About Me

I’ve been working in the fields of sustainability and social entrepreneurship for the last 15 years. In July, 2008, I will become the inaugural Chair in Sustainable Development at the Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado Boulder, helping build a new, interdisciplinary program of teaching, research and practice in sustainability. Currently, I’m a Partner of the Innovation Network for Communities, a W.K. Kellogg Foundation-supported national non-profit launched in 2007 to develop and spread scalable innovations that transform the performance of community systems such as economic development, energy, land use and transportation. I'm also the Interim Executive Director and Trustee of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, the world's fastest growing network of sustainable businesses.

From 2004-2006, I was President and CEO of the Orton Family Foundation, the Vermont and Colorado-based operating foundation that seeks to transform the land use planning system as a pathway to vibrant and sustainable communities. Before Orton, I spent twelve years in the Boston area where I founded and led two non-profits, the acclaimed environmental justice center Alternatives for Community & Environment and New Ecology, Inc., a pioneering green development research and consulting organization.

From 1998-2004, I taught in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT, where I am currently a Research Affiliate, and was an Adjunct Professor of Law at Boston College Law School from 1993-2003. I am also an Associate of the Citistates Group, the nation’s foremost think-tank and speakers bureau for metropolitanism and regional development.

I am the author of two books, The Land That Could Be: Environmentalism and Democracy in the Twenty-First Century (MIT Press, 2000), which won the Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association in 2001 for Ecological and Transformational Politics, was a 2002 Time Magazine Green Century Recommended Book and was translated into Hindi for publication in India, and A Republic of Trees, Field Notes on People, Place and the Planet (The Public Press, 2007).

I am a commentator for Vermont Public Radio and the web magazine TomPaine.com, a contributing writer for Northern Woodlands magazine and a published poet. My work has been featured in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, U.S. News & World Report and on National Public Radio, as well as in the book, Eco-Pioneers: Practical Visionaries Solving Today's Environmental Problems.

My policymaking experience includes the Massachusetts Brownfields Advisory Committee and the Massachusetts Environmental Policy Act Advisory Committee, and I have advised state and local governments across the U.S. and abroad on environmental and sustainable development issues. In 2001, I was selected as one of the Boston Business Journal's "40 Under 40" most promising leaders in the Boston metropolitan area. The legendary environmentalist David Brower described me as "an environmental visionary creating solutions to today's problems with a passion that would make John Muir and Martin Luther King equally proud."

I earned an AB in History and Classics from Brown University, an MA in History and JD from the University of Virginia and completed doctoral studies in Jurisprudence and Social Policy as a Regents Fellow at the University of California at Berkeley. I was a law clerk to Chief Judge Franklin S. Billings, Jr. of the U.S. District Court for the District of Vermont, have received numerous public service awards and fellowships and have been a trustee of several organizations, including the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, Echoing Green and The Funders’ Network for Smart Growth and Livable Communities. I'm also an advisor to several triple bottom line companies including Green Coast Enterprises and PowerHouse.

I live in southern Vermont with my wife Sally Handy and two children, Olivia, 9, and Shepard, 6.