Environmental health scientist Wendy Gordon Rockefeller holds a bachelor’s degree from Princeton University and a master’s degree from the Harvard School of Public Health. After completing her former education, she worked in the 1980s as a research associate and senior project scientist for the Natural Resources Defense Council. She later became the director of TechRocks, a now-defunct Internet activist group.

In 1989 Rockefeller and actress Meryl Streep co-founded the organization Mothers and Others for a Livable Planet, where Ms. Rockefeller subsequently served as executive director. She also has served, at various times, as a publisher with the National Geographic Society; an advisory board member of the Princeton Environmental Institute; executive director of The Green Guide Institute, publisher of The Green Guide, a resource designed to help consumers stay healthy and protect the environment; board chair of Trickle Up, an international charitable organization that provides seed money for small-business startups around the world;^[1] a trustee of the Rockefeller Family Fund; a director of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors; and vice chair of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

Ms. Rockefeller wrote the foreword for environmental journalist David Steinman’s 2007 book, Safe Trip to Eden: 10 Steps to Save Planet Earth from the Global Warming Meltdown.

Further Reading: “Wendy Gordon Rockefeller” (ActivistFacts.com, SourceWatch.org, Bloomberg.com).

Footnotes:

1. Trickle Up opposes the so-called “trickle-down” economic theory, popularized by former President Ronald Reagan, which maintains that tax cuts and other benefits to employers and wealth-producers will ultimately help people at every socioeconomic level.