SEAC

The first seeds of SEAC (pronounced ‘seek’) were planted in the fall of 1988 after a group of students from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill placed an ad in Greenpeace magazine inviting other students to join them in the fight to save the planet.  The enthusiastic response to that ad emboldened the Chapel Hill group, and in early 1989, they set about to organize Threshold, SEAC’s first national student environmental conference.

Many people thought we were aiming too high. The critics said we couldn’t possibly do something so big; however, we persevered and worked even harder. We believed there could be nothing more important that we could possibly do. Through untiring commitment, good luck, and the power of an idea whose time had come, we succeeded beyond our wildest dreams.

On October 27-29, 1989, more than 1700 students from 43 states and over 225 schools came to Chapel Hill to participate in Threshold. It was an astounding turnout. On the first night, the jam-packed Memorial Hall auditorium buzzed with excitement for SEAC had come to life and with it a new national student environmental movement was born. The conference had given SEAC the launch pad it needed to become a national organization. On that weekend many student environmentalists from around the nation also met each other for the very first time, talked grassroots organizing strategy, and voted for SEAC’s first national campaign: an all out effort to save America’s remaining old-growth forests and to reform the U.S. Forest Service.

Threshold sparked tremendous energy. Just two weeks afterward, students at 50 schools coordinated a nationwide day of action demanding that our universities and schools become models of environmental sustainability. Three months after the conference, students across the country organized marches on their state capitols, calling on our politicians to immediately adopt policies which would conserve, preserve, and restore our national forest heritage. Five months later students from across the nation descended on our nation’s capitol to participate in a SEAC rally calling for strong national clean air laws.

When we came together for Catalyst in Champaign, Illinois (SEAC’s second national environmental conference held just one year after Threshold) more than 7,000 students from all 50 states and eleven countries were there to celebrate and take SEAC into the environmental decade of the 1990s. [Contributed by Jimmy Langman, Threshold chairperson]

Numerous regions began corporate accountability campaigns around issues like British Petroleum’s pollution in Ohio and Coors’ destruction of rivers in Colorado. The momentum of Catalyst also carried into regional and state gatherings around the country.  SEAC developed a national magazine, Threshold, which we still produce today. In January of 1991, the U.S. went to war with Iraq, and many SEACers organized against the war, launching the Energy Independence Campaign to coincide with the anti-war effort and its corporate accountability campaign. Unfortunately, only a hundred people attended the main event, a rally in D.C.

In the summer of 1991, SEAC held its 2nd National Council Meeting.  At that meeting, the organization decided to refocus and move away from national campaigns, launching two new projects, the Common Ground conference (2500 attended in Boulder, Colorado), and the Action for Solidarity, Equality, Environment and Development (A SEED), an international effort of several youth organizations to impact the Earth Summit in Rio.  SEAC also started a field-organizing program, sending out student organizers to visit schools to spread the SEAC message.

A SEED grew into SEAC’s largest single project.  There was a speaker’s tour with educational events at over 120 campuses.  Weekend conferences were held in three states, and 23 countries networked by email and fax to discuss the issues.  In March 1992, SEAC organized a series of demonstrations at the United Nations in New York.  In June, one of the three official observers on the U.S. Delegation to the Rio Earth Summit (and the only student) was a SEACer.  In Rio, A SEED organized more actions, and youth on four continents, including SEACers in the U.S., went on a hunger strike.  In the end, SEAC became part of a network of student groups in 62 countries struggling at the grassroots for environmental and social justice.

During our peak in 1991, SEAC had 13 people on its full-time staff that consisted of a mix of national coordinators and field organizers. In 1992, SEAC’s budget fell dramatically and the staff was cut to five people. At the National Council meeting in July, the People of Color Caucus (POCC) demanded and received equal representation on the National Council. Throughout the Fall, SEAC continued the new strategy of focusing support on the development of local coalitions. The office was moved to a larger space in Chapel Hill, and the administrative capacity was increased again.  In 1993, indicative of SEAC’s early commitment to the struggle against corporate sponsored globalization, we started to organize against the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).  SEAC also created a weekend training program in the summer, where we sent teams of trainers to different campuses for a weekend of skill-sharing and issues workshops. That fall SEAC joined the Free Burma movement to promote human rights and environmental justice in Burma.  In 1994, SEAC launched its Environmental Justice Initiative (EJI) as part of the commitment to expand the analysis of students and youth beyond traditional environmental issues. The EJI was a project of the POCC and was geared toward educating and empowering youth and high school students. Part of EJI eventually turned into Youth United for Community Action and became its own organization in 1996. The POCC started developing an Environmental Justice Organizing Guide (EJOG) which was completed in 1996.

Unfortunately, 1996 became a tumultuous year for the organization as a series of conflicts led to the loss of funding, the loss of all staff and a decision to close the National Office. This was a result of conflict between the Coordinating Committee (CC) and the larger National Council (NC), as CC meetings occurred after the January and March NC meetings were cancelled. There was a decision made by the CC to cut the Summer Training Program, which caused a backlash from staff who felt the CC had overstepped their authority. With the amount of funding that was tied to the Summer Program, the high levels of conflict within the organization, and overall organizational ineffectiveness – the NC did not meet over the summer. Conflict continued into the Fall, as relationships with our fiscal sponsor at that time became so bad that they forbid SEAC from receiving grants. Nonetheless, in spite of the lack of funding and organizational crises, the National Council came together in October 1996 and voted to keep the organization alive without staff funding.

