Climate activist Finlay Pringle doesn’t mince his words. Boris Johnson? “I hate him,” says the 14-year-old from Ullapool in the Scottish Highlands, before correcting himself. “OK, in polite terms, I severely disagree with him. He’s like the British version of Trump. When he speaks, he sounds like an Oompa-Loompa. Everything is just slogans.”
And his future? “I’m angry,” he says. “I’ve been cheated out of my future. People are dying from climate change. The Australian wildfires claimed lives. People in the Maldives will lose their homes.”
Pringle is furious, sometimes hilariously, matter-of-factly so. He is also one of the longest-running school strikers in the UK. At the time of writing, he has been striking for an hour every Friday morning for 164 weeks. The worst thing about striking, he says, isn’t standing in the winter snow or sleet, but the highland midges in summer. “I know they’re important for the ecosystem,” he says,“but, man, do I hate them. They’re awful. I get bitten loads.”
Some people have assumed his environment-conscious parents forced him into activism – but that frustrates Pringle. “It’s always my decision,” he says. “If they’re doing a beach clean and I say I don’t want to do it, I don’t have to.”
Pringle became an environmental activist at the age of 10. It all started because a water company was planning to dump sewage into Loch Gairloch. “I wasn’t trying to be an activist,” he says. “I was just trying to do the right thing.”
Pringle loves the sea and often goes snorkelling with his family. “When you’re in and out of the water,” he says, “you’re consumed by it. Nothing else is going on. All you see is what is in front of you. And when you see plastic floating in the water, there’s no beating around the bush.”
He campaigned with other members of his local community and helped secure a U-turn: the water company pledged not to dump raw sewage in the loch. “Getting a positive result helped motivate me,” he says.
Pringle’s most famous campaign to date brought him head to head with TV survivalist Bear Grylls. In 2018, Grylls opened a dive experience at the NEC in Birmingham. Visitors pay to go diving in a tank with blacktip reef and nurse sharks. The Shark Trust partnered with Grylls on the project, from which it receives donations. Pringle was appalled: “Sharks and captivity don’t go together,” he says. (The Shark Trust disagreed, saying in a statement: “Tens of thousands of people have dived with and learned about sharks at the Bear Grylls Adventure – they go away with a desire to support shark conservation.”)
When Pringle found out about the attraction, he began “ranting about it on social media”. He attracted national headlines after telling Grylls he “sucked” and was the “worst chief Scout”.
“Oh god,” Pringle recalls, “that was a can of worms.” A spokesperson for Bear Grylls Adventure said: “We’ve partnered with Shark Trust and will donate a proportion of each ticket sold to strengthen the charity’s undisputable contribution to safeguarding the wild population of sharks.”
Sharks are Pringle’s favourite animal. “They’re my true passion,” he says. “It’s so wrong, the way we treat them. They deserve our respect, not our fear.” His favourites are, in order: goblin sharks (“they look freaky as hell”), cookiecutter sharks (“they are tiny but can prey on much bigger things”) and Greenland sharks (“they can live up to 400 years”).
Pringle is scathing about the solutions to climate change advocated by world leaders. “You know only one country in the world is on track to meet the Paris climate agreement?” Pringle says. “You know which one it is? Gambia! If this tiny, poor country can do it, why can’t we?” The UK is a joke, he says with scorn. “Coal mining in Cumbria. Expanding several airports in the UK. Cutting down ancient woodland for HS2. The list goes on and on.”
Pringle plans to be a marine biologist, so when I ask him what he’d like his treat to be, he suggests a pair of binoculars to use on his wildlife-spotting trips. “Watching animals and birds was one of the few things that helped get me through lockdown,” he says. “Just being able to go out on that daily walk, and see the gulls.”
Swarovski Optik provides a pair of pocket binoculars. He takes them out for a spin almost immediately. “It’s shocking how good they are for their size,” he says. He plans to go whale-spotting once the weather is good enough. “Whales always disappear behind the cliffs,” Pringle says, “so you have to run to see them. But these binoculars will be perfect for seeing them. They’re brilliant.”
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