Primary Job Title Founding Chairman of the Board of Trustees Primary Organization Conservation Lands Foundation
Location San Francisco, California, United States Regions San Francisco Bay Area, West Coast, Western US Gender Male
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Mr. Norton served as The Nature Conservancy’s Deputy Director of the Asia-Pacific Region. Based in Bali, he worked on marine and terrestrial biodiversity conservation projects across the region. He also served as Senior Advisor to the USAID Orangutan Conservation Services Project in Indonesia. In 2005, he was the Distinguished Visiting Lecturer at
the Department of Social and Cultural Ecology, Graduate School of Humanities, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic.
Previously, he was the Senior Advisor to The Nature Conservancy’s China Program. In that role, he helped to create The Conservancy’s Yunnan Great Rivers Project. Over the course of his career he also served as Vice President for Law and Public Policy of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, was the founding President of the Grand Canyon Trust, the founding Chairman of the Rails-To-Trails Conservancy and one of the founders and leaders of the Vietnam Veterans Reconciliation Project. Additionally, he was special counsel, Deputy Executive Director and Director of Membership and Development for The Wilderness Society. In his early career, he was a federal prosecutor with the US Attorney in Maryland, Assistant Attorney General of Maryland, and a law clerk to Judge Frank A. Kaufman of the United States District Court for Maryland.
He graduated with a BA in European History from Washington & Lee University and attended Columbia University’s Russian Institute as a Woodrow Wilson Scholar. He served in the US Marine Corps and was discharged with the rank of captain. Following his military service, he received his JD from Harvard Law School. Currently he is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Grand Canyon Trust, The Wyss Foundation, and is the Founding Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Conservation Lands Foundation.