The National Council came together again in January 1997, as an all-volunteer body to continue planning and moving SEAC forward.  NC members began writing grants that Spring and secured funding to organize the Summer Training Institute. Through a planning meeting in the Summer, the NC moved the organization forward and decided to re-open the National Office – but this time in Philadelphia where it would stay until 2007. 1997 and 1998 saw the grassroots movement continue to move forward, aided by the Summer Training Institute, as 15 state-level conferences occurred during these two years.  SEAC also took great steps to diversify our funding in the aftermath of the 1996 crash, as the majority of organizational funding came through merchandise sales, donations, and the active Speakers Bureau.

Throughout the organizational re-build, SEAC was able to continue its unique role of uniting movements and making change. SEACers were critical in the successful campaign to get Home Depot to stop selling Old Growth lumber.  SEACers recruited for and actively participated in the protest in 2000 that shut down the World Bank and International Monetary Fund Meeting in Washington, D.C.  SEAC began the fight for sustainable menstrual products in the summer of 2000, first with the initiation of a national campaign to get Dioxins out of Tampons (DOT), and then in 2001 with the launching of the Tampaction Campaign.  Work that focused on climate change began in the late ‘90s, and SEAC adopted the Kyoto NOW! campaign in 2001.

In 2003, youth organizers from the Kyoto NOW! campaign teamed up with Greenpeace and the Climate Campaign during SEAC’s National Meeting in Detroit, MI, to discuss a National Day of Action to occur in the fall to unite the clean energy movement. The organizers voiced their concerns about the many differences in the local campaigns, as well as the fact that, with so much emphasis being placed on anti-war efforts, a day of action for clean energy may be overshadowed, so the group decided to keep the goals modest. The National Day of Action for Clean Energy Campuses, held November 13th, was an exploding success that blew away the organizers’ expectations. The initial goal was to have 25 campus actions, and this was far exceeded with 65 groups ultimately participating!  It was around this time that the Kyoto NOW! campaign changed its name to Youth Power Shift as a means of moving beyond the limitations of the Kyoto Protocol and focusing on schools and universities to take bold steps toward clean energy use nation-wide.  In 2004, the November day of action was followed by a more coordinated event set on April 1st (April Fools Day) with the theme of moving beyond the foolishness of using fossil fuels- Fossil Fools Day. This Day of Action saw even greater success with 130 actions occurring nation-wide; double the 65 that took part in the November Day of Action.

Throughout the 2000’s, SEAC’s grassroots organizing efforts were linked together on the national level by a shared vision of radical social change, rather than a single organization-wide campaign.  We organized around Appalachian solidarity through protesting Mountaintop Removal; around Farm Worker Solidarity with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers; around solidarity with the Onondaga Nation in preventing pollution in Upstate New York; and continued our organizing through the Tampaction Campaign.  Organizing around climate and energy issues continued to expand as a critical area of SEAC’s organizing through the 2000’s, and became our primary focus by the end of the decade.

The name Youth Power Shift gave birth to the term “Power Shift” that united the Youth Climate Movement in the late 2000’s. The Campus Climate Challenge was formed as a way to encourage students to push their colleges and universities to become more environmentally sustainable. In 2006, SEAC applied for funding from the Energy Action Coalition (EAC) and has been a funded Coalition Partner of the EAC until recently.  2007 is said to be a landmark year for the movement to stop climate change and, through the EAC, SEAC helped organize and recruit for the first Power Shift, held November 2-5, 2007 in Washington, D.C.

With the EAC funding, SEAC was able to hire staff again, and put them to work in field organizing and national coordination.  SEACers organized, this time primarily around winning campus sustainability measures and putting an end to mountaintop removal. SEAC played the leading role in organizing the first 2007 Mountain Justice Spring Break (MJSB) – which has become a yearly event in the Appalachian Coalfields to build solidarity with coalfield environmental justice groups to end mountaintop removal.  Although we were putting staff to work and growing in our effectiveness, it was proposed, in the aftermath of MJSB, that SEAC dissolve and our grassroots efforts be absorbed by some other organization.  Through a series of long discussions and counter proposals that parallel the 1996 “organizational life vote,” the National Council voted once again to keep SEAC alive and organizing.  Along with that decision, we decided to move our office to our greatest grassroots base in Charleston, WV, where it remains today.  SEAC also committed to cut down the vision from a huge national rebirth to a more streamlined and localized effort of linking our grassroots struggles.

Through SEAC’s heavy participation during the late 2000’s in the Energy Action Coalition (EAC) and the strong majority of funding that came from the EAC, climate and energy organizing continued to be the predominant area of our work. We restructured our National Council to be a body of elected decision makers rather than representatives from each chapter.  Our base expanded deeper into West Virginia and more broadly into Kentucky and Michigan, where SEAC played a major role in starting organizations and state networks. Although SEAC dropped the summer training program in every year except 2009, SEACers came out in droves to statewide and national conferences that we organized in coalition with other EAC organizations. Power Shift’07, Power Shift’09, and the regional Power Shift events in the Fall of 2009 were major events that we helped organize and recruit for through the EAC.

In May 2010, the National Council decided to decline funding from the EAC in an attempt to force the diversification of our funding, as well as to refocus on our own vision rather than that of the EAC.  We are once again an all volunteer organization that is restructuring to ensure we stay true to our roots, while adapting to the ever changing youth movement(s). During the past 21 years of organizing, SEAC has helped to network student environmentalists, broaden and radicalize individual perspectives to tackle the root causes of environmental injustice, launch national/regional/state campaigns, and train tens of thousands of life-long activists who have gone on to serve and build movements for justice around the country and world.  We’ve experienced our share of organizational turmoil and anticipate more struggles in the future, but we will persevere and continue to be leaders in the youth environmental justice movement.