A longtime environmental leader, Michael Fischer is the former executive director of the national Sierra Club, the California Coastal Commission, and the California Coastal Conservancy. He directed the environment program of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation for 5 years.

I am now an amateur maker of Baroque keyboard instruments, a student of classical Italian fencing and of the Japanese tea ceremony. 

Currently, I am now the Executive Director of the Consultative Group on Biological Diversity, a professional association of 55 of the nation's premier foundations making philanthropic grants in the environmental arena.

As a ham, I am a general-class amateur radio operator, hoping to augment my ability to serve as a leader in the Mill Valley CERT (Community Emergency Response Team,) and as a member of the Marin County Sheriff's RACES. I am honored to work on community service projects for the Marin Amateur Radio Society.

I was delighted to hang out in the shacks of neighborhood ham radio operators while growing up on the Mississipi Gulf Coast in the 1940s and in San Antonio in the 1950s, and I have finally has joined their ranks, decades later.

My station is small: IC-735 barefoot, with the ICOM AH-2 tuner and a 132' longwire. My QTH is problematic: tucked in the back of a small, steep-sided, redwood-forested, SE-opening box canyon at 200' elevation, five miles north of the Golden Gate Bridge.