Yestermorrow Design/Build School

Stephen R. Kellert is the Tweedy Ordway Professor of Social Ecology at the Yale University School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.  He is also a Partner in the company, Environment Capital Partners, a private equity firm that invests in the environmental industry.  His work focuses on understanding the connection between human and natural systems with a particular interest in the value and conservation of nature and designing ways to harmonize the natural and human built environments.  His awards include the Outstanding Research Award for contributions to theory and science (2005, North American Association for Environmental Education); National Conservation Achievement Award (1997, National Wildlife Federation); Distinguished Individual Achievement Award (1990, Society for Conservation Biology); Best Publication of Year Award (1985, International Foundation for Environmental Conservation); Special Achievement Award (NWF, 1983); and being listed in “American Environmental Leaders: From Colonial Times to the Present.”  He has served on committees of the National Academy of Sciences, and has been a member of the board of directors of many organizations. He has authored more than 150 publications, including the following books: Biophilic Design: The Theory, Science, and Practice of Bringing Buildings to Life (co-editors, J. Heerwagen, M. Mador, John Wiley, 2008), Building for Life: Designing and Understanding the Human-Nature Connection (Island Press 2005); Kinship to Mastery: Biophilia in Human Evolution and Development (Island Press, 1997); The Value of Life: Biological Diversity and Human Society (Island Press, 1996); The Biophilia Hypothesis (edited with E.O. Wilson, Island Press, 1993); The Good in Nature and Humanity: Connecting Science, Religion, and Spirituality with the Natural World (edited with T. Farnham, Island Press, 2002); Children and Nature: Psychological, Sociocultural, and Evolutionary Foundations (with P. Kahn, Jr., MIT Press, 2002); and Ecology, Economics, Ethics: The Broken Circle (edited with F.H. Bormann, Yale University Press, 1991). 

Time magazine recognized McDonough in 1999 as a 'Hero for the Planet', stating that "his utopianism is grounded in a unified philosophy that-in demonstrable and practical ways-is changing the design of the world." Time Magazine again recognized Mr. McDonough and Michael Braungart as "Heroes of the Environment" in October 2007. In 1996, Mr. McDonough received the Presidential Award for Sustainable Development, the nation's highest environmental honor; and in 2003 earned the U.S. EPA Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Award. In 2004 he received the National Design Award for exemplary achievement in the field of environmental design. In October 2007, Mr. McDonough was elected an International Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects.

He also serves as U.S. Chairman and member of the Board of Councilors of the China-U.S. Center for Sustainable Development. He is part of the Management Committee of HRH The Prince of Wales's Business & The Environment Programme at Cambridge University. From 1994-1999, Mr. McDonough was the Edward E. Elson Professor of Architecture and Dean of the School of Architecture at the University of Virginia.

Mr. McDonough's leadership in sustainable development is recognized widely, both in the U.S. and internationally, and he has written and lectured extensively on his design philosophy and practice. He was commissioned in 1991 to write The Hannover Principles: Design for Sustainability as guidelines for the City of Hannover's EXPO 2000, and in 1993 to give the Centennial Sermon at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. More recently, Mr. McDonough and Michael Braungart co-authored Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, published in 2002 by North Point Press.

Bill grew up in suburban Lexington, Massachusetts. He was president of the Harvard Crimson newspaper in college. Immediately after college he joined the New Yorker magazine as a staff writer, and wrote much of the "Talk of the Town" column from 1982 to early 1987. He quit the magazine when its longtime editor William Shawn was forced out of his job, and soon moved to the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York.

His first book, The End of Nature, was published in 1989 by Random House after being serialized in the New Yorker. It is regarded as the first book for a general audience about climate change, and has been printed in more than 20 languages. Several editions have come out in the United States, including an updated version published in 2006.

His next book, The Age of Missing Information, was published in 1992. It is an account of an experiment: McKibben collected everything that came across the 100 channels of cable tv on the Fairfax, Virginia system (at the time among the nation's largest) for a single day. He spent a year watching the 2,400 hours of videotape, and then compared it to a day spent on the mountaintop near his home. This book has been widely used in colleges and high schools, and was reissued in a new edition in 2006.

Subsequent books include Hope, Human and Wild, about Curitiba, Brazil and Kerala, India, which he cites as examples of people living more lightly on the earth; The Comforting Whirlwind: God, Job, and the Scale of Creation, which is about the Book of Job and the environment; Maybe One, about human population; Long Distance: A Year of Living Strenuously, about a year spent training for endurance events at an elite level; Enough, about what he sees as the existential dangers of genetic engineering; Wandering Home, about a long solo hiking trip from his current home in the mountains east of Lake Champlain in Ripton, Vermont back to his longtime neighborhood of the Adirondacks.

In March 2007 McKibben published Deep Economy: the Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future. It addresses what the author sees as shortcomings of the growth economy and envisions a transition to more local-scale enterprise.

