SEAC members lobby against Bush's National Energy Strategy

"18 SEAC members travel to Washington to lobby against National Energy Strategy," Daily Tar Heel, 4/16/91

By Natarsha Witherspoon, Staff Writer

Eighteen members of the UNC Student Environmental Action Coalition lobbied on Capitol Hill on Friday against President Bush's energy strategy. Lisa Abbott, co-chairwoman of SEAC, said the National Day of Action involved students from across the country. "I think it was the first time many UNC students lobbied on the Capitol and said what they believed in and were listened to," she said. Ericka Kurz, SEAC's national campaign coordinator, said about 150 students attended the rally, which was part of SEAC's "Energy Independence" campaign.

Part of Bush's National Energy Strategy calls for opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and coastal areas of North Carolina for oil drilling. Abbott said the strategy also includes deregulating the nuclear industry, which would take away the power of citizens to prevent the operation of nuclear waste dumps and sites. SEAC members want Congress to make energy conservation and finding renewable energy sources their priority, she said. "The strategy never mentions fuel efficiency," she said. "It is lip service. There is no specific funding for the conservation of energy." Randy Viscio, SEAC's national outreach coordinator, said the group wanted Congress to pass the Corporate Average Fuel Efficiency Bill, which would raise the average fuel mileage of new cars from 26 miles per gallon to 40-45 miles per gallon.

Abbott said, "We asked our representatives to co-sponsor a bill in the House and Senate saying our country needs to reduce our dependency on oil. It was exciting to see students from all over the country," she said. A training session gave the students tips on lobbying, she said.

The students from UNC met with environmental aides of Sen. Terry .Sanford, Rep. David Price and Rep. Charlie Rose, all of North Carolina, Abbott said. Other students from UNC-Greensboro spoke with N.C. Sen. Jesse Helms' aides, she said. "The representatives were receptive and knowledgeable about the issues," she said.

"I think the strategy Bush has proposed, the National Energy Strategy, will be passed piece by piece," she said. "If it was to be adopted we could have one of the biggest disasters we could ever imagine in this country. It would destroy our land and leave us more dependent on fossil fuels and nuclear power." Viscio said the lobbying efforts included letters, phone calls and petitions. The rally was really a small part of the campaign, he said. Kurz said SEAC was considering holding a national conference that would concentrate on the energy campaign. "Students at UNC have done a great job locally, writing 30 letters," she said. SEAC has more than 200 chapters at colleges nationwide, with its national office located in Chapel Hill on Franklin Street.

SEAC: a grassroots network and decentralized democracy

"New kids on the Earth," Sierra. Jan/Feb 91, p34.

By KEIKO OHNUMA

Not content to prepare only for a high-income future, many students are working today to improve the world.

TODAY'S TEEN AND "twenty-something" environmental activists are showing themselves to be low-key and coolly efficient. Demonstrations and rallies aren't really their style; these high-school and college students would sooner organize a tropical-hardwood boycott or produce a catalog of their school's "environmentally sound" courses than take to the streets.

Whatever their tactical approach to current issues, today's up-and-coming defenders of the Earth are eager to put a new face on environmentalism. Reared during the Reagan era, they pride themselves on their fusion of 1960s-style idealism with '80s-style practicality. With high spirits and boundless energy, they've formed an efficient nationwide student-organizing machine composed of a bewildering array of political and social-change groups.

Among the largest components of this new activist mechanism is the Student Environmental Action Coalition (SEAC), which members call "Seek." Formed in early 1988 by two University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill students who wanted to communicate with other green-minded youth, SEAC has grown rapidly. In October 1989 the organization's first national conference, Threshold, drew 1,700 activists to a three-day powwow at the Chapel Hill campus. Participation swelled to 7,600 at Catalyst, SEAC's second major gathering, held last fall at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. For that event students came from all 50 states, Europe, Africa, and Asia.

Serving as an umbrella organization for more than 500 campus environmental groups, SEAC functions as a grassroots network, an information clearinghouse, and a spiritual resource for "empowering and enriching" its members, who may choose to undertake activities as politically neutral as promoting solid-waste reduction or as controversial as marching for animal rights. "We try to be a decentralized democracy, where ultimately the grassroots decide what their stance is" on any given issue, says UNC-Chapel Hill student Ericka Kurz, one of SEAC's original organizers. Coordinated, top-down policymaking is distasteful to the leadership, and member groups don't necessarily have to support any regional or national action, explains Lara Mears, a student at Texas A&M University who serves on SEAC's governing body, the National Council. The organization, she says, simply "brings together groups that have been working on a variety of issues, motivating them and giving them a voice nationally."

