Executive Producer, Casey Coates Danson

As the mother of two children and a strong sense of stewardship for the earth, Casey Coates Danson established Global Possibilities in 1996, a non-profit devoted to promoting the use of solar energy in the built environment as a viable and natural alternative to fossil fuels in order to mitigate climate change. Prior to that, Danson co-founded with her former husband, the American Oceans Campaign, now merged with Oceana. Danson served on the Board of Governors of the Parsons School of Design, the Board of Directors of the Southern California Institute of Architecture, and chaired the Board of Directors of the Environmental Media Association. She also served on the Advisory Board of the Jimmy Carter Work Project in Los Angeles and as an honorary board member of the Institute of American Indian Arts Foundation.

For Danson, it started as a simple need for natural light; there never seemed to be enough inside her homes. As an environmental design student at the Parsons School of Design in New York in the 1970s, she learned to appreciate how the Anasazi and the master builders of the Renaissance incorporated natural materials into their designs for self-sufficient cities. As news of the expanding hole in the ozone layer came to light in the 1980’s, her consciousness about the destructive nature of how we heat and power our homes expanded exponentially.

Through Global Possibilities, national conferences, educational initiatives, public outreach, speaking engagements and film, Danson seeks to remind people that the sun is virtually an untapped source of free, constant energy, and pleads for an energy transition – even If it’s with one photovoltaic panel at a time. 

Danson has left a living legacy in the form of two solar homes that she designed and built in the nineties – a 1,500-square-foot, Pueblo-style adobe home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and a grand, 7,000-square-foot contemporary Los Angeles home now occupied by a family of seven. Both demonstrate that the sun’s energy can be used to power houses at any end of the design spectrum.

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