GET REWARDS FOR 50TH ANNIVERSARY DONATIONS!

While supplies last, SEACC has rewards available for three levels of anniversary donations!

Give $100 and select one of 8 Historic SEACC Prints to hang in your home. 
Scroll through the pictures at the top of the page to see all the designs!

Give $250 and receive a limited edition Baseball Cap, perfect for rainforest weather.

Give $500 or more as your gift, you'll receive a limited edition 50th anniversary camping mug!

These mugs feature

• Copper vacuum-sealed insulation that keeps hot drinks hot and cold drinks cold
• A hard acrylic anti-leak lid with a snappable sip space
• A 18/8 stainless steel body

Our organization began in 1970 as a loose group of scrappy, feisty, geographically disparate community nonprofits that then reassembled as a regional conservation council. It’s a momentous era for SEACC as we celebrate 50 years of protecting Southeast Alaska, and we want to celebrate with you! Half a century is a lot of momentum, an energetic velocity that propels us to greater protection of the Tongass, the Inside Passage Waters, and the elevating of important voices like yours.

On top of your usual donation, please give to our 50^th Anniversary Fundraiser and help us reach our goal of $50,000 dollars above and beyond our annual fundraising. Your donation will help make the next year a powerful landmark for SEACC, allowing us to widen, strengthen, and secure 50 more years of conservation and advocacy in Southeast Alaska.

Our Water Participation Calendar provides up-to-date information on opportunities to take part in managing local and regional water resources throughout Southeast Alaska, from events to public comment deadlines.  Don’t miss the chance to participate in decision-making about our most important shared resource – water!  If you know of other opportunities not yet included on this calendar, please let us know.  

Coming soon!

There are a number of actions that you can take today to help protect our shared waterways in Southeast Alaska and the communities that depend on them.  Explore the options below to take needed action now.

Our work is currently focused on three transboundary rivers; the Chilkat (near Klukwan and Haines), the Stikine (near Wrangell and Petersburg), and the Unuk (near Ketchikan, Saxman, and Metlakatla).  We have selected these rivers because they are all vitally important to the survival of wild Pacific salmon and nearby communities, they are threatened by upstream mining activity, and there are still opportunities to take protective action in each case.  

Click on the options below to learn more about these three rivers and how to protect them.  

It is currently easier to pollute public waters in the state of Alaska than it is to protect them.  Yet, our local food sources and economies depend on clean water to continue.  A number of communities throughout Southeast Alaska have taken actions to protect their local waters by nominating them as Tier 3 Outstanding National Resource Waters (ONRW), but the state has refused to act on them. Meanwhile, the state permits dozens of corporations to dump wastewater into our rivers. 

The Alaska legislature is currently considering HB 138 - a bill that would make designating an ONRW an impossible hurdle by requiring that ONRW's only be designated through the legislature rather than administratively by the agency responsible for reviewing discharge permits. Why should the public have to go through a political process to protect clean water while corporations only have to fill out an application to pollute? 

Sign our petition to the House Resource Committee below calling for a Tier 3 designation process equally as administrative and streamlined as the permit process to degrade our waters.

You can also contact House Resource Committee Co-Chairs, John Lincoln and Geran Tarr, at [email protected] and [email protected] and tell them that it should not be easier to pollute our waters than it is to protect them.

Protect what you love! 

For 50 years, SEACC has been Southeast Alaska's grassroots voice in conservation. We work to protect the Tongass National Forest, Inside Passage, and our unique Southeast Alaska way of life.

Save The Date!

We can't wait to be in a room with you all again, celebrating the 50th anniversary and honoring each other for our shared love and passion for the Tongass and the Inside Passage Waters! However, with the health of our community in mind, SEACC is announcing the reschedule of our 50th anniversary party at the State Library Archives Museum. Initially, we had scheduled the celebration of our first 50 years for December 5, 2020 but with COVID-19’s continued relevance in every social space, we are rescheduling for next year.

Staff 

Meredith Trainor, Executive Director
[email protected]

Meredith fell in love with the wild mountains and towering forests of the Pacific Northwest while working for the Pew Charitable Trust’s International Boreal Conservation Campaign, in Seattle. It was this love of mountains and wild places that then drew her to SEACC, where she became the Executive Director in 2016. 

Early in her career, Meredith worked with stakeholders from the Forest Products Association of Canada on the Canadian Boreal Forest Agreement.  She successfully led an effort to increase the amount of Canadian Boreal Forest under permanent protection from development, by working with forest products industry members, provincial and First Nations governments, Indigenous peoples, industry, the scientific community, and community members, among others.

