Bella Garcia is a senior majoring in Environmental Studies with a Certificate in Energy Studies in Benjamin Franklin College. Outside of classes, she is an intern for the Carbon Containment Lab, a Student Writer for the Yale Clean Energy Forum, a Peer Mentor for the Environmental Studies Program, an Executive Chair for the Yale Student Environmental Coalition, a dancer in Ballet Folklórico Mexicano de Yale, and Co-Chair of the Episcopal Church at Yale.
Jenny Liu is completing degrees in Environmental Studies (BS) and Statistics & Data Science (BA) with an EVST concentration in Energy & Climate. Her interests lie at the intersections of energy equity, urban environments, and sustainable development. During her time at Yale, she has served as the 2024–2025 YSEC Co-President and held roles at the Yale Center for Climate Change Communication, Yale Sustainable Food Program, Yale FOOT, and the Yale Center for Business & the Environment, and Yale Center for Geospatial Solutions. A lifelong New Yorker and proud Hopper College member, Jenny enjoys a good bike ride, a strong cup of coffee, and a nice nap.
Roan Hollander is a Yale College Senior majoring in Environmental Studies.
Roan spoke with Bella and Jenny about a Yale Environmental Humanities grant project to create a library archive with materials from the Yale Student Environmental Coalition (founded in 1986) and its associated groups over the years.
RH: How did the idea for the YSEC Archive Project come about?
JL: This project came about in 2023, when Sebastian Duque Rios EVST ‘24 and Madeline Zaritsky EVST ‘24.5 became interested in doing oral histories with alumni to connect with them and capture some of YSEC’s history. At the same time, YSEC was losing its central meeting space in the basement of Welch Hall and didn’t know what to do with the many boxes of materials in the room going back decades. Paul Sabin suggested to them that they could try to put the physical items in the Yale library and connected them with some of the Yale librarians. Yale Environmental Humanities provided funds to support the project. The archive project grew out of an interest in preserving YSEC’s history and significance as an environmental student organization.
That was back in 2023. Bella and I were first-years. And we are wrapping up the project in our last semester of college. So it’s been a long time coming. But we are super, super excited about these finishing stages. We are hosting a physical exhibition in the library as part of YSEC’s 40th anniversary in April to celebrate the work and history that’s led up to this moment. A digital exhibition is also forthcoming on YSEC’s website. So keep an eye out!
Bella and Jenny showing excerpts from the Yale Daily News found in the archives.
The archives, organized and stored safely in Sterling Memorial Library’s collections.
What did you discover in the process of sorting through all of these archival materials? Did you learn anything new or surprising about the history of YSEC or of environmentalism on campus?
Here are some of our key takeaways from this process:
1. Student activism was never done alone. Take the archive project. We inherited this project when we were Co-Presidents, but no progress could have been made without the help of all the other YSEC members who have poured their time and effort into sorting, recording in the inventory, coming back week after week, etc.
2. YSEC underwent major organizational changes in the 1980s and 1990s. It’s had this interesting lifespan of being:
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A small student club in the mid-to-late 1980s,
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An advocate for increased Environmental Studies courses when the program was first established in 1984,
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A member of the larger, now-defunct Yale Student Environmental Center where a lot of environmental initiatives like Yale FOOT (!) were also housed,
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A 501c(3) organization after getting its IRS tax exemption approved in the 1990s,
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A UNFCCC observer organization at the Conference of Parties
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And more!
3. Activism and advocacy was always salient and present. From the recycling campaigns of the 1980s to the Citibank protests as part of the Occupy Wall Street movement in the 2000s to YSEC’s support of the Israel/Palestine protests in 2023 and 2024, YSEC has always engaged with student activism and protests. It is empowering to know that such a pattern has existed.
Left: an article in the archives from 1991 about the ‘Green Cup,’ a competition between residential colleges that encouraged students to reduce heat, electricity and water consumption, and increase their recycling.
Right: an article about the Urban Resources Initiative, a Yale-New Haven non-profit that provides hands-on urban forestry experience to students while working with New Haven community members to green the city.
A New Haven Register photo of Yale students who vowed to carry their trash with them all week to raise environmental awareness. Environmental activism on campus in the early 1990s was much more oriented around waste management and resource conservation than it is today.
What do you think the archive project tells us about how YSEC and campus environmentalism have changed over the years?
The archival project brought to light the big changes in campus environmentalism in the last forty years. Reading about past initiatives, such as the Recycling Project, Campus Earth Summit, and annual symposiums, was inspiring in the way that these projects have grown to become integrated within Yale. Today, the university provides recycling services, and Yale hosts countless environmental conferences throughout the year. Yet, within this institutionalized environmentalism, it’s important to recognize YSEC’s shift in scope and agency. YSEC has always been a student-run organization, and that comes with its own limitations. At the same time, institutional environmental management on campus has become more complex in ways that at times put it out of the reach of student advocacy. We hope campus environmentalism can be placed back in the hands of students, the same way it was just forty years ago.
A list of contacts for Vice President Al Gore.
Excerpts from the Yale Daily News covering environmental lawsuits, Earth Day events, and a clipping of a Garry Trudeau comic about eco-analysis.
What was student engagement in the process of creating this project like?
YSEC created an Archival Working Group last year to encourage students to get involved either in the physical inventory of the archives or in gathering oral histories by talking to alumni. This group was publicized and open to anyone on the YSEC newsletter, and attracted eight students who were passionate about archiving YSEC’s history. After the physical inventory and oral histories were wrapped up, YSEC board members have been working on a physical exhibit for YSEC’s alumni weekend in April and a digital exhibit to be placed on YSEC’s website.
Bella and Jenny looking through the archives to determine what to put in the digital exhibit.
What are your hopes and plans for the archive going forward? Where can people access it?
Our short-term goal is to curate an exhibit for alumni and students, which will be held on April 11th, 10 am-12 pm, in the Sterling Lecture Hall. We are hoping to offer a glimpse into key milestones for the organization as a way to remind, educate, and inspire attendees, as the following event will be a workshopping session on what the next 10 years of YSEC should look like. Our long-term goal is to create and publish a more detailed digital exhibit that includes a timeline of key milestones and a few of our successful initiatives. People can access the archives by requesting them through Sterling’s ‘Archives at Yale’ website to be viewed in-person.