HIP-HOP ARTIST TAKES ON CLIMATE CHANGE

Meet the Teenage Indigenous Hip-Hop Artist Taking on Climate Change; Rolling Stone recently sat down with Xiuhtezcatl Martinez after his powerful speech at the United Nations

Coco McPherson, July 13, 2015 (Rolling Stone)

“…At the U.N.'s high-level event on climate change, Secretary General Ban Ki-moon criticized what he called the snail's pace of [negotiations, and] Anote Tong, the president of Kiribati, delivered a mournful report on the massive relocation of his drowning island nation…[And then, dressed in a donated suit, with dark hair skimming his waist, Xiuhtezcatl Martinez, the youth director of Earth Guardians, issued a brief prayer in both Spanish and the Nahuatl language…[and] began an extemporaneous speech on the folly of climate dithering…When he finished just over nine minutes later, climate negotiators and representatives from nearly 200 countries had seen the face of America's next-generation environmental movement: a 15-year-old trilingual Indigenous hip-hop artist from Boulder who sits on Obama's youth council and who's already organized youth crews on six continents…[who told Rolling Stone we don't have to all stop using fossil fuels entirely and go live in the woods…It's about understanding — seeing — that the way we're interacting with the world is destroying the planet…” click here for more

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