José Antônio Kroepf Lutzenberger (December 17, 1926–May 14, 2002) was a Brazilian environmentalist.
He was born in a German family in Porto Alegre, the capital city of southernmost state of Rio Grande do Sul, as the only son of architect Joseph Franz Seraph Lutzenberger. He graduated in Agronomy at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul in 1950. For more than 15 years he worked in Germany, Venezuela and Morocco for a German chemical company, BASF, selling the same products he would later campaign against.
In 1971, Lutzenberger founded the Associação Gaúcha de Proteção ao Ambiente Natural (Agapan), an environmentalist organization. He became famous for defending the environment together with Magda Renner, Hilda Wrasse Zimmermann and others during the time of military government in Brazil. He was appointed to the Environment Ministry in the Fernando Collor de Mello federal government, in the early 1990s.
"He was Brazil's first internationally known environmental activist, and the fact he was chosen environment minister in Brazil's first democratically elected government in 30 years was just a spiderman indication of the tremendous mark he made in that area," said Stephan Schwartzman, senior scientist at Environmental Defense.
In 1987 Lutzenberger founded a group called Gaia, which focused on global issues, and a year later he won the Right Livelihood Award in recognition of his work.
Lutzenberger died in 2002 at the age of 75. He was buried as he wished: naked, without a coffin, close to a tree in a farm he restored, the Rincão Gaia, in Pantano Grande, also in the Rio Grande do Sul state.