[♪♪♪]
[bird tweeting]
-Okay, on to the program.
The quest
to shift our civilization
onto an equitable
and life-affirming path
will take generations.
As Chief Oren Lyons
of the Haudenosaunee
Six Nations,
Iroquois Six Nations,
has often counseled us
here at Bioneers,
"Raise up your leaders."
Young people are always
at the forefront
of social change movements,
bringing vitalizing creativity,
innovation, and legs.
More than ever before,
we need
intergenerational partnerships
to envision and to realize
a restored world.
Xiuhtezcatl Martinez
is a force of nature
as a young leader.
-[audience cheers]
-Absolutely.
He was so precocious
in his activism
that you have to wonder
if some planetary mind,
knowing time is short
and the situation dire,
was experimenting
with speeding up evolution
to offer us
a new breed of Earth warriors,
ready to rock
as soon as they could walk.
-[cheering]
-Xiuhtezcatl was raised
in his father's Aztec tradition,
with deep reverence
for sacred nature.
When, at age six,
he saw Leonardo DiCaprio's film, 
The 11th Hour,
about
the global ecological crisis,
he wept uncontrollably
for 45 minutes.
Then his father reassured him
that he was going to travel
a very important path
to set things right
for future generations.
Since then, Xiuhtezcatl
has occupied the front lines
of climate leadership.
He campaigned first
in his hometown
of Boulder, Colorado,
to eliminate pesticides
from parks,
charge for plastic bags,
and put a moratorium
on fracking.
He co-founded a local chapter
of Earth Guardians,
which was started
by a first generation in 1993,
and it has mushroomed
since he joined
from five crews
to over
2,000 youth activist crews
in nearly 40 countries
on six continents.
-[applause]
-Amazing.
In the ensuing decades,
his activism has taken him
to schools,
frontline protests,
to the halls of Congress,
the United Nations,
and global climate summits.
He joined the youth plaintiffs
from all 50 states
in the landmark
public trust litigation
that's going on right now,
suing the U.S. government
and states
for failing to protect
the atmosphere
for future generations...
-[applause]
-...and even that didn't stop
President Obama
from appointing him
to the president's
Youth Council.
He's appeared
in the pages of Time magazine
and Rolling Stone,
and on Bill Maher's
Real Time on HBO,
among many other
mainstream media.
He's a gifted rapper,
composer, and lyricist,
who's performed with his
very talented younger brother,
Itzcuauhtli,
at countless concerts,
rallies, and events,
and he wrote and produced
the powerful new album,
Generation Rise,
by Earth Guardians.
It's really good,
actually.
I like it,
and his original song
won the global contest
at the Paris peace talks
for their theme song
last December.
As a young leader,
he says this...
"I am not here
to create more followers.
I'm here
to inspire more leaders."
-[applause]
-And we're very honored...
Xiuhtezcatl is going to be
joining the Bioneers board
later this year,
so that's very cool.
So before we welcome
this mightily inspiring
Earth Guardian, Earth warrior,
we'd like to share
a really amazing home video
from 10 years ago
at his first public talk
when he was six years old
at a rally in Boulder.
Brace yourself.
-I'm here to talk to you today
about how sacred
the Earth is.
Most kids don't even know
that the world is sacred.
That's because they spend
most of their time
in front of their TV
or on some other video games.
It's time
for their parents to...
-[applause]
-...get them out of the house
and show them
that the Mother Earth
is a sacred thing.
Show them...
-[applause]
-...that the Mother Earth
is alive.
It is a beautiful,
living thing, and...
and if the parents
don't do this,
we may not have a chance.
When I was five years old,
I wanted
to go to all the factories
and shut them down
with my little brother,
but once I turned six,
I realized
that it was us who were buying
from the factories.
We're supporting them.
We're buying their things.
Now, who wants to make
a better future for us
and our children?
-[applause]
-I can't hear you.
-[cheering]
-Yes! Together we can do it.
The power of one.
Thank you.
-[applause]
-[cheering]
-[he laughs]
What's up, Bioneers?
Yeah, for real, though,
they snuck up on me
with that one.
I feel like I peaked
when I was six.
