He traveled to Brazil many times, and ultimately signed on to help design what became the Amazon Region Protected Areas ( ARPA) program. I knew I had a lot to learn.”Īnd so he continued taking calls from Leape. But going in to WWF and saying, ‘I’ve worked at Goldman Sachs, please step aside while I save the day,’ would have been arrogant and also just erroneous. “I saw this as a career change and so wanted to add real value beyond just giving money-although I did give money, because I knew it was important. “I never wanted to be a checkbook philanthropist,” Linden says. “They were looking for someone from the private sector who had experience running multi-hundred million-dollar projects to advise them, and I’d been recommended. “For my whole life I will be incredibly grateful to all who mentored me, and in particular the folks at World Wildlife Fund who drew out my ability and gave me the opportunity to help save the planet- exactly what I wanted to do.” Larry Linden “He said they were getting ready to launch a program to help save very large parts of the Amazon, and that the project would be two hundred times larger than anything they’d ever done,” Linden explains. About six months after he determined to shift his focus in that direction, Linden received a call from Jim Leape, who at the time was in charge of conservation programs for WWF-US. Or the fact that, when I was a young Air Force officer, I wrote one of the first environmental impact statements, on the B-70 bomber.”īut back to Linden’s goal to help heal the planet. “These experiences have informed my whole life, my relationship with WWF, and a lot of other things,” says Linden, “like the topic of my master’s thesis, which was air pollution from jet engines. This discovery led California to implement some of the nation's earliest air-quality control measures. When the air quality was bad enough, recess was canceled.Īround this same time, scientists at CalTech in Pasadena figured out that the pollutant at fault was ozone-whose creation was driven by sunlight that energized a reaction of hydrocarbons and nitrogen oxides from oil refineries and automobile exhaust. As Linden remembers it, the air was brown and hazy, stinging his eyes and making breathing painful.

Pasadena is on the eastern edge of the Los Angeles Basin, and in the afternoons it was extremely smoggy. “My family also went camping in Yosemite and had all those other great California nature experiences.” “After school I would go up into the wilderness and spend the latter part of the afternoon traipsing through the forest,” Linden recalls. Just north of his elementary school was the San Gabriel Wilderness. Like most little kids, Linden spent a lot of time outside when he was growing up in the 1950s in Pasadena. This was an idea that was a long time coming. This wasn’t grandiose verbiage or a pie-in-the-sky proclamation. And so I decided to leave Goldman, and get to work on slowing down the rate at which we’re destroying the planet.”

“And so when I realized I had some financial freedom, I said to myself: It’s my turn to do something. “I’ve always been one who has been very grateful to the others on whose shoulders I stood-those who created our great country and gave me so many tremendous opportunities,” Linden says. And when the company went public in 1999, he began considering what his next move should be. He worked for Goldman Sachs for many years, became a partner, was a leader of Goldman’s global expansion through the 1990s, and guided their Y2K transition plan.

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