By Stephanie Petit
October 11, 2021
Source: People
Photo Source: Unsplash, Mubarak Showole
Queen Elizabeth's son can "totally understand" the urgency for activists like Greta Thunberg: "All these young people feel nothing is ever happening so of course they're going to get frustrated"
Prince Charles shares the concerns of Greta Thunberg and other young environmental activists — and understands their frustration with inaction surrounding the issue.
Queen Elizabeth's eldest son, 72, spoke with the BBC ahead of the U.N. Climate Change Conference COP26 in the gardens of his house on the Balmoral estate in Scotland. He urged world leaders to take direct steps to prevent catastrophic impact from climate change.
"They just talk," Prince Charles said. "And the problem is to get action on the ground."
When asked if he sympathized with Thunberg, the 18-year-old Swedish activist who recently accused politicians of inviting "cherry-picked young people to pretend they are listening to us" to conferences on the issue, Charles replied, "Of course I do, yes."
"All these young people feel nothing is ever happening so of course they're going to get frustrated," he said. "I totally understand because nobody would listen, and they see their future being totally destroyed." Prince Charles and Thunberg met in 2020 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. "She's remarkable, she represents one of the main reasons why I've been trying to make all this effort all these years," Charles told CNN. "I've always worried about the fact that so often, in terms of humanity, we leave things too late so you have to hit a brick wall and experience a catastrophe before anything happens." Prince Charles, who made his first environmental speech in 1970, also spoke to the BBC about groups such as Extinction Rebellion protesting in the streets. "All these young feeling nothing is ever happening, so of course they're going to get frustrated. But it isn't helpful, I don't think, to do it in a way that alienates people," Charles said. "So I totally understand the frustration, the difficulty is how do you direct that frustration in a way that is more constructive rather than destructive. The point is that people should really notice how despairing so many young people are." Prince Charles' interview with the BBC took place in Prince George's Wood, an arboretum that the Prince of Wales created in what was once a "rather empty field" in the gardens of Birkhall, starting with a tree planted the year his eldest grandchild, now 8, was born.
Prince Charles is set to attend the U.N. Climate Change Conference COP26 along with his mother the Queen, wife Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, son Prince William and daughter-in-law Kate Middleton during the first week of November. The conference takes place from October 31 to November 12 in Glasgow, Scotland.
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