20 Years Ago Today: SEAC on the Threshold of a National Movement

   

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Nearly twenty years after we both spent countless hours helping to organize Threshold in our first semester at UNC-Chapel Hill, C-line and I recently sat down to remember SEAC's early days. We thought about visiting the Forest Theatre, where Threshold concluded in an emotional ceremony on Sunday, October 29, 1989. But it was otherwise occupied by the Paperhand Puppet Intervention, performing one of their annual late summer shows. So we traveled a few hundred yards down the road, and ended up at the curved stone bench behind Gimghoul Castle that overlooks the far edge of Battle Park.

At the first SEAC organizing meeting of the fall semester '89 (in Hamilton 100), Jimmy Langman convinced us all that Threshold was going to spark a national movement, and Ericka Kurz gave a fiery, impassioned speech wearing a cool black leather jacket. Besides Jimmy and Ericka, SEAC founding members who were running the show included Alec Guettal, Blan Holman, and Don Whittier. They were all juniors, seniors, even recent grads, but nobody past their early twenties. Still, as C-line put it, "They seemed so old. And we said, tell us what you need us to do!"

The nuts and bolts effort required to actually organize a nationwide conference in the pre-internet era was a little less romantic. Working alongside dedicated souls like Lisa Abbott, Chris van Daalen, Celeste Joye, Yu-Yee Wu, Raj Krishnasami, Mark Chilton, Quaker Kappel, Ruby Sinreich, Susan Comfort, Sarah Davis, Dave Ball, Nicole Breedlove, and a bunch of other SEAC'ers, we prepared mass mailings, entered hundreds of pre-registered attendees' names into ancient Mac computers, lined up crash pad arrangements with hundreds of UNC students, and using a primitive device known as the landline telephone, called up folks who wanted more info to convince them to make the trek to Chapel Hill. And my favorite part, sitting around in endless meeting circles on the second floor of the Campus Y, arguing over one minor detail or another until the WHOLE GROUP reached a consensus.

Threshold ad from Oct. '89 issue of Music Monitor.

The conference succeeded beyond anyone's wildest dreams. Over 1,700 people showed up from around the country, representing 43 states and 225 schools. It was the largest gathering of student activists since the heyday of SDS in the late 60s. And it launched SEAC as a national student environmental movement. By the early 90s, SEAC chapters existed at over 2,000 U.S. colleges and high schools.

SEAC helped spark a renewal of progressive activism on campuses nationwide. From early on, organizers expanded the definition of environmental issues to include environmental racism and corporate accountability. Over the next few years, national SEAC trainers traveled the country to run local weekend organizer trainings that schooled a new crop of student activists.

SEAC coordinated additional national and regional conferences (most notably, the 1990 Catalyst conference, which drew 7,600 students to Champaign-Urbana, IL) and organized a series of national campaigns (including energy independence, corporate greed, defense of old growth forests, Free Burma, and anti-globalization). SEAC-sponsored voter education work helped elect green candidates at local and state levels.

Unfortunately, SEAC's growth made it overly reliant on grant money. And when some of its foundation donors eventually decided the group was too radical, and yanked their support, SEAC lost a significant chunk of its budget. The number of paid staffers plummeted from 13 down to 7 and then zero.

PIRGs also began jockeying with SEAC chapters for members, and after using SEAC's membership list to organize a 1994 conference, founded a competing student activist network called Free The Planet.

Internal SEAC struggles intensified, and the national office in Carrboro, NC closed its doors in the fall of 1996. However, SEAC rebuilt from the grassroots up, and reopened its national office in 1998, which moved first to Philadelphia and then Charleston, WV.

On a personal level, my involvement with SEAC convinced me I wanted to be an organizer, and laid the foundation for all my political work that's followed. I saw my first published articles appear in issues of SEAC's national newsletter (later renamed Threshold Magazine). I became good friends with C-line, and our adventures have continued ever since. I worked on my first winning political campaign thanks to SEAC, when we elected Mark Chilton to the Chapel Hill Town Council in 1991 (at age 21, he was the youngest candidate ever elected in North Carolina, and the first and only UNC undergraduate to hold public office in Chapel Hill to this day).