Meredith holds a Master's in Forest Ecology and Management from Yale University's School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. In her personal life, Meredith is an alpine climber, a Nordic skier, an ice climber, and a beginner backcountry skier and fisher. Mountaineering is a big part of Meredith's life: In 2015 she led a successful all­ woman climb of Denali’s West Buttress route and in 2016 led an attempt on the Sultana Ridge on Sultana (Mt. Foraker), in the Alaska Range.

Maggie Rabb, Deputy Director
[email protected]

Maggie was born in Juneau but grew up in rural Northern Vermont where she developed a deep appreciation of nature. She jumped at the opportunity to travel to Alaska after high school working as a trolling deckhand out of Sitka for six summers. Maggie found her passion for Southeast during her summers on a troller delivering salmon to communities throughout Southeast. During that time, she met, and later married, a commercial fisherman and continued to spend time each year in Southeast.

She graduated with a BA in Sociology and Environmental Studies from St. Lawrence University in Upstate New York where her studies focused on social movement organizations. Maggie spent time pursuing graduate studies in Sociology at Michigan State University and later spent a year as an international marine policy fellow at the State Department’s Office of Marine Conservation in Washington, D.C.

In 2013 Maggie followed her dream of relocating to Southeast Alaska by moving to Juneau. In Juneau, she worked at Perseverance Theatre as their Development Director for three years. She is now using her fundraising and nonprofit management experience in furtherance of her passion for environmental conservation. Originally hired as SEACC's Director of Development and Operations, Maggie now serves as SEACC's Deputy Director.

Dan Cannon, Tongass Forest Program Manager
[email protected]

Dan grew up in Ohio and discovered the beauty of our National Forests at the age of eight while backpacking in the Allegheny National Forest.  In college, his passion for wilderness found activism when he joined his classmates to save the campus campground from being paved.

With over ten years of grassroots and digital organizing experience, Dan has mobilized hundreds of thousands of people across the country. Early in his organizing career, Dan spent most of his time in the field, organizing communities to pass the ACES Act through the House and pressuring colleges to embrace renewable energy. Before coming to SEACC, Dan spent the last seven years at Greenpeace USA exploring the intersection of data, digital mobilization, and on the ground organizing to scale people power. Some of Dan’s work at Greenpeace included building power to pressure Asia Pulp and Paper to source pulp from sustainably managed forests and protecting the Arctic from Shell Oil’s drilling plans.           

Dan fell in love with Southeast and the Tongass while visiting a friend living on Prince of Wales Island. He is a graduate of Green Corps – The Field School for Environmental Organizing and holds a B.S. in Environmental Studies from Slippery Rock University. Dan is an avid backpacker who enjoys skiing (water and snow), collecting old maps, and local beer.

Sarah Davidson, Inside Passage Waters Program Manager
[email protected]

Sarah grew up at the edge of the Pacific Ocean in the San Francisco Bay Watershed. Having originated from a place surrounded by water, she has been drawn to it for as long as she can remember. Her work has focused on water resource management, transboundary water sharing, and community governance. It is informed by many years of living and working internationally and is driven by a belief that water has the power to build and strengthen communities. Sarah holds a double MA in Natural Resource Management and Sustainable Development, and International Affairs from UN-affiliated University for Peace in Costa Rica and American University in Washington, D.C. She wrote her MA thesis on Nile Basin Governance and studied Middle East history, politics, and conflict at American University in Cairo. She received her BS in Marine Biology from the University of California in Santa Cruz. 

Prior to joining the SEACC team, Sarah worked with the Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay, where she coordinated residential stormwater projects and opportunities for community engagement throughout Washington, DC for the RiverSmart Homes Program. Sarah also served as the Water Program Manager for the Nile Project, which uses music to bring people together across political boundaries to overcome conflict, create solutions for a sustainable Nile Basin, and nurture a shared Nile Basin identity.   

Sarah is a community organizer, scientist, and photographer. She enjoys exploring and immersing herself in the Juneau community where she can pursue her passions for participatory processes, systems thinking, social justice, and all things water.

Guy Archibald, Staff Scientist
[email protected]

Guy first discovered his love of nature as a young child growing up in the Rocky Mountains, just west of Denver. Over the years he watched as the area once filled with deep, dark forests, groves of golden aspen, and huge herds of elk and deer in wide-open meadows was replaced by a six-lane highway, strip malls and suburban sprawl of 30,000 people. This spurred his desire to work in the environmental field. Soon he was pursuing degrees in biology and education, leading to 20 years of work as an environmental chemist before coming to SEACC.

His work in environmental chemistry underscored the importance of protecting the clean water of the forest and seas and the communities that depend on them. He has seen first-hand how pressures to see the land only as a commodity, combined with a fractured regulatory system threaten the once pristine waters of Alaska.