Mad throwback.
How's everyone
feeling today?
-[cheering]
-Yeah, that's what's up.
Um...
I'm very honored
to be here,
honored to be
on the Board of Bioneers.
I'm honored to have been here
the last couple of years
to share my story,
to learn and absorb,
and kind of just receive
so much from this conference
and from, you know,
all the beautiful people
that are gathered here today,
and over the last couple years,
so much of my learning, like,
I feel like I've been able
to kind of pace myself
and measure my growth
through Bioneers
and through the experiences
that I've had here.
Let's see if I can
get these slides up, and...
there we go!
There we go.
Okay.
My name
is Xiuhtezcatl Tonatiuh.
I'm 16. Um... man...
I've been on the front lines
of the climate
and environmental movement
since I was that little kid
up there.
That was the first time
I got up on a stage
and spoke to people in 10 years.
I'm still doing it,
and I still have
a decent amount of sanity
within me,
which is dope.
Um...
People ask me often,
you know,
"What is it that got you inspired
to be a part of this,
and to care
about the environment,
and to be an activist?"
People are like,
"Why are you an activist?"
And for me,
when I was a little kid,
I didn't really think about it
as being an activist,
or kind of taking upon
this title, or this label.
My father raised me
in the Mexica tradition.
We are from Mexico City.
That's my lineage...
-[cheering]
-...and when I was a little kid,
he spoke to me
of how every living thing
was sacred,
every living thing was sacred,
and this Earth, our oceans,
our rivers, our forests,
we have a responsibility
to protect
that which is sacred.
He said that he learned
from his father,
and his father taught him.
We have passed on
this understanding
that as human beings,
we have
an amazing amount of power,
and that must be used
to protect the land
for generations to come,
and so, for me,
I was, like, well, you know,
it's my human duty
to be a warrior for the Earth,
to protect the sacred,
to stand
for what I believe in...
and my family on my mom's side
had been incredibly involved
in activism and environmentalism
and all kinds of things,
and I started
to learn about it,
and I started
to research into, um...
I watched
Leonardo DiCaprio's documentary,
The 11th Hour,
and I was a six-year-old kid
that was, like...
that looked outside
at the world around him,
and I saw a planet
that was falling apart.
You know,
we look at climate change,
and we see statistics
on a billboard...
on a graph, excuse me.
We see, you know, polar bears
drowning in the ocean,
and ice caps melting.
We see more carbon molecules
in the atmosphere,
and as a little kid,
understanding that
was really hard for me
because I felt so connected
to the world, to the Earth,
to these mountains and forests
that I'd fallen in love with,
and I was like,
"That's falling apart
because of the lives
that we're living,
because of the destruction
that we are causing
to the Mother Earth,"
and I feel like
when people
look at climate change,
they see
an environmental problem.
It's causing sea levels to rise
and different weather patterns
to change all over the world,
and greater floods and droughts,
and the way that
I've just been seeing it lately
is that it's a human problem.
If you look at how a natural
system responds to crisis,
is the roots
will stay strong,
and if a forest is burned down,
it will grow back over time,
but if a human system
is destroyed by crisis,
it takes just as many resources,
concrete, fossil fuels
to rebuild that city.
So every city that is taken
by climate change
is going to take that much more
of destroying the Earth
to rebuild it.
Climate change
is a human rights issue,
and as a member
of the younger generation,
I'm going to be inheriting that.
Like, the legacy
that adults are leaving behind
is one ridden
with drought, hurricanes,
storms, wildfires,
tornadoes...
at a greater level
than we've ever seen before.
Like, things are worse
in the world today
than they've ever been,
when you look
at our environment,
when you look
at our climate,
and to understand this,
I had to see that, like,
people are being impacted,
and that the reason
there's a sense of disconnection
to these issues
is we can't resonate
with the environment
because we're not connected
to the Earth anymore,
in a lot of ways.
Many people
have lost that connection.
And when I began
to understand
that there are millions
of climate refugees
all over the world
that have already been impacted
by climate change,
this is not an issue
that is going to affect us
in the future.
This is here now.
Communities are suffering.