Two decades after Threshold, SEAC remains the nation's largest student- and youth-led environmental group. The most fitting thing that happened to commemorate Threshold's 20th anniversary was that from Oct 16-18, the SEAC-affiliated Energy Action Coalition sponsored a regional summit (Carolinas Power Shift) at UNC-Chapel Hill. 350 student environmental activists gathered from schools in North and South Carolina to network and organize for action on clean energy and climate change. And speakers included Mark Chilton (now the two-term mayor of Carrboro), wearing his original Threshold t-shirt!

Clearly, SEAC continues to mobilize young people to protect our planet and our future. For more information on SEAC and its work today, visit SEAC.org.

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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.

SEAC talks to OCAW, the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers' Union (by Ericka Kurz)

Threshold (SEAC national magazine), page 36, Jan-Feb 1991

by Ericka Kurz
SEAC National Campaign Coordinator

Several SEAC representatives met with Tony Mazzocchi, Secretary-Treasurer of OCAW and publisher of New Solutions, a journal of Environmental and Occupational Health Policy. At New York City's Labor Institute in late November, they discussed common interests between OCAW and SEAC. The meeting consisted of three main topics:

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National Campaign Update (by Ericka Kurz)

Threshold (SEAC national magazine), pages 6-8, Jan-Feb 1991

by Ericka Kurz
SEAC National Campaign Coordinator

Oil and energy are very much on everyone's minds these days, and fortunately for us, we've been focusing on these issues since fall. Much is going on within SEAC on the local level, and this spring we'll see some action on the national level. What we need to do now is to solidify the campaign strategies which have been developed on every level, link organizers working on the different levels and in different parts of the country together more effectively, and in the meantime, strengthen our documentation of goings-on in every nook and cranny of SEAC. This article is an overview of what's been going on and what's being planned for our campaign on national, regional, local (and international) levels.

It's time for a battle of grassroots grit against the million dollar muscle of the oil and nuclear lobbies on Capitol Hill...

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In hopes of a more peaceful future (by Ericka Kurz)

Threshold (SEAC national magazine), page 4, Jan-Feb 1991

by Ericka Kurz
SEAC National Campaign Coordinator

(originally written 1/29/91, on night of George H.W. Bush's 1991 State of the Union address)

This war is hitting home for a lot of people. Many here in North Carolina have daughters and sons in the service and are doing all they can to give the troops moral support, my little sister Elizabeth just got arrested in an anti-war demonstration in San Francisco, and I'm working in the office for safer energy resources and stronger democracy in hopes of a more peaceful future...

(Click for full page original layout)

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.

Threshold called success, chance to reunite the student movement

"Threshold called success," Daily Tar Heel, 10/30/89

By SARAH CAGLE and STEPHANIE JOHNSTON, Staff Writers

This weekend's historic Threshold conference, sponsored by the Student Environmental Action Coalition (SEAC) of the Campus Y, closed Sunday as participants voted to work over the next months to protect forest lands in the United States. The three-day national student environmental conference, heralded by organizers as the first of its kind, drew more than 1,600 people from 43 states as well as from several foreign countries. Events included internationally renowned speakers, workshops and discussions on how to better organize and succeed in environmental action.

Participants spent about two hours discussing various short-term campaigns at Sunday's assembly at the Forest Theatre and decided that upcoming congressional action protecting the Tongass National Forest in Alaska should be their most pressing concern. "The forest is a representative issue of the fundamental concerns of everyone here," said Alec Guettel, one of three SEAC co-chairmen. Both the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate have voted on a bill to protect the Tongass Forest, which developers are destroying. Threshold participants said the House bill would provide stronger protection. Participants will write letters to their Congress representatives to ensure passage of the House bill and organize a simultaneous march on their state capitals to raise environmental awareness. A date for the march has not been set. Other ideas considered in the vote included targeting for major campaigns multi-national corporations that are harming the environment.

