Joel Reynolds

Western Director, Executive Office

NRDC’s principal institutional representative in the West, Joel Reynolds joined the organization as a senior attorney in 1990, after a decade with the Center for Law in the Public Interest and the Western Center on Law and Poverty, both in Los Angeles. Since 1980, he has specialized in complex law-reform litigation, arguing cases on behalf of environmental and community groups at all levels of the federal courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court. He has also led several of NRDC’s largest campaigns: to preserve the birthing lagoon of gray whales in Baja California; to protect the California State Park at San Onofre; to reduce underwater noise pollution that threatens ocean wildlife; and, most recently, to halt the construction of the environmentally destructive Pebble Mine in Alaska’s Bristol Bay. He has twice been selected California Attorney of the Year (environment) and, in 2012, was appointed Chairman of the Board of the Tejon Ranch Conservancy, overseeing conservation on 240,000 acres of California’s largest private landholding. His work has been profiled in the New York Times best seller and PEN science prize winner "War of the Whales" (Simon & Schuster 2014). In October 2017, he received an Emmy for Outstanding Nature Documentary for the film Sonic Sea. He has contributed to the Opinion pages of major media like the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Christian Science Monitor, Huffington Post, and other major periodicals in California. A graduate of Columbia Law School in 1978, Reynolds is based in Santa Monica.


This website provides general information, not legal advice. If you need legal help, please consult a lawyer in your state. Joel Reynolds does not hold themself out as a specialist in a particular area of law or law practice.

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