Bio
In April 2004, the Sierra Club Planet wrote, “Doochin at 16, has done as much to help the environment as many could hope to do by age 60.” Today at age 20, Jeremy, a sophomore Ingram Scholar at Vanderbilt University continues to be an influential and dynamic environmental activist propelled by an enduring passion to protect the world in which we live.
Selected at age 15 to attend the Sierra Club Leadership Training Academy, Jeremy, at age 16, became the youngest member elected to the Sierra Club Executive Committee of the Middle Tennessee Group, a position in which he served for two years as vice-chairman and environmental education chair. During that time, Jeremy expanded Sierra Club activities to reach out to student groups across Nashville to plan environmental campaigns and educational speakers.
In 2003, Jeremy founded the Student Environmental Outreach Coalition (SEOC), a program to help educate students about environmental issues and to provide environmentally oriented community volunteer activities for students throughout Nashville. SEOC quickly blossomed into one of the largest and most active student environmental groups within the State. SEOC hosted a variety of professional guest speakers, lobbied on the State Capitol Hill for environmental legislation, orchestrated energy reduction campaigns to families in Nashville, rallied major corporations such as Bowater Mersey Paper Company and Office Max to encourage sustainable environmental practices, and provided hours of student powered volunteer services to label city storm drains, plant trees, and mulch trails and clean up invasives in the park system.
Jeremy’s environmental work led to his appointment by the mayor to serve as a youth liaison on the board of the Nashville Metro Public Works Department, and his work with the Tennessee Chapter of the American Chestnut Foundation as the director of organizational development to help to breed a blight-free American Chestnut Tree. For three years, Jeremy served on the Nashville Earth Day Festival Board reaching out to the student community and spearheading the first city wide student section for the Nashville Earth Day Festival. To achieve this, Jeremy organized a board of 20 environmental student leaders across Nashville that created a pavilion of 12 different education and activity stations. In addition, Jeremy has also focused on a number of other service organizations and critical issues, including his involvement as director of school campaigns to raise thousands of dollars for tsunami and hurricane victims and the founding of a student-led initiative called LIFE, a peer counseling program that trained 30 students and established counseling facilities within the course of a year.
As a Sierra Club Chapter activist, Jeremy has worked with students across the State in efforts as diverse as campaigns to establish container deposit legislation to Kilowatt Ours campaigns, which featured screenings of the environmental documentary of the same name and advocated action to cut energy usage in homes across the U.S. In the summer of 2006, Jeremy worked with former EPA Chief of Staff and Vanderbilt Law Professor Michael Vandenbergh to research environmental law pertaining to industrial sectors and corporations; Jeremy compiled detailed research reports on environmental procurement policies used to write articles in published law reviews.
In the summer of 2007, Jeremy worked in Washington, D.C. at Conservation International with the Senior Director of Policy in the Center for Conservation and Government. Jeremy researched, analyzed, and assessed climate change cap and trade legislation on Capitol Hill, specifically for biodiversity impacts and allocations to international forestry sequestration. He attended public hearings, met with senior congressional staff and environmental leaders, worked with government and business representatives, and advocated for Congressional funding of global conservation programs. CI works in over 40 different countries around the world in biodiversity and conservation.
A graduate of Hume-Fogg High School, summa cum laude, Jeremy accepted the Ingram Scholarship at Vanderbilt University, a full four year merit scholarship for leadership and community service. Jeremy is also the recipient of the Best Buy Scholarship, the Target All-Around Scholarship, the Tennessee Hope Scholarship, and the Tennessee General Assembly Merit Scholarship. Jeremy’s honors include the first Nashville Youth Leadership Award, presented by the office of the mayor, the Frederick Douglas and Susan B. Anthony Award in Humanities and Social Sciences, the President’s Volunteer Service Award, certificates of Congressional Recognition, and a 2006 Prudential Spirit of Community Finalist Award.
In November of 2004, Jeremy received the Sierra Club Rising Star Award from the Tennessee Chapter “in recognition for extraordinary service to the Tennessee Chapter Sierra Club and the Citizens of Tennessee.” Currently serving as the Sierra Club Tennessee Chapter liaison to students across Tennessee, he is active in environmental organizations at Vanderbilt and continues to reach out and speak to students about the importance of the environment. In November, 2007, he was the featured speaker for the Vanderbilt University Virtual School’s videoconference educational class room that was broadcast to a dozen schools across the U.S. and Canada.
Jeremy enjoys camping, hiking, sea kayaking, white water rafting, ice climbing, fishing and exploring our natural planet.