Silver Bullitt

From spearheading the first Earth Day to directing the National Renewable Energy Laboratory under President Jimmy Carter, Denis Hayes has been at the forefront of the environmental movement for four decades. Since the early 1990s, Hayes has been zeroing in on the Pacific Northwest as president and CEO of the Seattle-based Bullitt Foundation, with a mission to promote environmental sustainability in the region.

With about $90 million in assets, the foundation in late 2008 announced it was narrowing its funding focus to the areas of ecosystem services, energy and technology, civic engagement and urban ecology. The foundation is also working on a plan for its new headquarters—a five-story building in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood aiming to meet the ambitious standards of the Living Building Challenge.

Sustainable Industries caught up with Hayes this fall to discuss ways in which the Bullitt Foundation is working to stay on the cutting-edge of sustainable development, his take on building standards and why enacting climate change legislation is more challenging than the environmental policies of the 70s.

SI: The Bullitt Foundation’s criteria refer to “high risk, high potential payoff opportunities to exert unusual leverage.” What are some projects that exemplify those criteria?
DH: There’s a group called Central City Concern down in Portland [that was initially set up to deal with alcoholism and homelessness and now also develops and manages low-income housing]. …They wanted to capture the rain that fell on the roof … but it was against the law in Oregon. … They wanted to explore what it would take, what sort of tweak in the law, it would take to do that.

We gave them a small grant to do that. They began investigating and a local architecture firm loaned an architect. [Central City Concern] proposed legislation in the Oregon state legislature to put [a rainwater collection law] into effect as a new statute. So as a consequence of a relatively small grant—I think it was like $10,000—we fundamentally changed water law in the state of Oregon.

SI: In what ways might the Bullitt Foundation’s influence extend beyond the Pacific Northwest?
DH: Most of what we do is to experiment, to try out things, and if they’re successful then we’ll try to call other people’s attention to them. If we do something fairly exciting here it gets picked up. … So we’re looking for models of sustainable development, and to the extent that we come up with things that really seem to be working—such as the really fairly extraordinary investments Portland has been making in transportation systems and the stuff Seattle has been doing creating modes of urban villages—it becomes [a model]. … We have a chance to have an impact, both on our successes and our failures.