The Costco Connection

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Click here to see Denis Hayes talking about the Bullitt Center.

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32 ;e Costco Connection APRIL 2016

By Steve Fisher

SUSTAINABILITY. IT’S A word that has
achieved a high level of visibility and desirabil-
ity worldwide. In a 2012 speech, United Nations
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said, “Ours is
a world of looming challenges and increasingly
limited resources. Sustainable development
offers the best chance to adjust our course.”
Among those at the forefront of sustain-
able development is Costco member Denis
Hayes, president of the Bullitt Foundation. If
neither of those names rings a bell, add them
to your mental database of people and organi-
zations fighting for Earth’s future.

The birth of an environmentalist

Hayes was born in Wisconsin in 1944 but spent most of his upbringing in the small town of Camas, Washington.

“I grew up in the Columbia River Gorge, one of the most beautiful parts of the world,” Hayes tells The Connection during an interview at the Bullitt Foundation’s Seattle office.

“My father worked in the paper mill that
was kind of destroying the gorge, clear-cut-
ting the forest that I hiked all around in as I
was growing up,” he recalls. “I woke up every
single morning with a sore throat because of
uncontrolled sulfur dioxide and hydrogen
sulfide [from the mill]. Every now and then
there’d be a major water-pollution excursion
into the Columbia, and you’d look out and
[see] thousands and thousands of dead fish.
And I think imprinted in me at that point is
that it must be possible to make paper, and, in
fact, must be possible to have a fairly comfort-
able industrial civilization, without destroying
the planet.”
Hayes received an undergraduate degree
in history from Stanford University and then
headed off to the Kennedy School of Gov-
ernment at Harvard University. While there, a
fortuitous situation resulted in his rise to
national, and international, prominence.

“A senator from Wisconsin, Gaylord
Nelson, was concerned with conservation
issues,” Hayes recalls. “He had seen how cam-
pus teach-ins on civil rights and on the war in
Vietnam had created the scenes that ulti-
mately grew into movements around those
issues. And he thought that might make
sense for environmental and conservation
issues as well.”
Nelson proposed an environmental
teach-in on college campuses in April 1970.

“I had, by that time, decided that this was a field that I wanted to devote my career to,” Hayes says. “So with the arrogance of youth I jumped on a plane, flew down to Washington, D.C., and got a 15-minute courtesy interview with the senator with the hopes of maybe getting the charter to go back and organize [the event at] Harvard.”

The scope of his ambition at that point was to promote a local event at the college, but more was in store. That 15-minute interview lasted for a couple of hours, and led to the creation of Earth Day, beginning on April 22, 1970. Nelson asked Hayes to coordinate the events across the entire country.