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Gen-Z climate activists call out Greta Thunberg’s celebrity status: ‘It’s really dangerous to deify individuals’

Greta Thunberg is a leading climate change activist, organizing and energizing people around the world. But other Gen-Z environmentalists are bringing attention to the fact that the 17-year-old Swedish teen, who became an internationally recognized figure after sailing across the Atlantic Ocean to the United States, isn’t the only voice in the movement that needs to be heard.

“It’s a weird thing because I think the U.S. in general plays such a huge role in the kind of mainstream of what people see across the globe,” Tokata Iron Eyes, a 16-year-old Indigenous youth leader from South Dakota, tells MAKERS following her appearance at the 2020 MAKERS Conference. The media, she points out, has “not been covering all of the activists of color and all of the activists coming from low income communities who have been doing this for way longer.” However, the teen makes clear, that’s not “to discredit any of Greta’s work. It’s just to say that we are not covering what we should be.”

Iron Eyes, who at 12-years-old was protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline and became the subject of a viral video, went on to explain how the attention paid to specific activists often drowns out the voices of marginalized communities. “Even when I was working with Greta, in local news and stuff they would always get my name wrong or they just wouldn’t put my name in any of the media at all,” she says.

Wanjiku “Wawa” Gatheru, another young activist of color who joined Iron Eyes on the 2020 MAKERS Conference stage, adds “it’s really dangerous to deify individuals” when it comes to this issue in particular. “Climate change, environmental degradation, the environment, this is the most inclusive thing that there is. It’s everything brought together. So I think it’s important to say, ‘OK, we can find hope and feel empowered by other folks but deifying them isn’t what we should be doing,’” Gatheru says. “We should be seeing ourselves in their fight and begin to say, if they can do it, I can do it. And this is a community fight, community resilience. And that’s more important than just lifting up one person.”

Gotta love how they went down the raaaaacism route, eh?

Of course, in the age of social media, what they’re really looking for is popularity and validation, for likes. They really do not offer much in the way of concrete policy recommendations, just a lot of “why aren’t you listening to me’s” and “we’re all doomed, why don’t you adults do something!!!!” Would you listen to children attempting to give you advice on investing, on running a business, on theoretical physics? Perhaps if they were a wiz kid who graduated grad school with the proper degree.  Would you listen to a kid on investing if they continuously lost money? Would you listen to a kid screeching about climate doom when they aren’t practicing what they preach?