People are losing their lives,
their homes, their communities.
Entire island nations
are disappearing,
and because
of this climate crisis
that we are creating,
and part of it, yes,
is the fossil fuel consumption,
you know, because
we are currently today...
if you look at energy
at the beginning
of the Industrial Revolution
and energy today,
we are still digging up
dead plant and animal matter
out of a hole in the ground
to power our world.
That is not
the future of energy.
Look at how far
we've come in technology.
Look at how far
we've come in medicine.
Look at how far we've come
in, you know,
our cars and our telephones.
Look at how much we progress
in all these places,
and we're still burning
fossil fuels.
We're still finding
more creative and new ways
to dig up dead stuff,
and put death into our air,
into our water,
into the lungs
of our children.
That is not the way.
That is not the way
that we need to power our world,
and that is not
a solution for the future.
and then we look
at how every natural system
in the world...
humans in a lot of ways
have exploited that,
because we are consuming
so much,
we are taking so much, you know.
We see the planet,
and we see a resource,
something that we can gain from,
and when I was growing up,
since I could walk,
I've been dancing
my traditional dances.
Since I could speak,
I've been learning my language.
I mean, you should've hear me
try to learn
how to say my own name.
That, like, straight up,
took me, like, two years...
-[laughter]
-...to learn
how to say my name,
and then spelling my name
was like a whole other era
of my life...
-[laughter]
-but, um...
the way
that I grew up
was like, yeah,
we've got to give back
to the Earth
everything that we take,
through prayer,
through ceremony,
through dances,
through songs.
Like, our connection
to our culture
is our connection to the land,
and regardless
of whether we're Indigenous
or not,
or the color of our skin,
or the god that we believe in,
like, we're all Indigenous
to this Earth,
and that's something that...
-[applause]
-We share that,
and that is a human thing
that connects
each and every one of us.
That is undeniable.
We all come
from the same Earth.
We drink the same water.
We breathe the same air,
and we got one planet...
and I think the biggest...
[laughs]
I think what ties
all these problems together
that we see
in the world today
is disconnection.
We are systemically removed.
We have removed ourselves
as human beings
from the Earth,
and the reason that we see
crisis in the world today,
and what I've learned,
is because of a disconnection.
We are disconnected
to ourselves.
That's why my generation,
there's more suicide,
there's more depression,
there are more pills
being pumped
into the school systems
and into high schools
to diagnose for depression,
for anxiety,
for all these things,
because we're disconnected
from ourselves.
We're disconnected
from one another
as human beings.
That's why
there's racism and hatred
and violence and war.
We're disconnected
to our food.
That's why we don't know
what the hell
we're eating on our plate.
There's a disconnection
with that.
And we're disconnected
from our planet,
and therefore we justify
the pillaging
of an entire Earth
at the expense of the legacy
that you will leave behind,
because of a sense
of disconnection...
because we no longer
see the Earth as our Mother.
We no longer
see the Earth as our home.
It's a resource.
It's something
we can take from,
and we have been trained
to believe that,
and not even
just to believe that.
We've been trained
to look the other way
while it happens
without us even noticing.
When you go to the store
and you buy a product,
or when you put some food
on your plate,
or when you hop in your car
and drive somewhere,
we don't think
about the impact
that that has, you know.
We're taught to kind of just
float through life,
and whatever's convenient
is what we're going to take.
So, my grandpa
is a super wise dude.
His name is Makasha Roske.
Some of y'all might know him,
and he always talks
about shifting
the human consciousness,
and actually, before he even
had that conversation with me,
I was like,
"Yo, what needs to change
isn't just, like, light bulbs
and the way we get our energy,
it's like the way we think
as human beings.
What I've got to shift
is the way that we see ourselves
in relationship
to this Earth,"
and people are like,
"Oh, what are the solutions?
How do you fix the world?"
and I'm just like,
"Damn, you know, I'm 16!
I'm trying
to figure it out too."
-[laughter]
-And...people are always like,
"Oh, you're the future!
You know, young people
are so important,"
but what I've come
to understand is, like,
the intergenerational movement
that needs to be created
is more important
than anything, because...
