William Becker

William Becker is veteran advocate of sustainable development, known internationally as a dynamic writer, subject-matter expert, speaker and educator on the topic. He has presented to the United Nations, the international conference on global climate change in Copenhagen and Rio+20. He has addressed audiences throughout Europe and in China, as well as the United States. Bill engages audiences with his "direct talk" combined with dramatic videos and photographs.

Bill is a Senior Associate at Natural Capitalism Solutions and at E3G, the international environmental think tank headquartered in London. He is co-director of The Future We Want, an international initiative with the UN to help the public understand how sustainable development can improve our lives and communities; Executive Director of the National Sustainable Communities Coalition, which links U.S. communities with experts in "full spectrum sustainability"; and Executive Director of the Presidential Climate Action Project, which develops recommendations on how the President of the United States can create policies and programs to deal wiith global climate change.

Bill is a member of Mikhail Gorbachev's Climate Change Task Force in Geneva, and an advisor to the Environmental and Energy Study Institute in Washington, D.C.

Bill spent 15 years at the U.S. Department of Energy and founded its Center of Excellence on Sustainable Development. He has specialized throughout his career in helping communities understand and practice sustainability, including "green" recovery from natural disasters. He has led or participated on expert teams deployed to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and Thailand after the 2004 tsunami, and to Beijing to help green the Olympic Village at the 2008 Olympic Games.

His interest in sustainable development began in the 1970s when he proposed and helped implement a project in which a rural Wisconsin village relocated from a floodplain and built the America's first solar village. That project is recognized today as a pioneer in sustainable community development as well as climate change mitigation and adaptation.

Bill is a former journalist who began his career as a decorated war correspondent in South Vietnam. He is a frequent contributor to a variety of blogs, including Huffington Post. His most recent book -- The 100 Day Action Plan to Save the Planet -- was published by St. Martin's Griffin in New York.