There is a fair chance that throughout her Zoom conversation with Björk Guðmundsdóttir, Greta Thunberg will be doing embroidery. It is a Thursday afternoon in Stockholm, after class, in what is Thunberg’s last year of secondary school. Doing cross-stitch does not affect her concentration – in fact it helps her to focus; she stitches in many important meetings, and in lessons, as long as she’s not required to take notes. Thunberg is 19 but took a year out – she was also absent on many Fridays, striking alone at first in 2018 and then as part of what became an international movement, Fridays for Future. Today, it turns out that the thing she’s twiddling like worry beads at the bottom of her Zoom screen is just the lead from her headphones. Björk pipes in from Reykjavik: a face-to-face meeting of the pair would create a carbon footprint of around 0.59 tonnes.
The world’s leading voice for climate action and the world’s most original musician have collaborated in the past (on Björk’s 2019 Cornucopia tour) but never met until now. Today, Guðmundsdóttir is wearing a sweater and spectacles, and Thunberg a vest, sitting in the offices of her publisher in Stockholm. Both admit to being shy. They live in countries that have little truck with celebrity and can go relatively unbothered in their daily lives – a Scandinavian phenomenon they will go on to discuss.
For many years there were few significant musical voices within the climate movement. There was Sting and his Rainforest Foundation, launched more than 30 years ago, but the environment wasn’t considered sexy – the stuff of science rather than songwriting. Yet Guðmundsdóttir has found a way to speak about it for two decades, in her work, and in fronting several high-profile campaigns in Iceland. She has protested against aluminium smelting, and campaigned for a new national park in the island’s highlands. Her songs have always put nature into playful dialogue with music – from the 1997 album Homogenic, with its beats crafted to sound like volcanoes, to her new album Fossora (a made-up word meaning “she who digs”) – a meditation on the Earth from a “matriarchal” perspective.
Thunberg listened to the album earlier today, and Guðmundsdóttir has spent the weekend reading Thunberg’s new anthology, The Climate Book – her epic guide to achievable climate action with essays by over a hundred scientists, academics, activists and thinkers.
In the course of an hour, the pair will consider the connections between culture and the climate movement, and the power of music (Thunberg’s mother, an opera singer, curtailed her international career because of Greta’s concerns about her carbon footprint). They will talk about the pernicious influence of greenwashing, the costs of political inaction, and the UK’s reputation on the climate, as well as motherhood, Icelandic taxi drivers, seaweed and burnout. They started by talking about their first, remote collaboration.
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