ABSTRACT
While Greta Thunberg is regarded in our time as the Nordic icon for youth engagement with climate change, many people tend to forget that Scandinavia has a longer history of environmental youth activism. Already during the 1960s, two groups of Swedish and Norwegian architecture students became pioneering environmentalists when they set up two exhibitions about the global environmental crisis. Against the backdrop of the 1967 environmental turn in Sweden, a group of architecture students at Chalmers in Gothenburg organised a reading group that in 1968 culminated in the poster exhibition So What (Än sen då). In addition to travelling through Sweden, this debate-provoking exhibition was displayed internationally thanks to Swedish diplomacy and the United Nations. After being introduced in Norway, the concept was changed by the architecture students at the Oslo School of Architecture into its own entity titled And After Us (og etter oss). From April 1969, And After Us was shown in a number of Norwegian cities until a hurricane destroyed it in September 1969. This chapter describes these two important but little-known exhibitions and reveals how these grassroots initiatives subtly entangled with national and international politics.