At Mears' school, for example, TEAC (Texas Environmental Action Coalition) has published a community recycling directory and set up company-sponsored recycling bins in the dorms. At Stanford University, SEAS (Students for Environmental Action at Stanford) is concentrating on getting environmental studies incorporated into the academic curriculum. And at UNC-Chapel Hill, students are looking beyond their campus, drafting a resolution challenging the state's road-construction budget.

So far SEAC has concentrated primarily on coalition-building. But at campuses where no environmental-action groups yet exist, SEAC promotes such politically inclusive and pragmatic activities as recycling. National Council member Lisa Abbott of UNC-Chapel Hill says recycling is one of the best tools an organizer can use to involve students, "because a large number of people have to work together. From there, it's easy to get them talking about other issues."

Besides the youth of its members, what distinguishes SEAC from most mainstream environmental groups is its attempt to incorporate a broad array of social issues into its agenda.

Soon after Threshold, where guest speakers represented what students saw as the predominantly white, male, middle-class environmental establishment, SEAC began to cultivate alliances with grassroots organizers of minority, labor, and consumer groups--the sort of people who provide what Kath Delaney of the National Toxics Campaign Fund calls the "new voice" of environmentalism. As a result, Catalyst speakers included Winona LaDuke, president of the Indigenous Women's Network; Cesar Chavez, president of United Farm Workers; consumer advocate Ralph Nader; and Physicians for Social Responsibility founder Helen Caldicott.

Behind this shift in emphasis is a definition of environmentalism that stretches to include "anything that impacts on a living organism," as National Council coordinator Beth Ising puts it. David Ball, student coordinator of SEAC's administrative office, says the term means protecting not only the environment but "the people who live in it," and thus working toward "eliminating sexism, racism, and homophobia, promoting peaceful and nurturing philosophies over militaristic and exploitative ones, and questioning why corporations have so much control over how common resources are used."

Such broad-minded thinking isn't found just among college groups. Creating Our Future, a Marin County, California-based organization made up mostly of high-school students, and its national offshoot, Youth for Environmental Sanity (YES!), have also wedded traditional environmental thinking to social concerns.

Creating Our Future organizer Joseph Pace, a 19-year-old high-school graduate, regularly visits schools to promote environmental awareness. He tells students they should be aware of how their actions affect the world around them. For him, concern for animal rights and social justice make up part of the "compassion for all beings" implied by the word environmentalism. YES! organizers are touring the country, bringing a similar message to hundreds of thousands of primary and secondary school students in 25 cities in 13 states. Sixteen-year-old Santa Cruz, California, resident Ocean Robbins, a YES! spokesperson, says students are doing "tons of things" to address such issues at countless schools throughout the United States.

While some veteran environmentalists might scoff at such all-inclusive idealism, many are enthusiastic about the new trend. "Some of these students have an awareness that I am just beginning to have myself," says the National Toxics Campaign Fund's Delaney, who has been active in the environmental movement for ten years. "They're very committed to a democratic process, very sensitive to gender and cultural issues, and beginning to develop a plan to bring in students who haven't historically been involved."

Environmental theorist Barry Commoner, who spoke at Threshold, views the students as natural allies of grassroots activists. While the big environmental organizations "are negotiators, litigators, lobbyists," he says, the students "are much more like community groups, oriented toward anti corporate activism."

Indeed, established grassroots organizations have begun to see a potential gold mine in SEAC and other youth networks. Earth Day organizer Denis Hayes believes SEAC'S influence will ultimately depend on whether its leaders can effect change. But their ability to turn out large numbers of activists, Hayes says, gives SEAC, Creating Our Future, YES!, and similar groups "de facto political power." Hayes, like Commoner, notes that students, dismissed by activists during the Reagan years as "investment bankers on the make," have become increasingly sought after by some of the major environmental organizations - "not just as foot soldiers, but as allies."

KEIKO OHNUMA is a freelance writer in San Francisco.

8,000 SEAC members from around the globe gather for Catalyst conference

"8,000 SEAC members from around the globe gather for Catalyst conference," Daily Tar Heel, 10/10/90

By MARY MOORE PARHAM, Staff Writer

They came from 50 states and 12 countries. Armed with little more than tents and the desire for environmental change, about 8,000 members of Student Environmental Action Coalition (SEAC) gathered at the University of Illinois last weekend for Catalyst, a three-day student convention with an agenda as varied as its participants. Panel discussions, benefit concerts and workshops were held at the Champaign-Urbana campus for Catalyst, the second annual national SEAC convention.

The first, Threshold, took place at UNC last year. This year's convention included a march and a rally as well as 5,000 more participants. Among those present were 49 students from UNC, the second largest group coming from outside of Illinois.

