Join the Hale community as we toast the start of fall, reflect on a successful summer, and connect with friends new and old.
Join members of Hale’s community as we welcome the new season. We’ll reflect on a successful summer and reconnect with friends over hors d’oeuvres and toast our annual award winners.
We are thrilled to welcome career environmentalist and clean energy investor Ian Bowles as our keynote speaker. He will speak on “The Conservation Imperative in the 21st Century.”
Meet Our Keynote Speaker
Ian Bowles has a more than 35-year career history focused on conservation, climate change and clean energy. He has worked on the international, federal, state and local levels as a businessman, political appointee and nonprofit leader. He is co-founder and Managing Director of WindSail Capital Group, a Boston based investment firm focused on clean energy. He lives in Dover, about 100 yards from Noanet Reservation, and has mountain-biked, hiked and walked all over Hale for many years.
From 2007 to 2011, Bowles served as the first Secretary of Energy and Environmental Affairs of Massachusetts. As Secretary, he created the first state cabinet agency in the country that encompassed all aspects of both energy regulation and environmental protection, including six departments that employ staff of more than 3,000. He worked to negotiate and then implement six landmark new Massachusetts laws that made MA a national leader in greenhouse gas emissions reductions, energy efficiency, solar development and building codes. Bowles was the architect of Governor Deval Patrick’s commitment to invest at least $50 million annually in land conservation, then the largest MA commitment to land conservation in history.
Earlier in his career, Bowles served on the senior staff of the National Security Council overseeing U.S. policy on international energy and environmental matters. He was also a Senior Advisor to the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, where he oversaw what was then the largest charitable grant in history to an international conservation organization and was a Senior Research Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. Before that, he spent eight years as a top executive at Conservation International where he played a key role in creation of the four-million-acre Central Suriname Nature Reserve, one of the world’s largest tropical forest nature reserves.
He has been recognized with the Hall of Fame award by the Northeast Clean Energy Council and Conservationist of the Year by the MA Chapter of the Nature Conservancy.
Bowles co-edited Footprints in the Jungle (Oxford University Press) on infrastructure development and land conservation and has written broadly on energy, environment, conservation and sustainability in both professional journals such as Science and in the popular media such as the New York Times. He received his A.B. cum laude from Harvard College and a Masters degree from Oxford University. He holds an honorary doctorate from Emerson College and guest lectures frequently at Harvard Kennedy School. He is a native of Woods Hole, MA, but his grandmother, Margaret Jackson Clowes, was born in Dover and lived there virtually her whole life.