25 young people making noise for social progress

Xiuhtezcatl Martinez

18-year-old Xiuhtezcatl Martinez is an indigenous climate activist and hip hop artist. At such a young age, he’s become one of the leading voices in the environmental movement and the youth director of Earth Guardians, a worldwide conservation organization.

Martinez started speaking out as an environmentalist at just 6 years old. By the time he became a teenager, Martinez had given TED talks on environmental policy and spoken multiple times before the UN. During his third speech in 2015, Martinez famously and bluntly said, “What’s at stake right now is the existence of my generation.”

Martinez also uses his music as part of his activism. Many of his songs are political. For example, his song “Speak for the Trees” was chosen as the Jury Award Winner in the 2015 competition at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. He also performed at Standing Rock. Additionally, he wrote a book called We Rise.

Martinez also filed a landmark lawsuit against the US Federal government with 20 other young people in 2015 called Juliana et al. v United States at al. in which they argue that the federal government is denying their constitutional right to life, liberty and property because they’re ignoring what’s happening with climate change. The lawsuit is still being pursued under the Trump administration.

“The marching in the streets, the lifestyle changes haven’t been enough so something drastic needs to happen,” Martinez told Rolling Stone. “The change that we need is not going to come from a politician, from an orangutan in office. It’s going to come from something that’s always been the driver of change – people power, power of young people.”