Ecology Action is a non-profit

environmental organization An environmental organization is an organization coming out of the conservation or environmental movements that seeks to protect, analyse or monitor the environment against misuse or degradation from human forces. In this sense the environm ...

and consultancy founded in 1970 under

Internal Revenue Code The Internal Revenue Code (IRC), formally the Internal Revenue Code of 1986, is the domestic portion of federal statutory tax law in the United States, published in various volumes of the United States Statutes at Large, and separately as Title 2 ...

Section 501(c)(3) in

Berkeley, California Berkeley ( ) is a city on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay in northern Alameda County, California, United States. It is named after the 18th-century Irish bishop and philosopher George Berkeley. It borders the cities of Oakland and Emer ...

. The organization has since moved its headquarters to

Santa Cruz, California Santa Cruz ( Spanish for "Holy Cross") is the county seat and largest city of Santa Cruz County, in Northern California. As of the 2020 census, the city population was 62,956. Situated on the northern edge of Monterey Bay, Santa Cruz is a pop ...

, with satellite offices in

San Jose, California San Jose, officially San José (; ; ), is a major city in the U.S. state of California that is the cultural, financial, and political center of Silicon Valley and largest city in Northern California by both population and area. With a 2020 popul ...

, and

Sacramento, California ) , image_map = Sacramento County California Incorporated and Unincorporated areas Sacramento Highlighted.svg , mapsize = 250x200px , map_caption = Location within Sacramento C ...

, where it employs approximately 100 people and operates a variety of energy saving, water, waste reduction, and

greenhouse gas emission Greenhouse gas emissions from human activities strengthen the greenhouse effect, contributing to climate change. Most is carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels: coal, oil, and natural gas. The largest emitters include coal in China and lar ...

reduction programs. The organization assists businesses, governments, and utilities in designing and implementing programs in

efficient energy use Efficient energy use, sometimes simply called energy efficiency, is the process of reducing the amount of energy required to provide products and services. For example, insulating a building allows it to use less heating and cooling energy to ...

water conservation Water conservation includes all the policies, strategies and activities to sustainably manage the natural resource of fresh water, to protect the hydrosphere, and to meet the current and future human demand (thus avoiding water scarcity). Populati ...

, and

sustainable transportation Sustainable transport refers to ways of transportation that are sustainable in terms of their social and environmental impacts. Components for evaluating sustainability include the particular vehicles used for road, water or air transport; the ...

History

Ecology Action was launched on Earth Day in 1970 as an all-volunteer, unmanned recycling donation depot for bottles and cans. Forty years later, the organization has become a leader in California’s sustainability program design and development with active programs focused on driving behavior change in water conservation, energy management, and alternative transportation. The organization persevered through the conservative backlash of the 1980s—when the state froze over half a million dollars of their grant contracts—and the

Great Recession The Great Recession was a period of marked general decline, i.e. a recession, observed in national economies globally that occurred from late 2007 into 2009. The scale and timing of the recession varied from country to country (see map). At ...

of 2007–2009. Despite these setbacks, Ecology Action’s sustainability programs have helped over 20,000 California residents and business owners save millions of gallons of water and reduce energy consumption by half a million kilowatt hours each year. In 2009, the organization began to renovate the former ''Santa Cruz Sentinel'' newspaper building with two other partners. The organization also sponsors Bike To Work Week, inviting over ten thousand students and adults to bike to school and/or their places of work twice a year.

References

External links

Official website
{{Authority control Environmental organizations based in California Charities based in California Santa Cruz, California 501(c)(3) organizations