In late summer 2006, Bill helped lead a five-day walk across Vermont to demand action on global warming that some newspaper accounts called the largest demonstration to date in America about climate change. Beginning in January 2007 he founded stepitup07.org to demand that Congress enact curbs on carbon emissions that would cut global warming pollution 80 percent by 2050. With six college students, he organized 1,400 global warming demonstrations across all 50 states of America on April 14, 2007. Step It Up 2007 has been described as the largest day of protest about climate change in the nation's history. A guide to help people initiate environmental activism in their community coming out of the Step It Up 2007 experience entitled Fight Global Warming Now was published in October 2007 and a second day of action on climate change was held the following November 3.

March 2008 saw the publication of The Bill McKibben Reader, a collection of 44 essays written for various publications over the past 25 years.

Bill is a frequent contributor to various magazines including The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Orion Magazine, Mother Jones, The New York Review of Books, Granta, Rolling Stone, and Outside. He is also a board member and contributor to Grist Magazine.

Bill has been awarded Guggenheim and Lyndhurst Fellowships, and won the Lannan Prize for nonfiction writing in 2000. He has honorary degrees from Green Mountain College, Unity College, Lebanon Valley College and Sterling College.

Bill currently resides with his wife, writer Sue Halpern, and his daughter, Sophie, who was born in 1993, in Ripton, Vermont. He is a scholar in residence at Middlebury College.

Reicher is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences Board on Energy and Environmental Systems, co-chairman of the board of the American Council on Renewable Energy, and a member of the boards of the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy, the Apollo Alliance, and the University of California-Davis Energy Efficiency Center.

Before his position at Google, Reicher served as president and co-founder of New Energy Capital Corp., a private equity firm funded by the California State Teachers Retirement System and Vantage Point Venture Partners to invest in clean energy projects. He also served as executive vice president of Northern Power Systems, one of the nation’s oldest renewable energy companies. Reicher was also an adjunct professor at the Yale University School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and Vermont Law School.

Reicher has also held several positions with the DOE, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, the World Resources Institute and the Natural Resources Defense Council. He also worked for the Massachusetts Attorney General, served as a law clerk to a federal district court judge in Boston and as a legal assistant in the Hazardous Waste Section of the U.S. Department of Justice, and was on the staff of President Carter's Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island. Reicher holds a BA in biology from Dartmouth College and a JD from Stanford Law School. He also studied at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and MIT.

Dave received a BS in Chemical Engineering and Industrial Administration from Yale University in 1960. In 1965 he received his Master of Architecture, also from Yale, where he was awarded the AIA (American Institute of Architects) Medal of Excellence. In 1996, Mr. Sellers designed the memorial to former Yale President and Baseball Commissioner Bart Giamatti, sited on the Yale campus.

Mr. Sellers went on to teach and served as the Director of Goddard College’s Design and Construction program, the nations first school of design-build, from 1972-1978. After his time at Goddard, Dave went on to serve as a studio head at Yale University’s Graduate School of Architecture, then on to MIT as a studio head at that school’s Graduate School of Architecture.

Over the years he has also taught at the Universities of Washington, Michigan, North Carolina, Dartmouth, Montana-Bozeman, the University of Vermont and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He has been an instrumental instructor at Yestermorrow for nearly 20 years.

Dave’s many design projects include the AIA award winning Smith Lodge in Warren, Vermont; Atkins Lodge in Killington, Vermont, recipient of an AIA special recognition award; and several buildings at the Gesundheit Institute, Dr. Patch Adams’ hospital complex in West Virginia. Sellers has won three AIA awards for designs using native materials and natural systems.

In addition to his design and teaching work, Dave has been instrumental in several successful business enterprises. He co-founded Northern Power Systems, a research and manufacturing company specializing in wind turbines. He partnered with biologist John Todd to create Four Elements Corporation, a research and development company that developed the first Solar Aquatic commercial sewage treatment system. He is the co-founder of Vermont Iron Stove Co., which designed and manufactured high efficiency wood stoves. More recently, Mr. Sellers founded the Mad River Rocket Co., which makes the world’s only wilderness sled, for which there are three patents.

Dave is an active volunteer and has served on the Board of Advisors of the Windstar Foundation, as a trustee on the Vermont Council of the Arts and the Warren (VT) Town Planning Commission.

Sylvia's current work includes the design of SUNY Purchase's Center for Integrated Technology Learning, the design for the HealthCare Chaplaincy in Lower Manhattan, a 140,000 square-foot school in Hunters Point South for the NYC School Construction Authority, and a master plan for the National University of Rwanda. Sylvia is Partner-in-Charge of the expansion of The Juilliard School and the renovation of Alice Tully Hall (with Diller Scofidio + Renfro). She recently completed the adaptive reuse of the Lion House, the first landmark building in New York to receive LEED Gold Certification, and the LEED Gold Certified Center for Global Conservation, both at the Bronx Zoo.

Sylvia's past projects include the Martin J. Whitman School of Management for Syracuse University, the Knowledge Union Technology Center and the Arnhold Hall Cultural Center for the New School, the Black Rock Forest Center for Science and Education, a renovation/addition for the American Bible Society headquarters, and renovations of the Spence, Dalton, Calhoun, Grace Church and Ramaz Schools.

Sylvia earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in studio art and art history from Dickinson College, where she was named a Metzger Fellow. She received her Master of Architecture from the University of Virginia School of Architecture.