Allen Hershkowitz

Allen Hershkowitz is an American environmental scientist who worked as a senior scientist at Natural Resources Defense Council from 1988 to 2014 and then at the Green Sports Alliance.

Hershkowitz started working at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) around 1988.

In 2007, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences approached the NRDC for advice about how to reduce the carbon footprint of the Oscar Awards show, after the academy was asked to do so by one of the producers of An Inconvenient Truth. Hershkowitz, in his role as a senior scientist at the NRDC, helped them from 2007 to 2011. Similarly, The Recording Academy asked the NRDC for help greening the Grammy Awards starting in 2008, and Hershkowitz led that effort as well.

At an NRDC staff retreat in 2004, board member Robert Redford suggested that the NRDC establish more of a presence at professional sporting events; Hershkowitz told a reporter from Mother Jones: "We were trying to figure out how to reach out to untraditional allies, and Redford says to us, 'You know, if you want to meet Americans, you’ve got to go to a baseball game or a football game. You’ve got to go to one of these stadiums. That’s where America is.'" Herkowitz met with Bud Selig of the Major League Baseball (MLB) shortly after that, and soon the NRDC was creating white papers and teams to advise all the major sports leagues about environmental sustainability initiatives that addressed each sport's needs and could help them save money. Hershkowitz eventually ran the Sports Greening Initiative at the NRDC.

The Green Sports Alliance got started in the late 2000s as informal discussions among management of sports teams in the Pacific Northwest, about how to improve their operations' sustainability. The idea of formalizing an alliance was generated in a meeting between Hershkowitz and representatives of sports teams owned by Paul Allen via Vulcan Inc., and GSA formally launched in the spring of 2011, with NDRC as one of the founding organizations. In 2014 Hershkowitz left the NRDC and became president of the GSA.

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