As well as generating powerful images – and applying powerful community organising – the school strike movement makes an impact because of its narrative power.
Greta Thunberg’s story sparked a global movement. Students and communities have participated, from Marovo in the Solomon Islands; to Delhi; to Jakarta; to Mexico City; to Johannesburg. A 9-year-old was inspired to protest in New York, as was a 15 year-old from Kampala, Uganda. Thunberg’s story has got people talking about ‘The Greta Effect’’. It is now being shared with children through children’s books.
Sometimes, social movement narratives can follow a predictable script – one that ’we have seen many times before’, featuring colourless characters and lack real moral energy.
The work of the school strike movement, however, features powerful narrative ‘ingredients’.
Story structure
Stories conventionally feature a ‘beginning, middle, and end’.
Story structure can also be seen in terms of:
- an orientation (time, setting, characters, and their situation)
- a complication (an obstacle that needs to be overcome),
- a resolution (outcome)
- an evaluation or ‘moral of the story’ (addressing why this matters and what is at stake).
Some narrative ‘ingredients’ in #schoolstrike4climate
Orientation:
Complication:
The first strike took place 6 months ahead of Australia’s 2019 federal election. The climate movement had worked to make this election the ‘Climate Election’, and strikers organised a second National School Strike Day of Action a fortnight ahead of election day.
Scott Morrison’s election victory was a major ‘complication’ for the climate movement.
The story of the school strike movement is played out through the tension between:
- the ongoing climate crisis and the failure of existing parties, institutions and members of the older generation to address it and
- the school strikers’ status as the generation who will inherit the consequences of the past and present; their goals, and the actions they take to pursue them.
Resolution:
Student strikers and their supporters are creating an ongoing ‘resolution’ of this tension through their actions.
What will these newly-politicised students do next?
Their actions represent the next ‘scenes’ in an unfolding drama.
Characters:
The strike featured student leaders pitted against political leaders who dismissed, challenged and belittled their actions.
One school strike leader not yet 15 years old spoke powerfully on national TV, telling her interviewers how she saw politicians ‘doing nothing’ and felt a responsibility to address climate change: students who knew about science were not going to ‘sit around waiting for change’.
Conflict between protagonists and antagonists:
- Resources Minister Matt Canavan commented, “The best thing you’ll learn about going to a protest is how to join the dole queue”.
- Prime Minister Scott Morrison said, “we do not support our schools being turned into parliaments. What we want is more learning in schools and less activism in schools.”
- Australian Youth Climate Coalition spokesperson Laura Sykes replied that Morrison had shown “irrational outrage” to students who care about their education: “It was shocking see our prime minister condemning students as young as eight, who are sacrificing a day of schooling to stand up for a safe climate future… When young people try to have a voice in politics, Scott Morrison is shutting them down, yet he’s happy to listen to the coal lobby and big corporations who continue to profit from making climate change worse.”
School Strike 4 Climate posted on Facebook: Why is the Prime Minister trying to stop us having a say on our future?? Join the strike on Friday to show Scott Morrison we won’t be ignored.
Genre:
See the discussion of how genre makes a difference to climate storytelling.
“When climate change is a moral issue….”
Effectively communicating in a genre which emphasises heroism to achieve a better world (thus combining with the ‘moral of the story’– see below) matters for climate politics in very real ways, a point which receives support from an unexpected source following the Coalition victory in Australia’s 2019 election:
Moral of the story:
Greta Thunberg has spoken about everybody’s ‘moral duty’, our ‘moral obligation to act for ourselves and those who cannot’ and our ‘moral imaginations’.
A wide range of commentators on the school strikes take up the theme of climate change as a moral issue:
- Harriet Thew, a PhD Researcher in the UK, writes: ‘The strikers ‘wield the moral power of young people – a group which society agrees it is supposed to protect’.
- Climate scientist Michael Mann states ,“These kids speak with a moral clarity & poignancy that none but the most jaded of ears can fail to hear”
- Veteran US activist Ralph Nader argues that children’s moral power can challenge corporate power to address the climate crisis.
- Philosopher Rupert Read comments, ‘The ultimate reason why we should support these school strikes, as I and hundreds of other UK academics have just declared we will do, is that, through our inaction that has led the world they will inherit to this pretty pass, we adults have forfeited the moral right to do anything else‘.
- Australian climate scientist Will Steffen observes that the students ‘have so much moral authority because it’s their future that we’re destroying by pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere’.
- Environmental journalist India Bourke adds, ‘By invoking the moral power of the intergenerational contract – the vow of present generations to conserve the Earth for future ones – the strikes have resonated across borders’.