She’s on her way back down now at a pace approaching terminal velocity.
Life is full of weird auguries. The swallows’ return to Capistrano signals the onset of spring. If men stop buying underwear for themselves, it’s indicative of an oncoming recession. And when Greta Thunberg drops her convenient obsession with Israel’s imagined genocide and regresses back into a destructive environmentalist crackpot, it is a sign that nature is healing.
The precocious patron saint of antisocial progressive activism was spotted this week in Venice, where she worked with the group Extinction Rebellion to pollute the city’s famous waterways. You know, for the environment!
Thunberg and her fellow rebels dumped what the Telegraph called “an environmentally harmless dye” into the city’s Grand Canal and turning it green in a protest timed to coincide with the U.N.’s annual climate conference — the only audience that is still hyperreactive to her antics. In addition, the professional activists draped a banner across the Rialto Bridge that read “stop ecocide” (don’t worry; Israel is guilty of that, too, of course), and they staged a “flash mob” in which they “dressed in red with veils over their faces, walked slowly through crowds of tourists.”
The great, gaudy display was not well-received by Venice’s authorities. It was “disrespectful” toward the city’s “history and its fragility,” said one. The dye attack “risks having consequences for the environment,” a city official observed, succumbing to the unreasonable presumption that these activists care for the health of the environment. As Thunberg’s pivot to anti-Israel activism revealed, what they care about is fashion and the publicity they can generate for themselves by chasing it.
For Greta and her radical clique, their return to maniacal property destruction in the name of altruistic compassion is a sign that the consuming global outrage toward Israel — a phenomenon that persists online long after the conflict that supposedly induced it subsided — isn’t as salient as it once was. The problem for Greta et al is that their brand of eschatological environmentalism is also struggling to find the audience it once held captive.
As Andrew Follett wrote in these pages last week, the prospect of catastrophic climate change no longer looms so large in Western minds. Greta’s fellow young people in her native Sweden are the dead canaries in the coal mine. Whereas “environment/climate concerns” was the top concern for over one-third of young Swedish men and a majority of young Swedish women in 2019, only 13 and 15 percent, respectively, say the same today. That phenomenon is observable across Europe and America, Follett wrote. More auspiciously, according to a Gallup poll this year, a plurality believes the press has “generally exaggerated” the threat posed by climate change.
What is Greta Thunberg if not a media creation — the hectoring avatar of self-righteous ignorance instrumentalized by the adults in her life who used her as a tool toward their ends? She ascended to global stardom on the winds of fashion, but she’s on her way back down now at a pace approaching terminal velocity.
Greta and her ilk were banned from Venice over the stunt, but only temporarily. It’s not clear why the city’s stewards didn’t expel her permanently. Perhaps they think she can change, and that’s not a bad bet. After all, we’ve seen her evolve in the face of shifting environmental conditions before. Doubtlessly, there are plenty of causes she could embrace if she were interested in making a difference: kelp forest restoration, for example, or the plight of the freshwater mussel. Maybe she’ll wage a stirring fight against noise and light pollution, or, truer to form, rend garments over the disaster represented by “microplastics” just as the scientific community is coming around to the notion that the phenomenon was always overblown.
Either way, Greta will have to reinvent herself again. As portents go, that’s a valuable one. It shows that the global issue landscape is changing, perhaps for the better. And yet, there are some things that will probably never change, Thunberg’s opportunism being one.