Denis Hayes

Roles: Special Guest

Hayes will be discussed EARTH DAYS.

As President of the Bullitt Foundation for the last 20 years, Denis Hayes has promoted urban ecology in Seattle, Portland, and Vancouver, BC.  Going well beyond metaphor, he has sought to help reshape cities to actually function as ecosystems. Toward that end, he recently completed the world’s greenest office building, the Bullitt Center, which will open on Earth Day, 2013.

During the Carter Administration, Denis directed the federal National Renewable Energy Laboratory. He has been a visiting scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center, a senior fellow at the Worldwatch Institute, an adjunct professor of engineering at Stanford University, and a Silicon Valley lawyer.

At age 25, Hayes was national coordinator of the first Earth Day.  In 1990, he was the full-time chair of Earth Day as it expanded from the United States to 144 nations. Today, Earth Day is the world’s most widely-observed secular holiday.  After an absence of six years, Denis recently resumed the chairmanship of Earth Day Network as it begins the countdown to the 50th anniversary in 2020.

Denis has received the national Jefferson Medal for Outstanding Public Service as well as the highest awards bestowed by the Sierra Club, The Humane Society of the United States, the National Wildlife Federation, the Natural Resources Council of America, the Global Environmental Facility of the World Bank, the interfaith Center for Corporate Responsibility, the American Solar Energy Society, and the Commonwealth Club.

He has served on dozens of governing boards, including those of Stanford University, the World Resources Institute, the Federation of American Scientists, The Energy Foundation, Children Now, the National Programming Council for Public Television, the American Solar Energy Society, Greenpeace, CERES, and the Environmental Grantmakers Association. Hi solar energy book, Rays of Hope, was a major influence on the renewable energy program of the Carter Administration.  (In real dollars, America’s renewable energy budget only returned to Carter era levels in the second year of the Obama Administration.)