Billy Parish
Campaigning for a Better Climate

By Nicole Price Fasig
This profile was printed in Abroad View magazine fall 2006

Global warming may be an inconvenient truth, but it’s one Billy Parish acknowledged years ago. Before Al Gore helped to bring it back to the forefront of national consciousness, Parish was rallying college students toward renewable energy.

Parish had just begun his junior year at Yale University and his term as head of the Yale Student Environmental Coalition when he began coordinating youth summits to discuss the challenges that face our environment.
The following spring, Parish took time off from school to launch The Climate Campaign, an organization that seeks to unite student networks to lobby their schools to adopt a range of environmentally friendly policies including using renewable energy, instituting green building and working for energy conservation. It has been more than three years and Parish hasn’t looked back.

“I don’t know if we will ever have a better opportunity in American history to recruit young people to do this work,” he says. “We need to radically change the direction of our country’s energy policy—and because the stakes are so high for us, young people are willing to fight for change.”

Under Parish’s leadership, students have been wildly successful at the university and state levels. He has since founded a similar umbrella organization, Energy Action, with Arthur Coulston, a graduate of the University of California at Santa Cruz. Parish hopes to go back to school some day but, for now, he is more than content to devote his energies to a more global cause.

“In the next few decades the world will have a real wake-up call on climate change,” Parish says, “and it’s exciting to already be working on solutions.”