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The New Face of Eco-Style:

By Neela Banerjee

At the age of 24, Danny Seo has already founded a 20,000-member environmental organization, saved a forest in Pennsylvania, spearheaded efforts to protect the rights of students, written four books and appeared on the Oprah Winfrey show several times. Feel motivated yet?

Seo hopes so — this environmental prodigy and PR specialist has made a name for himself showing people how easy it is to make a difference. Now, with a new book that combines Martha Stewart stylings with eco-friendly solutions, Seo is poised and ready to become a household name.

Korean American Seo grew up in Redding, Pa., the son of a doctor and an artist and the youngest of three children. Seo says that his life as an activist really started around the time of his 12th birthday, which fell on the same day as Earth Day.

“I would always look at the newspaper on the day of my birthday, you know, read my horoscope,” Seo says. “But I noticed every year, there were always stories about the sorry state of the planet, the rain forests burning and so on. At the age of 12, you are right on the cusp, you are naïve enough to believe you can actually change the world.”

When Seo’s friends arrived for his birthday party, he returned all the gifts and asked everyone to join his organization, later named Earth 2000.

“I didn’t know anything then,” Seo says laughing. “I knew we had to have meetings, which we did, in the home-ec room at school.”

Within a year, Earth 2000 started a recycling program, and took on a number of other projects. But Seo was tired of “planting trees and smiling in pictures with politicians.”

So at 13, he launched a campaign to save a forest — complete with lawyers and a PR firm.

“It was a big turn-around for the group because we realized we could do something big and have a big impact,” Seo says. “It just started with me, seven friends and $20.”

By the time Seo graduated from high school, Earth 2000 had some 20,000 members and Seo was spending up to 12 hours a day on his causes. He says that all of his siblings graduated first in their classes and went on to good colleges. Seo, on the other hand, was second to last in his class and never went to college.

When asked if his parents were proud of him back then, he adamantly replies: “Oh, God no. You know the Korean community, kids are supposed to be stellar students, play three musical instruments, be involved in all these clubs no one has ever heard of.”

But through Earth 2000, Seo achieved an incredible amount. He worked on an international campaign to stop whaling, got Eddie Bauer and the Limited Corporation to stop using fur, and helped pass a law that excuses students from participating in animal dissections, among other things.

“I was even under investigation by the State Department,” Seo says gleefully. “Not because I was doing something illegal but they wanted to create a profile. They didn’t know I was just a teenager.”

Beyond High School

At 18, Seo was ready to retire. But a few weeks after graduating from high school, Ballantine Publishing offered him a book deal and he wrote Generation React, a semi-auto-biography.

“It was actually kind-of like a cookbook for activism,” Seo says. “It was like how to get Wal-Mart to give you $10,000.”

Seo gladly admits that much of what he preaches and what drives his success is about good public relations. As a kid, he says, promoting himself and his causes was like a hobby.

“Most kids play sports or music, I was reading books on PR,” Seo says. “I would write mock press releases. It’s insane how into it I was. I think PR should be taught in school. It gives you instant writing, networking and person-to-person skills.”

Around this time Oprah was doing the Oprah Angel Network and Seo contacted her and said that he wrote a book on fundraising and would love to raise money for an Oprah house. They called him back and said if he could raise $30,000 using all the fundraising techniques in his book, they would have him on the show.

“I came up with the money and never said Oprah to anyone,” Seo says. “It was great.”

At 20, Seo was also chosen to be one of People Magazine’s “50 Most Beautiful People” — which, he says, was a great boom for him because it gave him mainstream credibility, especially in Korea. Seo is now the spokesperson for Samsung and has worked to raise money for dog shelters in Korea.

“I’m very much opposed to dog meat and had Samsung donate all this money to a group that is actually advocating against that,” Seo says. “It was a little bit of a struggle.”

Earth Style

While doing publicity for his book Heaven on Earth, a Washington Post reporter went to Seo’s apartment to interview him for what was supposed to be a small article on his idea of “fast-philanthropy.” But then the reporter noticed all of Seo’s different home projects, such as his redone furniture and sustainable floors. The article ended up as a two-page story in the style section, covering Seo’s shopping and personal style.

“This opened up a whole new world for me,” Seo says. “I thought about how lifestyle can be the new environmental movement. We know how we should drive less, buy more environmentally friendly items, but nobody knows how to do it. No one has ever said, ‘This is how you do it and not look like you live in a hut.’”

Seo envisioned lifestyle books, as beautiful as Martha Stewart’s “but not just about fluffy stuff.” Publishers loved the idea, but didn’t think Seo was the right person to do it. To prove them wrong, he renovated his parents’ home in suburban Pennsylvania, top to bottom, using environmentally friendly materials. That project became the basis for his forthcoming book, Conscious Style Home (St. Martin).

“I did a lot of research and it was what I would want a house to look like in my head,” Seo says. Using all the same furniture, Seo made the house “new, hipper, edgier and fun” — with things like bamboo flooring and energy efficient light fixtures made from Moroccan bath tiles.

Seo plans to take this lifestyle philosophy and run with it. He is currently a contributing editor to a new magazine called Organic Style. He recently did a big fashion piece for them and hired Todd Oldham to design it.

“I picked all the clothing to show eco-friendly clothing can be really beautiful,” Seo explains. “There is nothing crunchy about it. It’s all super high-end, luxury clothing.”

Seo believes that there is a strong market for this kind of product and is developing a product line for Target.

“We won’t sacrifice style for the environmental issues,” Seo says. “For example, we have these beautiful, 100 percent cotton, striped pillows — dyed, I’m sure, with horrible chemicals. But they are filled with eco-sponge, which is recycled plastic. Soda bottles. That’s huge — 100,000 pillows filled with soda bottles. It’s better to be 30 percent organic as opposed to nothing.”

These days, Seo’s parents have come to terms with the path their son has chosen and are proud of his success, not to mention the fact that they got their entire home redone for free. He says they have even become vegetarians, “sort-of.”

Seo is now the President of Danny Seo Media Ventures, “a cause-related lifestyle media company that produces television programming, books, Internet content, live events and private-label merchandise based on the Danny Seo Brand.”

According to Seo, being an Asian Pacific Islander American is “a huge benefit,” to his work.

“You don’t see a lot of Asian men on television talking about something that isn’t business or science,” Seo says. “So, in terms of branding myself, that’s great. I’m a recognizable person immediately.”

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