Greg Searle

Biografía: Greg Searle Executive Director BioRegional North America Chelsea, Canada Greg is an experienced international consultant, facilitator, and entrepreneur, and an expert on sustainable lifestyles. As a sustainability facilitator, Greg has lead bid-winning and selected design teams on large mixed-use neighborhood projects across North America from pre-masterplanning onward on a range of often difficult infill sites. The resulting Sustainability Action Plans and Green Lifestyle programs have set the most ambitious and comprehensive targets for green communities yet seen in North America, significantly differentiating them from typical green projects. Greg leads the One Planet Communities program for North America, and sits on the Steering Committee for the global program, which is administered by BioRegional. The program creates coalitions with developers, municipalities, and grassroots groups in influential US regions to build Zero Carbon demonstration neighborhoods that model a truly sustainable future - places where people of all backgrounds and incomes live healthy lifestyles with an 80% reduction in total carbon footprint. BioRegional, an independent non-profit environmental organization with world HQ in London, UK, is the recent recipient of the prestigious Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship, and the authors of the sustainability strategy for the winning London 2012 Olympic bid. BioRegional are best known as co-creators of the BedZED urban eco-village that the UK Solar Awards called "Perhaps the most influential of all housing projects this century." Greg founded BioRegional North America in 2006 to bring the One Planet Communities program to North America, and is guided by a Board of Directors comprised of many of the most experienced green architects and real estate developers on the continent. He is the lead author of the Green Living Manifesto. Greg has given over 50 workshops and keynote speeches in cities such as Barcelona, Houston, London, Vancouver, and Amman, Jordan, and at GreenBuild 2006 (Denver), GreenBuild 2009 (Phoenix) and AIA 2008 (Boston). He speaks on ground-breaking case studies such as BedZED, Sonoma Mountain Village, and One Brighton. Greg has also been invited as a guest lecturer on sustainability at universities in Canada, the United States, and Mexico. Greg lived at BedZED while studying the long-term impacts of the sustainable lifestyles program that operated there. He applied this learning in helping create an "eco-lifestyle" reality TV show, Wa$ted, now in its third season on Discovery's Planet Green channel. He manages an on-location team that provides ecological footprint reduction science and tactics to help over-consuming American families achieve as much as a 30% reduction in their ecological footprints in just 2 months. Greg previously served as a consultant to the United Nations and the World Conservation Union. He is also the co-founder, director, and former Chief Technology Officer of an award-winning knowledge management software company, Tomoye Corporation. Greg has lived in London, Rome, and Boston, and consulted extensively in Brussels and Washington DC. He is now based just outside of Ottawa, Canada's capital, where he is painstakingly eco-retrofitting his 60-year-old cedar log home. Nov 2009