Yestermorrow Design/Build School

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.

In 2008, Mr. Reicher worked for a group that raised about $2 million for the Obama campaign, Clean Tech for Obama. Mr. Reicher also advised the campaign on energy issues and appeared as a surrogate in debates on energy issues.

Prior to his recent position at Google, Mr. Reicher served as President and Co-Founder of New Energy Capital Corp., a New England-based company that develops, invests in, owns and operates renewable energy and distributed generation projects. Mr. Reicher is also a member of General Electric's Ecomagination Advisory Board.

From 1997-2001, Mr. Reicher was Assistant Secretary of Energy for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). As Assistant Secretary, he directed annually more than $1 billion in investments in energy research, development and deployment related to renewable energy, distributed generation and energy efficiency. Prior to that position, Mr. Reicher was DOE Chief of Staff (1996-97), Assistant Secretary of Energy for Policy (Acting) (1995-1996), and Deputy Chief of Staff and Counselor to the Secretary (1993-1995). He was also a member of the U.S. Delegation to the Climate Change Negotiations, Co-Chair of the U.S. Biomass Research and Development Board, and a member of the board of the government-industry Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles. After leaving the Clinton Administration in 2001 he was a consultant to the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee and a Visiting Fellow at the World Resources Institute.

In 2002, Mr. Reicher became Executive Vice President of Northern Power Systems, a venture capital-backed renewable energy and distributed generation engineering, services and technology company with installations in more than forty-five countries. Mr. Reicher led the renewable energy sales group at Northern and also was actively involved with the company's project finance, government relations and public affairs initiatives.

Prior to his roles at the Department of Energy and in the business community, Mr. Reicher was a senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council. He was also previously Assistant Attorney General for Environmental Protection in Massachusetts. Mr. Reicher currently is co-chairman of the advisory board of the American Council on Renewable Energy and a member of the board of the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy. He holds a B.A. in Biology from Dartmouth College and a J.D. from Stanford Law School. He also studied at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.

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.

Her current work includes the redesign of the Lincoln Center public spaces and the expansion of the Juilliard School (with Diller Scofidio + Renfro), a new mixed-use tower for a leading Manhattan private school, and new residence halls for the Berkshire School. Projects currently under construction include the Lion House reconstruction and the Jose E. Serrano Center for Global Conservation, both at the Bronx Zoo. Sylvia's recent projects include the Martin J. Whitman School of Management at Syracuse University, the Black Rock Forest Center for Science and Education, and the renovation/addition for the American Bible Society. 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.