So not too long ago I finished reading Our House is On Fire: Scenes of a Family and Planet in Crisis by Greta Thunberg, Svante Thunberg, Malena Ernman, & Beata Ernman (though it mainly seems to be written by Greta's mother, Malena )
The slim volume describes the personal journey of the Thunberg/Ernman family as they dealt with both Greta, and her lesser known younger sister Beata's challenging mental and emotional health difficulties and how their struggles paralleled their growing concern for the state of our planet. Each chapter is a "scene" from the life of the family, and each is brief, sometimes only a page in length. While the book is short, it took me a long time to read. It's not a happy story, and that is by design as the neglect of those who do not fit our societies definition of "normal" and the neglect of our planet are not happy stories. They do not intend to sugarcoat these facts to make the reader feel good. They were successful in that effort. I did not feel good.
I know among a certain segment of our culture it's considered funny to mock Greta Thunberg and deride her passion for addressing climate change. I've always felt that attitude is cheap, low, cowardly, and demonstrates an an inability to bring a meaningful challenge to climate change activists ideas. When you don't have a strong case of your own, you can always resort to personal insults and sneering.
That said, I do feel that the book missed the mark in two crucial ways. These omissions are important enough that they really hamstring the books ability to get us to take the climate crisis as seriously as they want us to.
First the author(s) fails to articulate exactly what the cost of failing to meaningfully address climate change will be. There are no specifics as to what we are potentially dealing with in just a few short years. Are we talking about an increase in an extreme weather events, rising sea levels that consume our coastal areas, and shift the colder climates further north (and south). Or are we talking about reaching a point where the planet is literally uninhabitable for human life, as Earth is turned into some sort of Venus-like planet. The language in the book is severe enough that it seems to imply the latter, though it is never said outright. And that is a fatal omission especially if you are calling for the most radical of change.
Which leads to the second missing piece of this book. The author(s) never specify exactly what steps MUST be taken NOW to halt the coming cataclysm. The implication seems to be that there must be a complete upheaval of our current way of life but there's never any picture of exactly what that would look like. The closest they come is calling for the end of air travel and embracing vegetarianism. The Thunberg/Ernman family is adamant that offering "hope" is foolish at this juncture. Any "solutions" that are not sufficiently radical will simply lull us into a sense of further complacency now that we've "done something."
The air travel thing hit hard. I love to travel and I love to fly--it's one of the things I miss most since the pandemic arrived. I know the authors would dismiss my determination to hold on to winging it as the selfish and short sighted wishes of a privileged person stubbornly insisting on grasping my luxuries at the cost of the planet. But if you're going to make that case and convince me, then you've got to tell me A) what exactly, in specific detail, is going to happen and B) what exactly must be done by society as a whole in order to stop it. Absent that, it's all too easy to walk away from the hard questions this book raises and the hard sacrifices it demands. And I know that's not what Greta and her family want people to do.
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