School of Sustainability

The philanthropist who put someone else's name on the building

Peter Buckley, born in 1947, was a lawyer first, then a successful entrepreneur, and then something rarer: a philanthropist with no interest in being known as one. The money went out across education, activism, land conservation and green building, and he founded or co-founded a string of institutions along the way. The pattern in all of it was the same: build the thing, make it last, stay out of the photograph.

The thing he built largest was the David Brower Center. He imagined it, led the long work of getting it built, and stayed on as its president from the day it opened until his death. The building pushed past the highest levels of LEED green-building certification, but the certification was never the point. The point was the tenancy: the centre became a working home for dozens of cutting-edge, influential environmental and social justice organisations under one roof.

Bioneers, the conference network he supported quietly from behind the scenes for many years, remembered him this month alongside three much better-known names: Gloria Steinem, Carl Anthony and Wendell Berry. Steinem and Anthony had both spoken at the conference; Berry never did, though his thinking shaped decades of its programme. Buckley is the only one of the four most readers will never have heard of, which appears to be exactly how he arranged it.

Bioneers · Read the source