action Summit in August. She is an ordinary girl who found the courage to tell the truth against those in power. Thunberg has become an icon of a generation who says, “we can’t just continue living as if there was no tomorrow, because there is a tomorrow.”

           Greta Thunberg was cited as a strong candidate for the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize and won the International Amnesty Conscience Award. She also won the Right Livelihood Award known as the “Alternative Nobel Prize.” We can’t conclude her move as just a young girl’s challenge to environmental protection. She provided the driving force for political action to resolve the climate crisis. “We must start today. We have no more excuses.” she said. We, like Greta Thunberg, must feel uneasiness about the future of the Earth we are living on and move on to fix things in practice.