2011 Mountainfilm in Telluride: Alec Loorz, teen climate change activist

22 May 2011 Mountainfilm in Telluride: Alec Loorz, teen climate change activist

[click “Play” to hear Alec Loorz speak with Susan about climate change and young people]

kicker: teen activist featured at Moving Mountains Symposium

Ask Victoria Loorz about her Mother’s Day. Likely she will respond by telling you what her son was up to.

And no, he was not out raising hell Ferris Bueller style. Neither was behaving like the proverbial teen skulking in his room. For sure he wasn’t sexting. The thought would never occur.

For Mother’s Day, March 8, 16-year-old Alec Loorz, through his nonprofit iMatterMarch, had arranged for a series of more than 100 marches in states across the country and 25 countries around the world (including Kuwait) to proclaim a teen revolution. The goal: Let the world know climate change is not about money. It is not about power. It is not about convenience. It is about the future of a generation too young to vote, but aiming to protect its future.

Want to know more?

Alec Loorz is a guest speaker at the 33rd annual Mountainfilm in Telluride, where his subject at the Symposium on Awareness Into Action is climate change and a mass movement of young people like himself. Like-minded teens are standing up with a unified voice to tell the “ruling generation” that they will no longer sit idly by as their elders make decisions that threaten their future. They believe they matter. They know their future matters.

The talk takes place at the Masons Theatre, some time between 1:30 – 3:30 p.m. in one of three afternoon breakout sessions and includes other youth activists, Tim DeChristopher among them.

Alec, now a high school junior in Ventura, CA., has been a climate change activist for four years. He started Kids vs. Global Warming when he was 12 after seeing Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth.” Since then, he has spoken to nearly 200,000 young people and adults about the issue of climate change and its ramifications. Initially he suggested the usual: walk or ride a bike, change your light bulbs, until, well, a lightbulb went off in his head and Alec realized the usual was not enough. That’s how iMatter March came about. And the legal campaign that seeks to force our federal government and state governments to curb greenhouse gas emissions is a “public trust.”

Alec filed his suit on May 5.

To learn more about Alec, click the “play” button and listen to his interview and follow these links for video:

bioneers speech:  http://vimeo.com/16717235
TED speech:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=raW7wu_XxPs
iMatter march video:  http://vimeo.com/20612203

Or search on YouTube: Alec Loorz