General Information: Overview: Who We Are: Mark Mininberg

Mark Mininberg is the ratna seat holder in the Zen Peacemaker Order. His responsibilities include the development of businesses to support the Order’s livelihood; to create employment opportunities for formerly incarcerated and homeless people as part of the Pathmaker Partnership; and to provide Zen entrepreneurship training for students in Peacemaker programs.

Mark is a lay Zen practitioner who owes a special debt to his teacher John Daido Loori Roshi, Abbot of Zen Mountain Monastery, with whom he studied the Hakuin system of koans for more than twenty years.  Mark served as the Monastery shuso, or head seminarian in 1995, was a member of its Guardian Council and Treasurer of its Board of Directors.  He is currently continuing his formal Zen studies with Roshi Bernie Glassman.

Mark’s Buddhist practice is intimately intertwined with his various working roles as a lawyer, healthcare administrator and business person. In 2005, he helped coordinate a major conference among His Holiness the Dalai Lama, the Mind and Life Institute and the Society for Neuroscience concerning the science of meditation and he is currently advising Columbia University in the creation of a center for the study and propagation of mental training in public health and public education.

Mark began his career as an environmental lawyer specializing in the redevelopment of contaminated industrial sites in urban areas of the Northeast. In this capacity, he was responsible for helping to return dozens of properties to productive use; drafted new federal and state legislation to facilitate cleanup operations; and successfully litigated several test cases of new environmental laws, including one of the largest Superfund cases in U.S. history. After the collapse of the Berlin Wall, Mark founded the Council for Sustainable Development in Eastern Europe to create a “peace dividend” by converting former military technology to use in generating clean energy in the highly polluted former Soviet states. As a result of this work, Mark was invited to serve as an environmental advisor to the governments of the Russian Federation and the Czech Republic. In 1992, Mark introduced then Vice President Al Gore to the Russian Minister of Environment and was subsequently retained by the U.S. Overseas Private investment Corporation to create environmental standards for development and operation of global power generation projects funded or insured by the U.S. government. He subsequently licensed a number of clean energy projects in the United States, Europe and the Caribbean.

Mark’s interest in renewable energy led him to found HES Energy in 1996. HES now procures more than $500 million in renewable fuel and electricity for 125 hospitals and affiliated universities in the United States. HES is developing more than $200 million in new renewable power plants sited on hospital campuses. HES is also a national leader in generating energy using ‚Äúgreen gas‚Äù, a fuel that is created by capturing and cleaning methane gas released from municipal landfills, thereby cutting the methane greenhouse gas impact by half.

Mark is the author of numerous books and articles and is a frequent lecturer on energy and environmental matters, including seminars and conferences sponsored by the United Nations, World Bank, the Oxford University Law Colloquium and the Yale University Center for International Studies. He is a graduate of Wesleyan University with Honors in History, and of the University of Connecticut  School of Law, where he was a member of the Law Review and received the Connecticut Law Tribune Prize for legal scholarship.