Student Environmental Action Coalition

In the beginning this national organization focused primarily on conserving, protecting and restoring the natural environment, but later its member student environmental organizations took on a broader definition of the environment that includes racism, sexism, militarism, heterosexism, economic justice, and animal rights.

SEAC, "working together to protect our planet and our future," defines the environment as including the physical, economic, political and cultural conditions in which we live. By challenging the power structure that threatens these conditions, SEAC works to create progressive social and environmental change on both the local and global level.

SEAC takes a hard-line stance on the issues it addresses, and is bottoms-up in which the headquarters takes its direction from the individual chapters around the country. 1, 2

In 1988, students placed an ad in Greenpeace magazine about networking with other young environmentalists. Later, their first action was a letter writing campaign to support a Global Warming Protection Act. In early 1989, they set about organizing a national student environmental conference with the aim of launching a new, united, national student environmental movement in the United States. Called Threshold, this historic conference on the weekend of October 27-29, 1989, was an inspiring success, attracting more than 1700 students from 225 universities and schools from 43 states and several countries. The conference effectively brought the organization to life, and its participants voted to make SEAC's first national campaign saving old-growth forest and reforming the U.S. Forest Service. The next time SEACers met in Champaign, IL, a year later they were 7000 strong from every U.S. state, plus others from 11 countries.

Since Threshold in October 1989, some of the SEAC accomplishments include: 1

January 1991- As SEACers protested the war in Iraq and at the same time launched the Energy Independence Campaign. Only 100 attended the rally in Washington, D.C. in support of SEAC. However, the idea of Energy Independence Campaigns has some resistant. Energyindependencenow.org is a California not-for-profit organization striving for cleaner energy resources, but some believe this goal will drive prices up and put people out of work. 1, 3

1992 - The New York chapter brought together 120 schools to protest the Hydro-Québec II dam in Canada. This dam would have flooded an area 1000 kilometers and damaged land of the indigenous Cree tribe. SEAC and the Cree challenged the two billion dollar Rupert River hydroelectric project again in 2005. Originally, the Cree had agreed on payment for this over 50 years summing $70 million at the hand of Grand Chieft Ted Moses. However, Matthew Mukash is the person now challenging it. In August 2005, “federal and provincial environmental review panels said Hydro-Québec's impact study was deeply flawed and sent the provincial utility back to the drawing board.” 1,4

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