William Becker:

National Leadership Summits for a Sustainable America Project Director & Sr. Consultant

Bill Becker is the Executive Director of the Presidential Climate Action Project (www.climateactionproject.com). and the organizer of the "National Leadership Summits for a Sustainable America", a series of four conferences in 2006 and 2007 to advance America's sustainability in a time of global warming.

The Presidential Climate Action Project is one of several initiatives that have emerged from the summits so far. Another is the "Wingspread Principles on the U.S. Response to Global Warming," a document authored by Bill and signed by many of the nation's climate leaders to begin speaking in a unified voice about the nation's responsibility to address climate change.

Before he joined the University of Colorado at Denver and Health Sciences Center in January 2007 to direct the Presidential Climate Action Project, Bill was senior advisor to the Global Energy Center for Community Sustainability and an adjunct faculty member in the Colorado Energy Research Institute at the Colorado School of Mines. He served both functions while on sabbatical from the U.S. Department of Energy, where he was Director of DOE's Central Regional Office, overseeing a staff of 30 and nearly $50 million annually in federal programs to commercialize energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies. He retired from DOE on Jan. 1, 2007.

Bill is regarded as a national expert on sustainable development. After the Great Flood along the Mississippi River in 1993, he organized and led a team of experts to help two communities relocate from the floodplain and rebuild on higher ground with sustainable designs and technologies. In 1996, he founded and directed DOE's Center of Excellence for Sustainable Development and its Smart Communities Network web site, the "granddaddy" of sustainable community resources on the Internet.

More recently, he organized and led a team of US sustainable design experts to Beijing to help Chinese officials "greening" of the Olympic Village for the 2008 Olympic Games. In 2006, he participated on a small team of experts who traveled to Thailand to provide advice on tsunami reconstruction. Also in 2006, he was one of three national experts deployed by the State of Louisiana to help residents of the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans plan "sustainable reconstruction" after Hurricane Katrina.

Bill began his diverse career at age 19 as a combat correspondent for the U.S. Army in South Vietnam, where he won a Bronze Star medal for his news reporting and photography under fire. After the war, he worked as a writer/photographer for the Associated Press; published his own weekly newspaper in rural Wisconsin; and served as editorial writer and columnist for the Wisconsin State Journal in Madison, WI. After he left journalism for a career in public service, Bill worked as associate director of the Wisconsin Energy Extension Service, research director for the Wisconsin State Senate, Executive Assistant to the Wisconsin Attorney General, Counselor to the Administrator and Chief Counsel for Advocacy at the U.S. Small Business Administration in Washington, DC, and special assistant to two Assistant Secretaries for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy at DOE.

Bill's interest in sustainable development began in the 1970s when, as editor and publisher of the newspaper in Soldiers Grove, WI, he proposed and helped implement a project to relocate the community from a floodplain and rebuild it as the nation's first solar village. The project was a pioneering example of nonstructural flood prevention - an approach in which people move out of harm's way rather than relying on engineering approaches to managing riverine ecosystems - and one of the nation's first community-wide solar energy projects. The project has been featured in the television documentary "River Town," as well as in several books, including two authored by Bill: Come Rain, Come Shine, and The Making of a Solar Village.

Bill and his wife, Mary, live in Golden, CO.