-[applause]
-...and it's because
the technology,
the innovation,
the creativity,
and the passion
that young people have
is amazing.
It's so powerful.
When our voices are given
the attention that we need,
when we are told
that our voices have power,
that we can be leaders,
young people rise to the top,
and if we look at the world
that we want to see,
yes, we need technology.
We need innovation.
We need things
to move forward
in a good, positive way
that is in balance
with the Earth,
and remember the knowledge
of our ancestors,
of those that came before us,
of the Indigenous tribes
that lived on this land,
that lived in harmony,
that lived in balance,
that understood
the need to give back
just as much
as we were taking.
So the future of the world
is that balance
between the new
and that
that has come before,
and that's the way
that I see it,
and the only way that I see
that it is going to work,
I guess this ties back to...
we have found
a way to fall out of love
with the beauty
of not only the world
but with life itself,
with our humanity.
We have lost our connection
with our humanity,
because that humanity
is what ties us all together,
and I think...
to understand
the change that needs to happen,
we have to look
towards the solutions,
and media just bombards us
with the problems.
Like, everywhere
that I look on social media,
on Facebook, and...
I don't even watch
the news anymore
because I can't, you know.
It's all the bad stuff
that's happening,
and what happened
to the solutions?
What happened
to empowering people
to create change?
And that's why we're here,
because we're not going
to get it anywhere else...
because right here,
sitting in this audience
and standing on this stage
is where we will be reminded
as human beings
that we have the power
to create change,
that our voices
are more powerful
than any corporate industry
on the planet,
than any government,
than any law
that is written against us.
Like, our voices will overcome,
and that's why
we've got to remember that.
-[applause]
-Yo, people have power.
People have power...and...
the Indigenous peoples
of these lands
have, I feel like, been...
well, I guess, first off,
just leaving a little prayer
to this land that we're on
right now,
giving thanks for every breath
that we take of this air,
every step we take on this land,
because it is not our own...
you know, honoring the people
that came here before us,
and if we look
at the movements
that have been created
in the last few years,
inspired
by the Indigenous men and women
at the forefronts
of these issues,
we will see there's examples
of people creating change.
If you look at what happened
with the Keystone XL pipeline,
Obama did not stop the pipeline.
Sure, he signed the papers,
and he said no,
but it was
because of the pressure put on
by the front-line Indigenous
communities in Canada,
fighting the tar sands,
fighting this pipeline
all across the country...
-[applause]
-...because of the solidarity
that we felt
all over this country,
where people were demanding,
were saying that,
"We will not allow you
to exploit our lands
as you have
throughout history.
We are ending
this historic pattern
of exploiting our land
for the benefit
of your people...
not even your people,
for the benefit of the profit
that a fossil fuel industry
makes
off the suffering of people,
of all people."
And if you look
at what's happening
at Standing Rock...
hey, make some noise
for our brothers and sisters
on the front lines.
-[applause]
-We are...
Standing Rock
is the greatest example
of a frontlines movement
that we have seen
in this country
for a very long time,
Where, when I went
and I witnessed,
I saw kids riding on horseback
through the camps.
I saw grandfathers
and grandmothers
preparing food for the camps.
I saw men and women
sitting in ceremony,
praying for their land,
for their water,
marching and standing in front
of these metal machines
that threaten
their ancestral burial grounds,
their land, their water,
their...
their legacy.
This is not
about the environment only.
This is about our Earth.
This is about
human beings.
You know, I saw that
when I went to Standing Rock
because the amount of love,
the amount of support,
and the amount
of mobilization
that has happened
from all over the world
about a story
that is not being told
in our mainstream media
is unbelievable,
and we will not be stopped.
They are not going home
for the winter.
They are going
to stay there,
and each and every one of us
has to do our part
to support
the frontlines people
that are giving up their jobs,
their time,
their schools, their energy,
their lives to fight...
-[applause]
-...and remind us
that this is not just
about one pipeline.
It's about every pipeline,
about every fossil fuel
infrastructure project
that threatens our land
and our children.
This is this tribe
showing us
that no industry will push us
off our lands ever again,
that we will never again
back down
to a fossil fuel infrastructure
that is dying.
