Ray Wilson

“I like HEC because it speaks the truth. It looks for solutions. It works at building bridges. HEC works on some problems that no one else does and supports other organizations working on common problems.”

HEC member Ray Wilson was born in a small town in Pennsylvania, spent summers on his grandparents’ small dairy farm, and holds degrees in Agricultural Engineering. He was an officer in the Army Corps of Engineers and spent a year in Vietnam building bridges, roads, and buildings. His career has predominantly been spent designing farm buildings to meet EPA environmental compliance. More recently, he consults in organizational development and operational improvement.

Ray has attended several of HEC’s Greening the Statehouse annual forums and helped form Indy Green Congregations. He is a Board Member of Solarize Indiana and he is involved with the Indiana Solar Energy Forum, promoting solar panel installation and sustainable energy solutions for Indiana.

Ray also chairs the board of Hoosier Interfaith Power and Light, an organization with which HEC has long collaborated and held mutual respect. HEC and HIPL have worked together on legislative priorities and on Climate Boot Camps. “HIPL is now launching a project called Thriving Faith Communities to help congregations and their congregants across the state to reduce their energy consumption and thus their carbon emissions by 25% by 2025. We started out just thinking about doing this in Indianapolis in support of the Thrive Indianapolis plan, but realized with all the Zoom [virtual training] capabilities, that we could open it to the whole state,” noted Ray.

Ray says he views the Hoosier Environmental Council as Indiana’s premier environmental advocacy organization. “I like HEC because it speaks the truth. It looks for solutions. It works at building bridges. HEC works on some problems that no one else does and supports other organizations working on common problems,” he says.

His environmental issue of greatest concern is global warming – the most important problem in human history. Ray says that not wasting energy is critical to climate action. “My dream is that very soon our national and state elected officials will come together and see the critical period we are in as a civilization. That we will see the life or death crisis for what it is, and we will, for the next 5 – 10 years, do what we did in three years during World War II. We can do it. In this crisis we will be building something. It will be much easier [than waging a world war] and more rewarding.”