Alec loorz biography

Former youth climate activist Alec Loorz is a writer, photographer, activist, and wild storyteller.
Founded the non-profit organization, "Kids vs Global Warming" at the age of 12 after watching Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth (2006).
He was the youngest person to attend Al Gore's Climate Reality training.

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Youth Activists 15 Years Later

Alec Loorz is a writer, photographer, activist, and wild storyteller. He has spent years in apprenticeship with wild spaces, and those on the edge, and he is deeply drawn by the mystery of the living earth.

Loorz’s early background was as a public speaker and youth climate activist. Throughout his teens he spoke to over 500,000 people at schools, environmental events, UN conferences, and many other venues. He organized the international “iMatter March” and was the lead plaintiff in a federal lawsuit against the US government on behalf of the atmosphere and our future, the first of its kind.

By age 18, Loorz was burnt out, and he left the world of climate activism entirely. He ended up living in Olympia, Washington for five years, and there fell in love with the shorelines, rivers, mountains, and edgelands of the Pacific Northwest. He was gifted a collection of significant encounters with animals and other wildernesses (along with nearly a million photos), and his work has since become about sharing these stories, and seeking out and listening to

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In the spring of 2010, Julia Olson, an environmental attorney based in Oregon, was introduced to Alec Loorz, a teen-ager from Ventura, California, and the founder of an advocacy group called Kids vs. Global Warming. At the time, Olson, who ran the nonprofit Our Children’s Trust, was preparing to sue the federal government over its insufficient action on climate change, and she hoped to coördinate youth demonstrations and other events with the filing of the lawsuit. Loorz, then fifteen years old, had been inspired by “An Inconvenient Truth,” Al Gore’s documentary from 2006, and had graduated from a climate-leadership program founded by Gore. He told Olson that he was game to help, but he had another role in mind: he wanted to be a plaintiff in the case. After Olson made sure that Loorz and his family knew what they were getting into, she agreed to represent him and two other teen-age climate activists.

That lawsuit, filed in May of 2011, was eventually dismissed, but it was the beginning of a legal campaign that has gained new attention—and, potentially, new significance—since the

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Ventura, CA

Alec first saw Al Gore’s documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” when he was 12 years old. Inspired by the message, Alec wrote to the organization and applied to be a presenter, but was denied due to his age. Undeterred, Alec created his own presentation and gave it over 30 times before Mr. Gore took notice. Eventually, Mr. Gore invited Alec to his next training session and Alec became the youngest presenter with “The Climate Project”. Since then, Alec has gone on to give over 100 presentations to upwards of 20,000 people and founded his own organization, Kids vs. Global Warming, a project of Earth Island Institute since 2008. Its mission is to educate youth on the science of climate change and empower them to take action. Through multi-media presentations to schools, keynote and panel presentations at conferences, videos and social media, Loorz translates the complex science of climate change into terms that motivate youth to get involved with creating solutions.Another campaign Alec created, the Declaration of Independence from Fossil Fuels, was taken national with