Denis Hayes
Honorary Chair, Earth Day Network
Denis Hayes left his graduate studies at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government to coordinate the first Earth Day in 1970 - an event often credited with launching the modern American environmental movement. Twenty years later he headed the first International Earth Day, with 200 million participants in 141 countries. Hayes returned in 2000 to serve as chair of the 30th anniversary of Earth Day, and remained as head of Earth Day Network, the group coordinating Earth Day activities worldwide.
Today, Hayes is President & CEO of the Bullitt Foundation, a $100 million environmental foundation located in Seattle. An environmental lawyer by training, Hayes has published more than 100 articles, books, and papers on energy and the environment.
During the Carter Adminis-tration, he headed the federal Solar Energy Research Institute (now the National Renewable Energy Laboratory). From 1983 to 1988, Hayes was an adjunct professor of engineering at Stanford University. He has served as Director of the Illinois State Energy Office, Senior Fellow at the Worldwatch Institute, and Visiting Scholar at the Smithsonian Institution.
In 1993, he received the Charles Greeley Abbot Award of the American Solar Energy Society, and in 2000 he was elected as a Fellow of the Society. In 1979, Hayes received the national Jefferson Medal for Greatest Public Service by an Individual under 35. Hayes was awarded the John Muir Award in 1985 by the Sierra Club and has received the highest honors awarded by the National Wildlife Federation, the Humane Society, and the Interfaith Center for Corporate Responsibility.
Time magazine selected Hayes as one of its "Heroes of the Planet," Look magazine named him one of the 100 most influential Americans of the 20th Century, and the National Audubon Society included him in its list of the 100 Environmental Heroes of the 20th Century.
Hayes is or has been a trustee or director of Stanford University, Greenpeace USA, the World Resources Institute, the American Solar Energy Society, the Federation of American Scientists, the Energy Foundation, the League of Conservation Voters, the Humane Society of the United States, the National Programming Council for Public Television, CERES, and Children Now.
