Awards ceremony keynote speaker Denis Hayes
Denis Hayes is the President of the Bullitt Foundation and board chair of the International Earth Day Network, as well as the immediate past chair of the Energy Foundation.
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. 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.