Laurance Rockefeller
Key Player

Trustee, Natural Resources Defense Council; Private philanthropist; Former chairman, Rockefeller Brothers Fund; Former chairman, Citizens Advisory Committee on Environmental Quality; Trustee, the Laurance Rockefeller Charitable TrustPhilanthropist Laurance Rockefeller — grandson of John D. and brother of Nelson and David — has spent his life spending the family’s money on environmental causes. He has given millions of dollars to support national parks, establish historic sites, and fund a variety of activist groups. In his youth Rockefeller was a venture capitalist, but by the 1950s he was concentrating on environmental issues, chairing the Outdoor Recreation Resources Review Commission and the Citizens Advisory Committee on Environmental Quality. He has served as a trustee of NRDC since 1979.

Rockefeller has also given hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Center for Psychology and Social Change in Massachusetts, an outfit that investigates alien abductions. He has funded a scheme to signal aliens with halogen lamps and once held a UFO conference at his ranch in Wyoming.