CEED (the Center for Environmental Economic Development) will be celebrating its 15th anniversary this coming year, and EPIC just celebrated its 30th year. CEED is still the "new kid on the block," although it is coming of age. The two organizations definitely share some history though..."
The newly appointed Executive Director of CEED is Ruthanne Cecil, one of the founders of EPIC. Ms. Cecil recently received EPIC's special Sempervirens award for being among the founders of EPIC, at a well-attended annual benefit dance and awards banquet on November 9.
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Formerly a bookkeeper and journalist by trade, Cecil wrote for Star Root newspaper, founded Hard Times and then the Country Activist, a multi-issue progressive newspaper with 5,000 in circulation that published monthly for six years during the redwood struggles of the 1980s. She returned to school in 1992, receiving a BA degree from Humboldt State, then headed to law school at the age of 49. Throughout her school years in the 1990s, she worked as a paralegal and a law clerk on a variety of cases against Maxxam in its takeover of Pacific Lumber. After law school, she clerked for a Eureka firm helping the litigants in a case against PL after the devastation of Stafford and Elk River. "I have absorbed Maxxam cases for much of my life," Cecil stated. "Understanding how CEED can catalyze positive change often comes from watching corporations do it wrong. Yet they must become part of the solution."
At the Center for Environmental Economic Development, the work is very different from EPIC, and yet complementary. CEED's work is about the Sustainable Transition side of the equation. While EPIC fights for justice through court cases and holding actions, CEED works for sustainable transitions to better economics, technologies, communities, and policies.
CEED's work focuses mostly on sustainable forestry, sustainable energy, green buildings, and sustainable communities. Additionally it works on indigenous impacts of climate change and subsistence economies in the Arctic. About one-third of the work currently is local to Humboldt, but as more local groups spring up, CEED offers models to the bioregion, the state, the Pacific Northwest, and the Arctic. "Our work at this time runs the gamut from local to international, California to Alaska and the arctic circumpolar ring. "You'll hear more about us in the coming months," stated Cecil.
For more information: www.ceedweb.org
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TOC for Forest & River News, Winter 2007