Peter Lehner

Peter Lehner has been the Executive Director of NRDC since 2006.

"Peter brings a wealth of experience to his position as Executive Director, including creating and leading the environmental prosecution unit for New York City Law Department early in his career. Subsequently, Peter began his long association with NRDC, serving for five years as Director of NRDC's water program from 1994 to 1999. 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.

"In addition to Peter'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.

"Peter 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."


 * Former Advisor, Environmental Leadership Program