He is now able to use his skills in science, as SEACC's staff scientist to safeguard clean water and wild salmon from threats such as mining. He believes in the work done at SEACC and that the only thing worth doing is leaving the world a better place. When not working at SEACC Guy enjoys spending time with his family. He is also a skilled and avid carpenter, hunter, fisherman, science teacher, and observer of the natural world. 

Heather Evoy, Indigenous Engagement Lead
[email protected]

Heather is a native Alaskan, born and raised in Ketchikan, and an Alaska Native, Tsimshian, and Tlingit. She graduated with a BLA from UAS with focus areas of Anthropology and Environmental Sciences. The locally focused interdisciplinary training and knowledge she gained throughout her undergraduate career included topics such as: environmental economics, glaciology, hydrology and geomorphology of the Southeast landscape in context/relation to ancient human occupation; tribal and local governance and politics; museum/archival experience; and countless hours of independent study based on ethnographic interviews and archival research regarding her family’s home community of Metlakatla. 

Some of Heather’s fondest childhood memories took place in Metlakatla with her grandmother when they went out in darkness at minus tides to dig for clams and when they would spend long summer hours together berry picking. Heather has taken notice of the many environmental changes experienced in her region, both in her personal life and academic work. She seeks to understand those changes through an indigenous lens while strengthening and uniting forces for those most afflicted by the ongoing changes. Heather has been living in Juneau since 2012 where she and her two children have continued to enjoy being members of two intertribal dance groups and learning their Tsimshian ancestral language of S’malgyax. Heather is also the Alaska Indigenous Representative to the Western Mining Action Network (WMAN).

Shannon Donahue, Upper Lynn Canal Organizer
[email protected]

Shannon Donahue spent eight years exploring the state of Alaska from the Interior to the Aleutians before choosing Haines as her home in 2010. She loves the dramatic beauty, abundant wildlife, strong communities, and deciduous trees of the Chilkat Valley. After dividing her time between Alaska and Montana for graduate school, she was awarded a Masters of Science in Environmental Studies from the University of Montana in 2010, with a focus in bear conservation and education. She has worked for the Great Bear Foundation, Alaska Arts Confluence, Alaska State Parks, and the US Forest Service (Tongass and Chugach National Forests). Shannon co-directed and produced the documentary film, Walking Bear Comes Home: the life and work of Chuck Jonkel, featuring archival footage of Jonkel’s groundbreaking polar bear field research in the 1960s, that premiered at the International Wildlife Film Festival in Missoula, Montana in 2017. Shannon now organizes around mining and water quality issues in the Chilkat Valley.

In addition to her environmental work, Shannon spends her time practicing greenwood carving and woodturning, foraging from the land and sea, cooking delicious meals with friends, and slowly finishing her house.

Sally Schlichting, Environmental Policy Analyst 
[email protected]

A Juneau resident since 1969, Sally Schlichting has worked in the environmental arena for 25 years as a government regulator, consultant, and policy analyst covering contaminated sites, energy, sustainability, and climate change.  Her work has included project management, research, and policy development at local, state, national, and international levels on issues as wide-ranging as site remediation, impaired waters, brownfield redevelopment, emerging toxics, international forest carbon sequestration, climate adaptation, community resilience, and energy efficiency. 

Sally has a master’s in environmental science and policy from Johns Hopkins University.  Most recently, she served as the program manager for contaminated site regulation and policy with the Department of Environmental Conservation.  Prior to that, she worked at the Center for Clean Air Policy in Washington D.C. crafting forest protection strategies for developing countries, including Mexico and Indonesia.  She is also a past Vice-Chair of the Juneau Commission on Sustainability, where she oversaw development of CBJ’s greenhouse gas inventory and co-organized a community forum on energy conservation and efficiency and the first annual locally grown food festival.   

In her off-hours, Sally is an accomplished flutist and chamber musician, enjoys cooking, and loves to get out on the trails and mountains around Juneau in all seasons.

Conor Lendrum, Development and Outreach Associate
[email protected]

Born and raised in Juneau, Conor is a sincere and enthusiastic lover of the landscape in which he was born. Son of an Oregonian landscape architect and a Californian horticulturalist, Conor was raised to always be watching the world around him; to appreciate what human hands had labored to create and to see the intricate and elegant beauty that none could replicate. Growing up in Auke Bay he was raised in the nursery beneath the boughs of the Tongass, his playmates the salmon in the creek by his house and the bears that traveled through his yard to eat them, the bats that bedded in his attic and the great blue herons that nested in the broken Sitka spruce outside his window.

Graduating from the University of Oregon with a BA in English and having completed the Kidd Tutorial in creative writing, Conor returned home for a few years where he worked at Kindred Post and volunteered as the secretary of the board for Woosh Kinaadeiyí. He then worked for two years in grassroots field marketing and small business advocacy in Philadelphia, PA, traveling and working all over the mid-Atlantic.

