Author Description
Barry Nelson is a senior policy analyst for NRDC’s water program in San Francisco. He focuses on protecting the environment by studying water management policies and their effects on rivers, estuaries, fi sheries, wildlife, humans, and wild places. He promotes policies that can meet human needs for water while helping to restore damaged aquatic ecosystems and fisheries, and that reduce the water management impacts of global warming. He has worked for many years to restore and protect the San Francisco Bay-Delta estuary and the San Joaquin River, and has played leading roles in the passage of landmark state and federal water reform legislation, including the Central Valley Project Improvement Act (1992) and the Delta Reform Act (2009). He has also researched oil shale development and the resulting negative impact on Colorado River Basin water supplies. Prior to coming to NRDC in 1999, he was the executive director of Save The Bay in Oakland, California. He has degrees in rhetoric and economics from the University of California at Berkeley.