Organizers of the conference said the Tongass campaign gives Threshold participants an opportunity to further develop the network the conference has helped create. "I hope it's just a start," said Blan Holman, co-chairman of SEAC. "I hope people will meet the challenge." Ericka Kurz, co-chairwoman of SEAC, said Threshold participants were eager to keep the momentum from the communication going. "The conference wasn't strictly environmental. There was a sense of strong desire to reunite the student movement as a whole. The most amazing thing is there's more to come."

Threshold organizers said they were pleased with how well the conference went. "Students came away with clear ideas," said James Langman, conference chairman. "They're ready to work together and start a unified student movement on a local and a national level." Guettel said the participants fulfilled the goals for the conference. "It was better than expected. One of our objectives was to educate people about the most effective methods of grassroots activism. We went over them here. Another objective was to build a new student movement and campaign. That was the greatest success of this."

SEAC member Sharon Wells said she had received a lot of compliments on the organization of the conference and the selection of the speakers. "I think it went very well. The discussion groups allowed everyone to really talk. Everyone will go back with a goal to work towards."

Students who attended Threshold said they learned a great deal at the conference. "The conference got a lot of environmentalists with different priorities together," said Dana Hollish, a sophomore at George Washington University. "We want to do something for all the concerns, but we have to choose one. The conference will have a lot of aftereffects. It will bring about more big conventions like this more often." Paul Haught, a sophomore at Georgetown University, said he was pleased to see people show they wanted to do something about the environment. "I like the fact that people want to do something specific, but there are a lot of conflicting views," Haught said. "I expected a low-key, moderate conference of maybe 300 people," said Heather Fuller, a sophomore at UNC. "It was enormous. To see all the passion from so many students was incredible. It was almost shocking."

International spotlight on Threshold, SEAC's first environmental conference

"International spotlight on environmental conference," Daily Tar Heel, 10/17/89

By KENNY MONTEITH, Staff Writer

A national student environmental conference to be held at UNC Oct. 27 to 29 has received much national and international publicity over the past few weeks, including an article in the Russian newspaper Pravda. Threshold, sponsored by the Campus Y's Student Environmental Action Coalition (SEAC), has been mentioned in magazines such as Mother Jones and Greenpeace, and also on MTV. Michael Stipe, lead singer of R.E.M, has even recorded a public service announcement for the conference. Other newspapers such as The New York Times will attend, as well as the Associated Press. Some major news networks, including CBS, may also cover what is considered to be the biggest student environmental conference ever.

"The response is incredible," said James Langman, conference chairman of SEAC. "It's really weird because people in L.A. could hear about it from four or five different sources. "There are students coming from Seattle; Dallas; Lincoln, Neb.; and St. Paul, Minn. They want to join and be a part of something big." According to organizers, the conference is expected to bring more than 1,000 students from more than 200 universities in 43 states. Langman said most of the people attending would be college students, although he has heard from some high school students and even one sixth-grader. "I got a call from a girl in Mississippi who saw it advertised on TV, and she wanted to know more about it."

SEAC Co-Chairwoman Ericka Kurz said some local universities were planning to attend. "We have a good committee at Duke and two or three people at State." Alec Guettel, co-chairman of SEAC, said the group hoped to educate students from all over the country on how to have an impact on environmental issues. "We also want to consolidate SEAC and come up with some major campaigns. This is the beginning of a national student movement. There's never been a unified student voice." Threshold marks a major accomplishment for SEAC, allowing the group to bring environmental awareness not only to the campus, but also to the nation, members of the organization said. Although many students from other universities are attending, Kurz and Langman emphasized that these universities were not involved in the planning stages of Threshold, and that SEAC was the only environmental group organizing this conference.

Threshold will showcase speeches by environmental leaders from around the country. The topics will include the disappearing of tropical rain forests and global warming. The conference is holding workshops in recycling, governmental regulation, urban ecology and grassroots activism. The Indigo Girls will stage a benefit concert at 9 p.m. on Oct. 28 in Memorial Hall.