David Weiss, 52, has more than 35 years of activist experience, ranging from local land use to international issues.

David lives in Albany County with his wife Sarah and sons Miles, 5, and Aden, 2. The family grows much of its own food and works to make their hilltop farm as self-sustainable as possible.

He is president of New York Farmers' Wind Power, LLC, a 100% Community-owned Renewable Energy development company. He is a certified Class A Interior Firefighter with the Rensselaerville Volunteer Fire Department and serves on its Board of Directors. David is also President of the Rensselaerville Library Board and served on the 2006 Town of Rensselaerville Land Use Committee, Chairing the Natural Resource Committee.

David's lifelong commitment to helping others began when still a teenager. In 1973, at 17, he co-founded The Ulster County Environmental Task Force to oppose and defeat the planned construction of four nuclear power reactors in Cementon, NY. He discovered that the power plant cooling towers would spread vast amounts of PCBs from the 28 million gallons of cooling water taken from the Hudson River each day. This became the key reason that the largest proposed nuclear power park was permanently stopped.

In 1975 David became one of the original members of Greenpeace, based then in Vancouver, British Columbia. He was instrumental in opening the first office in the U.S. in 1976. He attended Cabrillo College and the University of California at Santa Cruz to study Renewable Energy Systems, Oceanography, and Organic Agriculture.

In 1986, he began work on media outreach with Randy Hayes at the newly founded Rainforest Action Network and helped the organization grow from 8,000 members to 45,000 in little less than two years. He remained a key advisor to RAN until 2000.

He founded the non-profit organization Rainforest International in 1995 to help keep the rainforest and other environmental issues in the media and before the public. Their current mission is to promote sustainable, community-based renewable energy projects and educate citizens about the benefits of C-BED legislation (Community Based Energy Development). Read more at www.c-bed.org.

Through his work on these and other large scale events (up to half a million people), David has shown the capacity to coordinate efforts with various agencies including State and County Health agencies, State and local law enforcement, and the Department of Transportation.