The environmental organization focuses on concerns in the Southeast region of Alaska, including the areas of the Panhandle, the Tongass National Forest,[1] and the Inside Passage.
In 1976 Ted Whitesell and Kay Greenough took SEACC to Washington, DC, for the first time for the National Forest Management Act hearings.
[8] The March 1976 Congressional hearings in Washington were held because the Point Baker Association and plaintiffs Herb Zieske, Chuck Zieske, and Alan Stein had won a victory in the US District Court in Alaska on December 23, 1975, in which Judge Van der Heydt ordered 1) no trees could be cut unless they were dead or dying 2) and no trees could be cut at all north of a line between Calder Bay and Red Bay on Prince of Wales Island.
Senator Huddleston stated on pages 26 and 60–61 in the Hearings Record of the US Senate Subcommittee of Environment, Soil, Conservation, and Forestry of the Committee of Agriculture and Forestry (in Juneau, Ketchikan, and Sitka August 18 and 21, 1976) that the bill was ready for floor action before committees considered the August testimony on such issues as whether mandatory 300-foot buffer strips should remove the discretion of the USFS when laying out clear-cut.
The Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA) triggered SEACC to take more action and protect the old-growth forests of the Tongass from logging.
The report sparked a large debate, and SEACC took their concerns to Washington D.C.[15] A hearing on Tongass National Forest was held on May 8 and 9 in 1986 by the House Interior Subcommittee on Public Lands.
[16] Koehler was leading a national Tongass reform campaign, in which he urged ending long-term contracts of the pulp mills, adding more wilderness areas, and cutting major subsidies for logging.
[14] A decade after the ANILCA Law passed, SEACC ushered through the first locally crafted federal lands protection bill they had been fighting for, for many years.
In 1995 he moved back to Alaska after discovering that state senators Frank Murkowski, Ted Stevens, and Don Young had gained power and tried to change the Tongass Timber Reform Act.
[22] In the end, the Tongass Timber Reform Act led to two major mills in Sitka and Ketchikan having to shut their doors in 1997, and it protected an additional half a million hectares of forest lands.
They had received a permit issued by the United States Army Corps of Engineers, allowing them to dump the toxic waste in the environment.
The three environmental non-profit organizations argued that the permit for dumping toxic mine tailings into Lower Slate Lake violated sections 301(a), 301(e), and 306(e) of the Clean Water Act.
On February 13, 2023, the NLRB affirmed that "the board has broad jurisdiction over nearly all types of private employers, large and small, for-profit and non-profit," and directed an election to take place by mail-in ballot.
[32] SEACC released a statement immediately after the vote count indicating that leadership will not enter into bargaining until the NLRB is "ultimately and appropriately determined to have jurisdiction in this case.
[33]" SEACC Board Chair Natalie Watson wrote in a December 30, 2022 Juneau Empire op-ed that organizational leadership "will stand by the results" of the election.
"[36] SEACC, together with Earthjustice and the Natural Resources Defense Council, advocated on behalf of the Tongass National Forest and challenged the State of Alaska.