Peter Lehner

Who is Peter Lehner?

Peter Lehner is an American lawyer and environmentalist, currently the Executive Director of Natural Resources Defense Council

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.

Early in his career, Lehner created and led 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. 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.