Student Profile: Jesse Sleamaker, 2010

Phrases like “save the environment,” “sustainability” and “going green” aren’t just buzzwords for hippies and hipsters—they’re philosophies and rallying cries for activists like 2009 Weinberg graduate Jesse Sleamaker.

Sleamaker strove to transform NU’s environmental group, Students for Ecological and Environmental Development (SEED), from a small niche organization into a powerful advocacy group that could influence university policy. And based off of the group’s accomplishments in the last three years, it looks like he may have done just that.

“At the end of my sophomore year I'd only been topically involved with SEED,” Sleamaker said. “The organization was less active [than] it is now and it only had a few really dedicated members.”

But when Sleamaker and Colin McGrath (now a fifth-year student in Weinberg and the Bienen School of Music) were offered the positions of co-chairs, they jumped at the chance.

The pair completely restructured the organization, recruiting new members by bringing in more speakers and striving to make the general meetings interesting, Sleamaker said. By the end of his junior year, SEED had 100 regular members and 20 members of the executive board.

“Jesse and I succeeded in significantly increasing meeting attendance and fostering a strong community of environmental advocates,” McGrath said. “Working with Jesse was an excellent experience. He was always excited about exploring ideas and rigorously investigating new approaches to advocacy.”

This commitment to advocacy shaped Sleamaker’s time as co-chair of SEED.

“We stuck with our classic events, Green Cup, Phil Fest, and Fall Speaker, but started adding other larger speakers as well,” he said. “Our largest focus, however, was an increased advocacy movement. We saw that NU was really falling behind other schools in its sustainability practices, and we wanted to try to change that.”

Such dedication to activism resulted in, among other things, recycling teams, a rise in environmentally-focused academics, an increase in environmental volunteerism and the establishment of an all-green dorm, G.R.E.E.N. House.

“When that came through, I started to feel like we really had something big—the administration’s tentative support,” Sleamaker said of G.R.E.E.N. House, an initiative he pursued with Jackie Beard, a Weinberg junior. “It was fantastic and really exciting.”

Throughout Sleamaker’s co-chairmanship, first with McGrath and later with Weinberg junior Emily Wright, SEED strove to foster these relationships with key members of the administration. A spring 2009 conference on sustainability drew top university officials, he said.

“I organized a [conference] to bring together stakeholders from across the university to see what we could do about sustainability,” Sleamaker said. “The event was fabulously well-attended, with top administrators showing up, including [Vice President for Student Affairs Bill] Banis and [Provost Daniel] Linzer.”

Sleamaker graduated in June, but his passion for environmental advocacy that he expressed through SEED activities will continue to shape his future, he said:

This is a problem we must solve: How do we bring mankind’s existence back in alignment with earth’s systems? What are the cultural and political aspects that we need to address? It’s the question of our time because it frames a philosophical and moral question with a pressing practical demand that’s both very scary and very exciting to me.