We are thrilled to welcome Bill Clary to the MassIPL board (which we call our Executive Committee), where he serves as our Board Treasurer. Bill comes to us as a mechanical engineer and clean energy entrepreneur whose career has spanned catalyst research, industrial engineering, and corporate management, and whose commitment to our shared world shows up in the many communities he serves.
Bill is the President and CEO of Pacific AgriTec, LLC, a company working to produce algae for commercial use while reducing carbon pollution from the air and from industrial emissions. He grew up in New Hampshire and Massachusetts, earned a bachelor's in chemistry from Carleton College, and returned to school to complete a master's in mechanical engineering at the University of Minnesota. A founder and former Managing Director at MIRATECH Corporation and a founder and investor in PHYCO2 LLC and Pacific AgriTec, Bill has served on corporate and community boards since 1992. Alongside MassIPL, he volunteers with the FRS Unitarian Universalist Green Team, a Habitat for Humanity work group, and the Newburyport City Energy Advisory Committee. He lives in Newburyport with his wife, Beth, a writer, and the two of them have launched two children now making their homes in Massachusetts and Colorado.
To help our community get to know Bill a little better, we asked him a few questions about his path into this work, what drives him, and what he hopes to help MassIPL accomplish in the year ahead. Here is what he shared, in his own words.
Bill's responses are in italics, below.
To help a small nonprofit stabilize its management and grow across the state, with its focus on faith communities and environmental justice communities.
Watching them recommit to a shared future with one another.
I played the tuba and sousaphone in high school.
I read President Carter's energy report for a class in college, which set me on a path that led to a master's in mechanical engineering and a career spent in the energy field.
My focus will be on revenue growth in the coming year, to strengthen our financial footing and position us to grow.
Thank you, Bill, for sharing your time and your story with us. Your belief in communities recommitting to a shared future, and your steady focus on the foundations that let good work grow, are exactly the spirit that moves this work forward. We are grateful to have you on the board. Welcome aboard.
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In this Sustainable Faith essay, Dayenu organizer Lenny Somervell reflects on climate grief and the pressure to "don't mourn, organize." Drawing on Jewish traditions of mourning, Somervell argues that grief and action aren't opposites, and that the climate crisis wasn't created by individual choices and can't be solved by them. Our power, like our responsibility, is collective. Rabbi Laura Bellows closes with a High Holiday reflection on recommitting to the world as it could and should be.
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Gopal Patel reflects on three bodies of water, the Ganges, Walden Pond, and the ocean, and what each teaches us about the change we're asked to make.
