ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Byron Kennard

ABOUT BYRON KENNARD
Byron Kennard is a long time advocate for both the environment and small-scale enterprise whom Amory Lovins, chairman of the Rocky Mountain Institute, describes as “the environmental movement’s greatest organizer.”
 
Inspired by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Kennard minted his environmental credentials working for Lady Bird Johnson’s beautification program and helping organize the 1965 White House Conference on Natural Beauty.   
 
Working as a community organizer for The Conservation Foundation in the late 60s, Kennard helped organize the first Earth Day, laying the groundwork for the worldwide explosion of civic and political activism that followed in its wake. The United Nations Environment Program awarded him the Leadership Medal for "distinguished contribution to the cause of the environment" as a result of this work.

"Always ahead of others, Byron was making things happen for the environment before most people knew what the word meant,” recalls Lee Botts, founder of  the Lake Michigan Federation (now the Alliance for the Great Lakes) and herself one of the pioneer environmentalists. “Back in those days, he established a national network of activists and today he is still doing that, now on behalf of small business. I am still trying to keep up with him."   
 
In the 1970s, Kennard collaborated closely with the late E. F. Schumacher, author of Small Is Beautiful. Schumacher, Kennard’s mentor, taught him the overriding importance of scale, why the size of things matters socially, economically, technologically, even politically. Kennard determined to propagate this idea and this task has been his passion ever since.
 
Two decades later, Kennard noticed how Information Age technologies were vastly expanding the capacities of small-scale enterprises. In 1998, he founded the Center for Small Business and the Environment (CSBE) to promote green small businesses and entrepreneurs. As Bill Drayton, Chair of Ashoka: Innovators for the Public, put it, “Byron’s creativity and organizing genius spotted this critical leverage point and is helping these innovating small firms work together to exploit it." 

During the past decade, Byron built and orchestrated a vibrant network of small business leaders and green entrepreneurs around the country. This network serves a mission of growing consequence. Recently, Kennard has been lauded by Todd McCracken, President of the National Small Business Association for “getting small business a seat at the table where critical energy-policy decisions are being made,” and by Senator John Kerry for “bringing small business into the global warming debate.”

“Byron Kennard is amazing,” declares Scott Hauge, founder of Small Business California. “Imagine a fellow who, decades ago, was a principal organizer of the environmental movement, being today the principal organizer of a new movement which, though just getting off the ground, promises to become as consequential as the one he helped launched in 1970.  What’s more, he’s done this armed only with a telephone and a computer.”

Mike McCabe, former Deputy Administrator of the US Environmental Protection Agency, who’s known and worked with Kennard for 30 years, says that “The really interesting thing about Byron is that he plays his best game with a weak hand.”

Elaine Pofeldt
Elaine Pofeldt is a former Senior Editor of FORTUNE Small Business
magazine. She’s written stories for Crain’s New York Business, E Magazine,
Inc., Forbes, Good Housekeeping, Marie Claire, Working Mother, and other
publications. Currently, Elaine also does editorial web consulting for clients
including Time Inc. Content Solutions. Elaine has been nominated for the
National Magazine Award for feature writing.

Elaine is a graduate of Yale University, with a B.A in English.