Alec Loorz of Ventura, Calif., is in many ways a typical 15-year-old — he likes surfing, graphic design and playing drums in a band called State of Emergency. The band’s name, however, reflects what’s not typical about this rising high school sophomore: He is taking big action against an actual state of emergency, global climate change, as founder of Kids vs. Global Warming.
He started the organization at the age of 12 after watching Al Gore’s revolutionary film An Inconvenient Truth. Before seeing the film, he says, he knew nothing about the issue. But the message Gore delivered “really changed my life … I knew I was being called to stop global warming within my lifetime.”
If that cinematic inspiration wasn’t enough, there were also his friends. The next day at school Alec told one of them about the film and was shocked to hear the boy say he didn’t think global warming was real. “It’s all a hoax,” Alec remembers his friend saying. “Al Gore’s a psycho.”
Alec badly wanted to refute his friend with convincing facts, but didn’t know enough to speak authoritatively. He furiously studied all night, learning everything he could about climate change and put together a presentation like Al Gore’s on the topic, he says, “just to prove my friend wrong.”
Off and running, Alec immediately applied to be trained as a presenter by Gore’s Climate Project, an NGO dedicated to increasing public awareness of the climate crisis. When he was rejected for being too young — Alec was still just 12 — he took matters into his own hands and began delivering his presentation on the topic to other kids. Through videos, animation, and simplified science, he showed kids the urgency of the problem and told them that they could and should be part of the conversation on — and solution to — this crucial global issue.
He also set out to find someone who had been trained by the Climate Project, and with the help of his mother Victoria, tracked down Lisa Shaffer at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. She took the young activist under her wing, introducing him to some of the scientists who had helped Gore with the film and getting him hooked into a larger network of climate activists.
Alec had given 30 of his own presentations and founded an NGO by the time Al Gore himself finally caught wind of the remarkable youngster and invited him to an event, ultimately bringing him onstage in front of 500 people. Gore, Alec’s hero, personally invited the boy to be formally trained as a Climate Project presenter. Finally, at age 14, Alec became the youngest member of the special group last fall.
In the meantime, Kids vs. Global Warming was going strong getting kids to take action on global climate change. It’s important for kids to be involved, Alec says, because “we’re going to grow up and face the consequences of what the world does or fails to do now. It’s our planet now.” Kids, he says, “have more power than we realize … The one thing kids need to remember is that we matter and we can make a difference.”
Over 2,000 kids have joined his cause, and Alec encourages those who join to plant trees at their schools “to make their commitment to fighting global warming something concrete and real.” A page of Kids vs. Global Warming’s Website titled “iMatter” details other things kids can do to help — bike to school, ask their parents to invest in alternative energy, hang-dry their laundry and refuse to use plastic bottles.
But this organization has bigger goals than getting people to change their light bulbs. The NGO’s first project, called Sea Level Awareness Project, or SLAP, involved installing more than 100 poles throughout Ventura to illustrate how high the sea will rise if nothing is done about climate change. Alec worked with the city of Ventura to get the first poles planted; now, only a couple of years later, the project is active in 10 cities in three states.
Alec’s ambitions reach even higher; he has set his sights on reaching millions of kids and getting his message to world leaders. The climate presentations that started it all are still going strong. The organization is now partnering with the Alliance for Climate Education, which does presentations in high schools, and plans to speak to two million students over the next two years. Alec himself has given almost 100 presentations around California; Washington, D.C.; and New York.
This year the NGO is also launching the California Climate Council of Youth (C3Y), a state-wide initiative that will bring engaged, creative California youth together to learn and plan about how, as Alec puts it, to “use their voice” to make a difference on climate change.
Kids vs. Global Warming’s “Declaration of Independence from Fossil Fuels,” on which Alec hopes to collect 350,000 signatures by Oct. 24 (the 350.org Climate Day of Action), will “let President Obama and the Copenhagen negotiators know that the youth of this country are serious about being independent from fossil fuels within our lifetime.” He has collected around 600 signatures already, which leaves only a few months to drum up vastly more participation. Alec requests that everyone — adults and kids alike — take a moment join in the effort at www.climateeducation.org/petition.
All these efforts have not gone unnoticed. Alec has won several awards in the last two years, including the 2008 Earth Charter Award for Youth Activist and the Environmental Defense Center’s 2009 Young Environmental Hero Award. He was also recently profiled on CNN.
This is all in little over two years since he started doing what he felt was needed as a determined 12-year-old. Makes one wonder what he’ll be able to do by the time he’s legally able to vote. I put my money on “save us all.”
Photos top to bottom: Alec Loorz, courtesy of http://www.kids-vs-global-warming.com; picture of Alec and his mom Victoria, courtesy of Alec Loorz at alecjloorz on flickr; a group of SLAP activists, courtesy of Alec Loorz at alecjloorz on flickr.)