Ericka Kurz (1968-1993) was an organizer and student leader who helped found SEAC, the Student Environmental Action Coalition, while she was a student at UNC-Chapel Hill in the early 1990s.
"UNC-CH students protest Exxon recruiting & policies," (Raleigh) News & Observer, 10/20/90. From right: Lisa Abbott, Ericka Kurz, Jimmy Langman, Alec Guettal, David Biggs, Erik Ose. Dan Coleman and Greg Gangi are near the far left.
Following the 1989 Threshold conference that drew 1,700 student eco-activists to Chapel Hill, SEAC became the largest and most significant U.S. student-led activist organization to emerge since the 1960s heyday of SDS. Ericka played a key role in guiding SEAC to become a democratically governed national student coalition. As SEAC's first National Campaign Coordinator, she set the tone for the group's willingness to challenge entrenched corporate powers by taking on the oil, energy, and chemical industries during inaugural campaigns for Energy Independence and Corporate Accountability.
Ericka was tragically murdered in 1993, but her spirit lives on in an entire generation of progressives who were introduced to activism through their involvement with SEAC. This archive documents some of Ericka's rich legacy of organizing work, as published in Threshold, SEAC's national magazine, and elsewhere during the years 1990-91. It also offers a glimpse of her hilarious wit and outsized, radiant personality that charmed and inspired all who knew and worked with her.
(Threshold, page 4, Jan-Feb 1991)
This war is hitting home for a lot of people...
(Threshold, pages 6-8, Jan-Feb 1991)
It's time for a battle of grassroots grit against the million dollar muscle of the oil and nuclear lobbies on Capitol Hill...
(Threshold, page 36, Jan-Feb 1991)
Several SEAC representatives met with Tony Mazzocchi, Secretary-Treasurer of OCAW...
(Threshold, page 7, March 1991)
Hello, I'm Ericka Kurz, a senior at UNC with a very low grade-point. It's been one hell of an experience witnessing this movement grow, and as you can imagine, I'm slightly burned out but still a true believer...
(Threshold, page 10, March 1991)
We'll be letting Congress, President Bush and the nation know that our generation demands an end to the oil and nuclear empires and and the beginning of a system of democratic, efficient, renewable energy!
(Threshold, page 11, March 1991)
BP...ranks as the world's third Biggest Polluter. Combine that with their strong anti-environmental lobby, and BP is a Big Problem we can't afford to ignore.
(Threshold, page 23, March 1991)
Around the world and in this nation we face a crisis - a crisis of dependence on nonrenewable resources which threaten our health, defeat democracy and drive us to war.
National Energy Tragedy!
(Threshold, pages 24-25, March 1991)
WE DEMAND: conservation, renewables, energy efficiency...RIGHT NOW.
(by Jennifer Karson and Ericka Kurz)
(Threshold, pages 12-13, May 1991)
What happens when Thomas Jefferson, Betsy Ross, Benjamin Franklin, Uncle Sam, and a bunch of excited SEAC'ers demand Energy Independence? Read on...
What's Going On, and What Does It All Mean?
(Threshold, pages 14-15, May 1991)
Democracy and Energy are the two most important issues which we as environmental activists can focus on, since more democratic political, economic, and social institutions will allow people everywhere to protect the natural resources they depend on,
and since efficient, renewable energy will allow for more decentralized control of our energy production. Energy underlies everything: with an oil-, nuclear-, and gasoline-based energy system we have pesticide-based agriculture, air, water, and land pollution, nuclear weaponry, and centralized, powerful institutions which don't pay for economic "externalities" and manipulate our government with billions of lobbying dollars.
Ericka Kurz and fellow SEAC'er Raj Krishnasami, Spring 1992.
Ericka kept a lovingly tended shrine to Prince above her SEAC national office desk.
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