Our House is on fire

I have written in an earlier blog about Greta and my links with Sweden and its education system. I have also been honoured to work with Karl Henrik Robert the founder of the Natural Step a framework for sustainability  (https://thenaturalstep.org/approach/ ). And, following the 2002 Earth Summit, I worked as a facilitator of an amazing international consultation on education for sustainable development  called “Learning to Change our World” held in Goteborg in May 2004.

So, Sweden has a special place in my development and engagement with sustainability. No surprise, then that I ordered this new book narrated, largely by Greta’s mother, Malena Ernman, the Opera singer.

Wow, what a family story, littered with the family trials of two daughters, Greta and Beata, who struggle with speaking, eating and other disorders. It highlights how these and other wicked family issues lead  them to link their own suffering to the suffering of the planet.And which then leads to a global movement when 15-year-old Greta Thunberg began a solo “school strike for the climate”. A teenager who became the unlikely face of climate activism. Our House Is on Fire is, among many other things, the story of how and why Greta came to be sitting on the pavement outside the Swedish parliament with a home-made placard.

This book has diminished my positive views of the Swedish education and social systems.  It wastes no time in dispelling any notion that Sweden is a utopia of public services. The description of getting help and a diagnosis out of the adolescent psychiatric services – “Where everyone is burned out from struggling with a constantly growing workload and where much of the time is spent putting out fires” – will have parents across the world groaning with grim recognition. Not a lot better is their view on mainstream education, “where all pupils must function in exactly the same way and where overworked teachers on a conveyor belt end up hitting the wall”. Greta was bullied, her school was indifferent, she lost 10kg in two months and reached the brink of hospitalisation before she was, eventually, diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder, selective mutism and Asperger syndrome. “Perhaps we will never be fine, but we can always get a little bit better, and there is strength in that. There is hope in that.”

For me the message is clear, despite  the turbulence and stress in their lives every family member rose up and made transformational changes  in their work and lifestyles to become celebrated global role models.