Conor returned home in December 2019 and has found his dream job at SEACC, crafting messages and organizing events in the cause of protecting the home he has always loved.

Emily Russo Miller, Communications Lead
[email protected]

Seeking adventure and new places, Emily moved from the desert of New Mexico to the temperate rainforest of Juneau in the fall of 2011 to be a reporter for the Juneau Empire daily newspaper.

She was instantly struck by the beauty of the Tongass, and with time learned how to interact with the land, be in nature and explore wild places. She became passionate about protecting the forest and joined SEACC in February 2020.

Emily has 10 years of experience in journalism and holds a masters from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in New York City and a bachelors from George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. She worked her way up from reporter at the Juneau Empire to its Managing Editor, a position she held for four years.

In her spare time, you can find her hiking around Juneau’s trails, kayaking local waterways, picking berries in the summertime, cross-country skiing and playing hockey in winter.

Matthew Jackson, Climate Organizer
[email protected]

Matt was born in Ketchikan, but his family moved south shortly after the pulp mill closed. The shock of moving from the vibrant Tongass to sterile suburbia taught him the value of healthy ecosystems and communities at a young age. His appreciation for wild spaces was deepened at Sterling College, a radically sustainable college whose mission is to advance ecological thinking and action. It was at Sterling that Matt learned how to apply ecosystem thinking to the real world, and came to believe that ecosystem thinking is critical to addressing social as well as environmental issues. 

Linda Baumgartner, Office Manager
[email protected]

When Linda first came to Alaska, she traveled from Seattle to Juneau through thick fog, only able to see the very face of the forest from the deck of her ferry. At the time she did not realize that it was the only line of trees left after extensive logging. In Hoonah, where she settled for her first six years in Southeast, she saw the truth. Linda lived a mostly subsistence lifestyle for those six years, living on a 42’ sailboat and fishing for salmon and halibut, trading with friends for venison and crab, and traveling the waterways of Southeast Alaska extensively. Originally from Australia, Linda now calls Juneau home and looks back on 2015 when she earned her U.S. citizenship with great pride.

Having worked many jobs since landing in Alaska, from Tideland Tackle, Mary’s Inn, and Southeast Artworks in Hoonah, to the State of Alaska’s Department of Environmental Conservation, and ACPE, Linda is glad to bring her many skills to the important work of preserving the special places of Southeast Alaska and the lifestyles of those who call it home.

Give us a ring!

Phone: (907) 586-6942

Stop by and say hi!

Southeast Alaska Conservation Council
2207 Jordan Ave
Juneau, AK 99801

Send us a line!

Click here for our 2019 Annual Impact Report!

The Southeast Alaska Conservation Council works its magic in three ways:

Tongass Forest Program

Forest management for resilient communities.

Southeast Alaskans are ready for Tongass management that preserves habitat for hunting; saves salmon strongholds for fishing; supports our booming tourism industry, and protects the carbon-rich ancient forests that moderate global climate. We can get there today by ending controversial old-growth clearcuts and supporting a community-scale, local wood economy that provides long-term jobs for Tongass communities.  

Inside Passage Waters Program

Keeping Southeast Alaska’s clean water clean.

From the headwaters of our transboundary rivers to the estuaries of the Inside Passage, clean water unifies our region and supports the salmon that power our communities. 

Grassroots Legal Program

Our Environmental Policy Analyst Sally Schlichting and Staff Scientist Guy Archibald provide legal and scientific resources at the request of local communities.

 For more than 40 years, SEACC has brought local voices together to defend the last great salmon strongholds on our planet, protecting the foundation of a $1 billion fishing industry that powers our local communities and supplies wild salmon to the world.

Our members are the fishermen, hunters, scientists, small saw millers, Alaska Natives, hikers, paddlers, and business owners who live, work, and play in Southeast Alaska. We're united by our love of this place, and our unique, salmon-based way of life. 

We don’t show up to work at SEACC for any reason other than to make the world a better place for all those who call Southeast Alaska home.

Over nearly the last half-century, we’ve done just that. But past success doesn’t guarantee anything in the future, and we know we have to earn your support by continuing to do what we’re here to do: change Southeast Alaska for the better.

Increasingly, this means working across nontraditional boundaries to get our work done. With wealth inequality at a record high, and climate change connecting social and environmental problems, the time is now to band together for justice across every line that has ever divided us.

What does that mean here in Southeast? We think it means renewing our commitment to what unites all of us, and pushing hard where we have common ground - our close-knit communities and our unique ability to fish, hunt, and play in the most beautiful and abundant place in the United States.

Together, we can work locally to build prosperity and resiliency into our Southeast Alaskan communities amid a changing climate and a political system dominated by transnational corporations. We hope you’ll join us with a donation of time or money, and also let us know how we can best join you by serving your cause and your needs.