About

William is the President and CEO of the Presidio Graduate School, where he is also the Richard M. Gray Fellow in Sustainability Practice. Before Presidio, he was a professor at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law, where he also served as Executive Director of the Rocky Mountain Land Use Institute. William has led several organizations at the forefront of the sustainability field, including the nation’s premier environmental justice law center, Alternatives for Community & Environment, which he cofounded as an Echoing Green Fellow in 1993, and the pioneering green development research and consulting organization New Ecology, Inc. From 1999-2008, William was on the faculty of the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT and, from 1993-2004, taught at Boston College Law School. He has lectured around the world on environmental policy and sustainable development and has been featured in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, U.S. News & World Report and on National Public Radio. William is the author of the award-winning book, The Land That Could Be: Environmentalism and Democracy in the Twenty-First Century and A Republic of Trees: Field Notes on People, Place, and the Planet. David Brower described him as “an environmental visionary creating solutions to today’s problems with a passion that would make John Muir and Martin Luther King equally proud.” William received his BA in history and classics from Brown University and a JD and MA in history from the University of Virginia. He also completed doctoral studies as a Regents Fellow at the University of California Berkeley and graduated from the Executive Program in Business Strategies for Environmental Sustainability at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. William was a law clerk for U.S. District Court Chief Judge Franklin S. Billings, Jr. He’s an avid telemark skier, trail runner and musician.