Brent Blackwelder

Brent Blackwelder has served as an environmental advocate in Washington for over 30 years and is President of Friends of the Earth. He was a founder of the Environmental Policy Institute, which merged with Friends of the Earth and the Oceanic Society in 1989. He has worked with citizen organizations to save rivers and to eliminate more than 150 destructive dams and stream channelization projects. Brent served as Chairman of the Board of the League of Conservation Voters and American Rivers, Inc. He was an initiator of the campaign to reform the World Bank and has succeeded in getting Congress to enact a series of significant reforms directing the Bank and other multilateral lending institutions to pay more attention to the environment. He has written extensively on a broad range of environmental issues. Brent graduated summa cum laude from Duke University and later on received an M.A. in Mathematics from Yale, and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Maryland.