A New Communications Face at CA-CP

Clean Air-Cool Planet is very pleased to welcome our newest staff member, Communications Manager Bill Burtis. Bill has been raising awareness about environmental issues since he snagged his first byline as a “cub” reporter for the morning daily Syracuse Post-Standard.

A recent college grad assigned to write obituaries and listen to the emergency scanners there, our intrepid new colleague nevertheless followed up a tip from a friend, who told him that her boss, a pharmaceutical chemist, had invented nerve gas. “The government was planning on dumping it in the Atlantic—tons of the stuff—enough to decimate fish populations. I knew it was an important story,” Burtis recalls. He got the interview, the story, some classically understated kudos from his editor and colleagues—and has been writing and working on environmental issues from that day to this.

Quickly lured away to other reporting jobs with the Newhouse and Gannet chains and a couple of local independent papers, Burtis went on to receive his MFA from the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa. He continued to write environmental and science stories when he moved to New Hampshire in the mid seventies as a freelance writer.

Eventually he became senior producer and writer at the University of New Hampshire, where he wrote for print and produced for television stories on climate change from the point of view of solar-terrestrial, oceanographic, and ice-core scientists.

Since then, he’s served as a writer and producer for the Environmental Hazards Management Institute, working on safety and spill-prevention and clean-up training materials, and more recently, as the Communications Coordinator with the New Hampshire Governor’s Office of Energy and Community Services under Governor Jeanne Shaheen. His job there, he says, was to help a “wonderfully dedicated team get out a strong message about the connections between energy efficiency and pollution prevention”—and the pantheon of benefits to both. Before leaving the Governor’s energy office, Bill was in charge of publishing the newly-released NH Energy Facts 2002, a valuable informational resource about energy usage, supply and infrastructure in the Granite State.

Go to http://www.nhecs.org/images/energy%20facts.pdf
to download NH Energy Facts 2002 from the
NH Governor’s Office of Energy and Community Services.

We here at CA-CP are delighted to be able to take advantage of Bill’s journalistic skill, communications experience, and policy expertise. We look forward to working with this dedicated father of three (four if you count his cat, Pumpernickel) who practices what he preaches about renewable power and energy efficiency—heating with wood, cooking with gas—in his Lee, NH home.

Welcome, Bill!

--Jennifer Andrews