The School Yard and Community Garden of the BIG ONE

Gil Friend is founder, president & CEO of Natural Logic Inc, providing advisory services in strategy, design, operations and information systems that help clients build economic advantage through exceptional environmental performance – Sustainable performance you can take to the bank™

Clients have included Agilent Technologies, Ex'pression Center for New Media, General Mills, Gilead Sciences, Granite Construction, Green Mountain Energy, Hewlett Packard, Nike, Odwalla, Pacific Gas & Electric, Sun Microsystems, the US General Services Administration and many others.

A systems ecologist and business strategist with 35 years experience in business, communications and environmental innovation, Friend combines broad business experience with unique content experience spanning strategy, systems ecology, economic development, management cybernetics, and public policy. Tomorrow Magazine called him "One of the country's leading environmental management consultants — a real expert who combines theoretical sophistication with hands-on, in-the-trenches know-how."

He is a founding board member of the Sustainable Business Alliance, Sustainable Berkeley, and the California Sustainable Business Council, and serves on San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom's Clean Tech Advisory Council. He was a founding board member of internet pioneer Institute for Global Communications, and was Co-founder and Co-Director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, one of the nation's leading urban ecology and economic development "think-and-do tanks," where he pioneered the current "green roof" trend more than 30 years ago.

Friend lectures widely on business strategy and environmental policy, and currently writes "The New Bottom Line," a monthly column on business strategy; a "Sustainability Sundays" column for WorldChanging.com; an irregular weblog on strategic sustainability and other matters of interest at http://blogs.natlogic.com/friend. He is a contributor to the best selling book WorldChanging; and author of the forthcoming book: Risk, Fiduciary Responsibility and the Laws of Nature.

He holds an MS in Systems Ecology from Antioch University, a black belt in Aikido, and is a seasoned practitioner of "The Natural Step" environmental management system.