Detention or Eco Club Choosing your future Juan Martinez
Transcriber: Andrea McDonough
Reviewer: Bedirhan Cinar
This might seem like a far-away place
in a far-away land.
My house is right there in the middle.
This was 1992 L.A. Riots.
And I remember being 8 years old
and looking out there
and thinking to myself,
“This is it, this is game over. I’m done.”
The military came in,
the cops came in,
and I thought they were going to save us,
and for some reason they kept on pointing the guns at my people.
So I grew up angry,
I grew up mad.
I struggled watching my parents pay rent at the end of the month.
Sometimes they had to take food out of their mouths
so that we, my two younger sisters and I, could eat.
And the people that I saw taking care of their family
and taking care of business were the gang members.
So I considered that as a career path,
not because they were the ones that,
you know, had the girls, had the cars,
it was because they were the ones who took care of their families.
And I love my family enough to even to consider that as a possibility.
But it wasn’t always bad.
If you haven’t put two and two together,
I’m a Dodgers fan.
I like the Dodgers even more so
because Dodgers Stadium sits in the middle of the Elysian Park,
one of the biggest parks in L.A.,
and I remember going out on the weekends with my family
and for la carne asada and sharing our cultura
and them taking me on trails
and showing me all this amazing stuff that they knew.
I grew up, I went to Dorsey High School.
You might not know Dorsey that much,
but you might know Crenshaw High School.
Crenshaw and Dorsey are rival high schools,
but they are more than just rivals
in the traditional sense of rival high schools,
they are the birth place of The Bloods and The Crips.
So I was in 9th grade detention,
and they gave me an ultimatum:
They said, “Either you stay in detention,
or you go to this thing called Eco Club.”
And I said, “What?!? Eco Club?
Forget you!”
But I took a chance and I went over to Eco Club.
And the first thing that they said was,
“Grab a bag of seeds and let’s go out.”
And I picked jalapeños
because I wanted to grill salsa for my mom at the end of that.
And they tricked me!
Then all of a sudden, I started worrying about photosynthesis
and the pH balance,
and the UV radiation,
and all this different stuff that would make my jalapeños grow.
At the end of that semester, they gave me an opportunity
to go to the Teton Science Schools in Wyoming.
For a kid who has never been out of South Central,
to see mountains for the first time,
to look up at the night sky and count,
I couldn’t even count, the stars.
For the first time in my life at the age of 15
I saw more stars than I could count.
I had to pinch myself and look at that shooting star
and say, “No, that’s not the ghetto bird coming up at me.”
And the ghetto bird, you won’t find in the Audobon book,
it’s a police helicopter in case you don’t know.
And I went back home and I found mentors and friends
and family and people who supported me in this,
and in 2005, this guy named Richard Louv
wrote a book called Last Child in the Woods,
and he coined a phrase called “nature-deficit disorder”.
It’s not a medical term, don’t worry,
you don’t have to take drugs for it,
it’s an easy fix:
all you have to do is get outside.
Because we have 7 billion people in the world today,
but if you were to put all those 7 billion people
shoulder-to-shoulder with each other,
they could all fit in the city of L.A.
It’s not necessarily that we are running out of space,
it’s how we are using that space up.
The average U.S. teenager now spends
somewhere between 40 and 65 hours a week
connected to some type of media device,
some kind of technology.
That’s a full-time job!
We’re not saying that its bad,
we’re just saying get out, have fun!
And I got together with some friends
and we created this thing called the “Natural Leaders Network”.
And we wanted to find out
how other people are getting outside all over the world.
We thought it was just us here in the U.S.,
but no, no, it’s all over the world.
And we started getting amazing things back:
the beaches,
the mountains,
in the middle of the city,
how people got out,
just the pure joy of celebrating our connection with nature.
And it all started with that one group.
I want to give you this new motivation
about a new nature movement,
and 7 reasons for a new nature movement.
You can create your own reasons,
but these are 7 reasons that we’re talking about.
I’m going to speed up a little bit because of time.
But, take it from these kids, let’s go get outside!
Last year I got to climb the grand Teton.
I went from being that kid from South Central
realizing that somehow I was connected to those mountains,
that my community in South Central L.A. was connected to the mountains up there.
And it all made sense,
the world made sense to me.
Science, and math, and history, and English,
and all the different things that were happening in this world
made sense to me because of that.
I went out to be the first one to graduate from my family in high school.
I’m the first one.
I’m a National Geographic Explorer today.
I do these amazing talks,
and I’m not telling you these things so I can brag about it,
or that I can show off,
I’m telling you these things because if a kid from South Central
who was about to be a gang member
can grow up to be a National Geographic Explorer
and sit here in front of you and address you like I am today,
then don’t ever, ever in your life doubt what you can do.
At the end of the day, I do what I do because of my family.
My family means the world to me
and from this day forward,
each one of you in this room is part of that family.
I want you go to away with that
and I’ll leave it with this one quote,
which has driven me to this point:
“Once social change begins, it cannot be reversed.
You cannot uneducate the person who has learned to read.
You cannot humiliate the person who feels pride.
You cannot oppress the people who are not afraid anymore.
We have seen the future, and the future is ours.”
It’s your future, it’s our future,
so go get ‘em!