-[applause]
-This is true people power.
This is true people power...
and...
it's not easy,
and for me, I've traveled
all over the place
and seen more hope
than I have seen hopelessness.
I have seen more light
than I have seen depression,
and I have seen more solutions
than I have seen crisis.
One dope thing
that I'm trying to do
is I'm trying
to sue this government.
Myself
and 20 other youth plaintiffs
are filing a lawsuit
to hold our federal government
accountable
for violating our constitutional
inalienable right,
written on hemp paper
on the Constitution
all that time ago...
We are suing them
for violating
our constitutional right
to life, liberty, and property
because of their inaction
on climate change...
-[applause]
-...and these are 21
of the most incredible
young people I've met.
The youngest
is eight years old.
His name is Levi.
He's that tall,
and has the best hair
of any little kid
I've ever met...
and these are young people
with stories,
they have a stake
in this world,
where, when you ask yourself,
"Why are you doing this?
Why are you
a part of this movement?"
It's about future generations.
When we ask ourselves what it is
that we are fighting for,
you look into the eyes
of those that you love.
You look at
the things in life
that have made you fall in love
with this world,
from the scenery
to the mountains,
to the silence
of being in nature,
to family,
to damn good food.
That is
what we are fighting for,
and if you look at the movement
that has been built
all over the world,
I've witnessed it grow
from the ground up,
where I've seen...
When I was nine,
I got together
with 13 of my friends or so,
and we got pesticides
out of our parks,
and we called ourselves
the Earth Guardians,
and now there
are hundreds of thousands
of young people
all over the world
that are rising up
as Earth Guardians
in communities
all over the place
to defend their land,
to create the solutions,
to use their passion,
to use their voice,
to use the things
that they love,
and fight to protect that
by starting
in local communities
and creating small action,
with the global family,
to make change
that will last forever,
and when people ask me,
"What is your end goal?"
I'm like, holy crap,
that is not an easy question,
but when people ask me, like,
"What is your end goal
with all this work?"
my end goal
is to do my part
to uplift a generation
so that every generation
to come after mine
knows the power
the young people have
to use their voice,
to uplift and give
this generation the tools
so that any community
in the world
can fight off any industry
that comes at them,
because of the power we know
that we have with our voice,
with our passion,
and an understanding
that we are going to define
the legacy that we leave on
for future generations.
So...
-[applause]
-This is not easy
to be in this fight,
to be in this moment,
to be in this struggle,
and to be alive
in the world today.
It's not easy,
and I of all people
understand
that sometimes you're going
to get depressed and hopeless
about these issues.
I've been there.
I've been there,
and what has lifted me up
every single time
is the reminders
of what I am fighting for,
and being in places like this,
and meeting people like you,
all the way in the back
to all the way in the front,
and having
these conversations,
and speaking of movements,
speaking of change,
speaking of hope,
speaking of love
and laughter and music,
and all the things
that make us feel alive,
that is what I am fighting for.
When I look into the eyes
of my little siblings,
my cousins,
of the beautiful young children
that I meet at places like this,
that is what I am fighting for.
When I sit in silence
in nature
and marvel at the spectacle
that is this world,
that is
what I am fighting for...
and when I look at the people
in the world
that have tirelessly fought
for their rights
as human beings
to live on a planet
that is untarnished,
unburned, and undestroyed
by our greed,
that have fought
and given up their lives
to be a part of this movement,
I see more bravery,
more courage, more passion
than I've ever seen
ever in my life.
When I look at the people
in this movement
that are fighting
and are continuing
to fight,
it reminds me
that we all have
a part to play.
We all have the responsibility
to take the energy
we feel here
and carry that forth
into our lives,
into our communities,
into our homes,
and I look
at the people I love,
and it reminds me
that that is
what I am fighting for.
So ask yourself what it is
that you are fighting for,
and remember,
there's no better time
to be alive than now,
because today,
we get to determine the legacy
that we are remembered by.
When every generation
in the future
thinks of what we left behind,
we are creating that today,
and each and every one of you
in this audience
is a part of it.
Thank you.
-[applause]
