Originally published 2019-10-20.
Xiuhtezcatl Martinez is an American climate activist and hip-hop artist who has campaigned on environmental issues since childhood. In 2019, aged 19, he helped launch NOW, a platform that asked ordinary people to give a small monthly amount, he suggested about $10, to fund tree planting and forest restoration, while encouraging businesses to build donations into their own products and events. He is also known as one of the 21 young plaintiffs in Juliana v. United States, the climate lawsuit that challenged the US government for years before the courts ended it in 2024 and 2025.
Here is who he is, what NOW proposed, what happened to the lawsuit, and how to think about small recurring climate donations.
Who Xiuhtezcatl Martinez is
Martinez was born on 9 May 2000 in Colorado and spent part of his early childhood in Mexico. His father raised him with a strong connection to Mexica (Aztec) traditions, and his first name comes from the Nahuatl language. He grew up in Boulder, Colorado, and moved to Portland, Oregon, in 2019.
By his own account, he was giving speeches about the environment at around six years old. At about nine, he asked his local city council to ban pesticides in city parks, an early campaign that led to a change in policy. He went on to serve as youth director of Earth Guardians, an environmental organisation founded by his family in 1992, which grew into a network of youth groups in many countries.
In June 2015, at 15, he addressed the United Nations General Assembly in English, Spanish and Nahuatl. He has written two books, We Rise: The Earth Guardians Guide to Building a Movement That Restores the Planet (2017) and Imaginary Borders (2020), and he records music that mixes hip-hop with environmental and Indigenous themes. In 2013 he received a US President's Volunteer Service Award, and Rolling Stone later named him among its "25 under 25".
The court cases he joined
Martinez was the lead plaintiff in a 2013 Colorado case asking the state's oil and gas regulator to put public health and the climate first when approving drilling. The Colorado Supreme Court ruled against the young plaintiffs in January 2019.
His better-known case was Juliana v. United States. Filed in August 2015 in federal court in Oregon, with support from the nonprofit Our Children's Trust, it argued that by promoting fossil fuels for decades despite knowing the risks, the federal government had violated young people's constitutional rights to life, liberty and property, and had failed to protect shared natural resources. In 2016 Judge Ann Aiken ruled that a climate system able to sustain human life is a fundamental right, a striking decision that kept the case alive.
It never reached trial. In January 2020 an appeals panel of the Ninth Circuit dismissed it 2 to 1, saying courts could not order or supervise the sweeping climate plan the plaintiffs wanted. After the plaintiffs amended their complaint, the same court ordered it dismissed in May 2024, and in March 2025 the US Supreme Court declined to hear their appeal. The judges did not rule on whether climate change harms the plaintiffs, only that federal courts were not the place to fix it.
What NOW proposed
NOW was announced in 2019 by Martinez together with a coalition of educators, entrepreneurs, artists and activists. Its starting goal was very large: to help plant one trillion trees. The model was simple. Individuals could give once or subscribe monthly, with Martinez suggesting $10 a month as a reasonable figure but no minimum. Companies were encouraged to integrate the programme into their business, for instance by setting aside part of the ticket price for concerts and events.
The group said it planned to rely on drones to plant at scale and to work with Indigenous communities whose knowledge of forests would guide where and how restoration happened. Martinez also stressed that keeping existing forests standing, especially in the Amazon, matters even more than planting new ones. The platform's website still describes NOW as a climate initiative built around a tree-restoration subscription.
Why trees, and why "one trillion"
The trillion-tree idea did not start with NOW. The youth organisation Plant-for-the-Planet, founded by German student Felix Finkbeiner, called for a trillion trees in a 2011 UN speech, building on an earlier UN Billion Tree Campaign inspired by the Kenyan environmentalist Wangari Maathai. A 2015 study led by ecologist Tom Crowther estimated that about 3 trillion trees grow on Earth today and that close to half of the trees that existed before human civilisation have been lost. In 2019 a widely reported Science paper argued that restoring forests on available land could store a large amount of carbon, which gave the trillion-tree goal new momentum. In 2020 the World Economic Forum launched its own initiative, 1t.org.
The scale of the emissions problem explains the appeal. Human activity releases around 40 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, and growing trees pull some of that back out of the air. National Geographic, drawing on World Bank data, reported that about 502,000 square miles of forest were lost between 1990 and 2016, and the magazine also reported that the Amazon had lost roughly a sixth of its forest cover in half a century.
What tree planting can and cannot do
Scientists broadly agree that protecting and restoring forests helps, but several cautions apply. The 2019 estimates of how much carbon new forests could store were criticised by other researchers as too high. Trees take decades to grow, can burn or be cut down, and do not replace the need to cut fossil fuel emissions quickly. Planting the wrong species in the wrong place, such as on natural grasslands, can harm biodiversity and local water supplies.
That is why many restoration experts prefer the phrase "the right tree in the right place", and why projects that involve local and Indigenous communities tend to last longer. Seedlings that nobody looks after often die within a few years. Even the 1t.org initiative lists cutting emissions and conserving existing ecosystems alongside restoration as its core principles.
Before you sign up for a monthly climate donation
Small recurring gifts can add up, and they give organisations a steady income to plan around. Before committing, it is worth checking a few things:
- Who receives the money? Look for a named organisation, its legal status and where it is registered.
- What does a donation fund? A good project says where it plants, which species, and who maintains the trees afterwards.
- How is progress reported? Survival rates, independent checks and published accounts matter more than the number of seedlings put in the ground.
- Can you cancel easily? A reputable subscription makes the amount, frequency and cancellation process clear.
A monthly donation is a personal choice, not a test of how much someone cares. Voting, talking to representatives, cutting your own energy use and supporting forest protection all count too.
(The Instagram post originally embedded here is no longer available.)
Why his approach resonates
Martinez's work has moved from the courtroom to the concert stage to fundraising, but the message is the same: young people should not wait for governments to act. NOW tried to turn worry into a routine, practical habit, the price of a few coffees a month. Whether or not any one platform reaches its targets, the idea that climate action can be shared, steady and hopeful has helped bring many young people into the movement.
Sources: Wikipedia: Xiuhtezcatl Martinez; Wikipedia: Juliana v. United States; Wikipedia: Trillion Tree Campaign; NOW (generation-now.com); Our Children's Trust: Juliana v. US; deforestation figures as reported by National Geographic.
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