Peter Lehner (born in 1958) is an American lawyer and environmentalist, currently the Executive Director of Natural Resources Defense Council[1]
As the Executive Director, Lehner manages more than 350 environmental advocates in seven offices across the planet and guides NRDC's policy positions and advocacy strategies. Since Lehner assumed his role as Executive Director in 2006, NRDC has strengthened and rededicated its resources towards curbing global warming, building a clean energy future for America, reviving the world's oceans, saving endangered wild spaces and lands, stemming the tide of toxic chemicals, and accelerating the greening of China. NRDC has opened new offices in Chicago and Beijing, and established a new Center for Market Innovation. He blogs regularly on Huffington Post.[2]
Early in his career, Lehner created and leaded the environmental prosecution unit for New York City Law Department. Subsequently, he joined NRDC as the Director of NRDC's water program from 1994 to 1999.[3] He left NRDC to become the Chief of the Environmental Protection Bureau of the New York State Attorney General's Office, a job he held for eight years. In that role, he supervised all environmental litigation by New York State, prosecuting a wide variety of polluters and developing innovative multi-state strategies targeting global warming, acid rain, and smog-causing emissions from the country's largest electric utility companies. His work at the Attorney General's office, where he led 40 lawyers and 10 scientists, received great acclaim and recognition for furthering the environmental agenda in New York State, the Northeast and nationally.[4]
In addition to Lehner's leadership at NRDC, he has been involved with a number of other organizations. He teaches law at Columbia Law School, and serves on the boards of the Butler Environmental Protection Fund, the Columbia Journal of Environmental Law, New York Rivers United, and the Center for Watershed Protection. He is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, on the advisory council of Harvard University's David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, and is one of the founding members of the Environmental Law Reporter and Environmental Law Institute's Advisory Board.[5]
Lehner has been honored with the Distinguished Public Service Award by the Association of the Bar of the City of New York; the Earth Day Good Government Award by the City of New York; the Environmental Leadership Award by Hudson Riverkeeper; the Region II Environmental Quality Award by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency; and the Environmental Leadership award by Environmental Advocates.
Lehner received AB degrees in Philosophy and Mathematics from Harvard College, and his law degree from Columbia University Law School, where he continues to teach environmental law. He is married to Fritz Beshar and has three daughters: Nadine, Eliza and Marina.
Natural Resources Defense Council
Frances Beinecke, NRDC's President