SEAC’s Founding
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, though, said 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.

By Jimmy Langman, Threshold chairperson.