For SEAC co-chairman Alec Guettel, the convention was akin to being at a football game extended for an entire weekend. "All that energy was there, not for football, but for something a lot of these people have dedicated their lives to," he said. "It was totally inspiring." The UNC contingent made the 14-hour trip to Illinois by van, arriving Friday at the county fairgrounds where they set up camp.

At the time of the convention, only 2,700 students had registered. However, as SEAC members quickly realized, their numbers were much greater. "Because Catalyst was such a new concept, we had little to go on in terms of estimating the number of participants," said SEAC co-chairwoman Lisa Abbott. "But as we arrived, it was clear that we had about 4,000 people, and by Friday night, almost 8,000. It was phenomenal, absolutely phenomenal."

Indoor housing for SEAC members was limited, and most students chose to camp at the fairgrounds in tents or simply under the stars. A tent city emerged, complete with portable latrines and four showers per 3,000 people. Free mass transit was arranged to get students to and from the campus. At night, bonfires dotted the fairground, and spontaneous outbursts of guitar and drum playing filled the air, sophomore Ruby Sinreich said. SEAC members woke in the morning to small bands of students playing flutes and tambourines.

Catalyst was more than a small-scale Woodstock, however. The program opened with speeches by consumer and environmental advocate Ralph Nader, actor Robert Redford, the Rev. Jesse Jackson and Dr. Helen Caldicott, president emeritus of Physicians for Social Responsibility. Each addressed his or her personal concerns as they related to the focal topics of corporate environmental responsibility and environmental justice.

The first session targeted the oil industry and other corporations responsible for environmental transgressions caused by off-shore drilling or excessive product packaging. Freshman Stephanie Jayne explained the need to attack corporations directly to reach a lot of people. "Although attack may seem a strong word, I believe that when a corporation is targeted, it reaches more than just their executive board," she said. "Employees, stockholders, advertisers and the government will begin to take notice." In addition to corporate accountability is the need to conserve resources for future generations. "We're going to be giving this earth to someone else, and what people don't necessarily realize is that oil is a finite resource," Jayne said. "We can use it for only so many years and then it's gone."

Sunday's session on environmental justice dealt with the issue of minorities in the environmental movement. The movement has been criticized for lack of racial diversity. Students and speakers focused their attentions on diversity, not only of the movement's participants, but of its agenda as well. Part of this diversity came in the form of a new committee within SEAC called the People of Color Caucus, which will elect a representative to sit on the national SEAC board. "There was a lot of anger, and for a while, it looked really scary,” Guettel said. "But I believe that if the environmental movement alienates a minority, it is an immediate failure and will cease to grow."

Part of this growth is dependent on the actual definition of environmental-ism itself. Catalyst also addressed the issue of defining a term previously synonymous with rain forests and the ozone layer. "I think environmentalism is beyond trees and sky and is taking on a more universal sense," freshman Kirti Shastri said. "The environment is also about the people we live with and how we are all interrelated." Jayne said environmentalism needed to be treated as a social issue. "Especially if you consider that the majority of toxic waste dumps are in low-income, minority neighborhoods."

In addition to the two panel discussions, SEAC members planned a march and rally to culminate in the main quad of the campus. "We took up five blocks of street, and it really made you feel that we were large enough to effect change," Sinreich said. "To have so many people committed to making a difference was incredibly uplifting." Abbott agreed. "We would pass people on the side of the street and yell out for them to join us," she said. "The whole march was very symbolic of the movement. It was about reaching out to people, saying, 'Come join us, this is the direction we've got to head in.'" During the rally, foreign students spoke about their own involvement in environmentalism. In the forefront of discussion was the 1992 United Nations conference in Brazil, where many decisions will be made about the status of international environmental policy.

SEAC, in association with other student coalitions, is already planning two parallel youth conferences to take place worldwide. The first would be held two months before the Brazil date and would draw up a list of demands to be presented during the U.N. conference. The second would take place during the U.N. meeting. "If decisions aren't made here in 1992, they will never happen," Guettel said.

As Catalyst came to a close, the most often heard criticism of the meeting was its brevity. Smaller student discussion groups had to be cut out to make room for speakers and student workshops. What the convention lacked in time was compensated for by the empowerment for change brought home by its participants. "I left with an understanding that students are more ready than expected to take serious and definitive steps toward action," said UNC senior Ericka Kurz, national office coordinator. "There are a whole lot of people around the country ready to do something. They see the environment as more than just trees, but as people."

Students interested in joining SEAC should attend Thursday's meeting in room 217A of the Student Union at 5:15, or stop by the SEAC office in the Campus Y for more information.