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Alex Matthiessen
 Leadership Position: Hudson Riverkeeper
and Riverkeeper Executive Director
NOLS Graduate: 1984 Wind River Wilderness
Course
NOLS grad Alex Matthiessen’s job title isn’t
one you come across everyday — he’s a riverkeeper,
a steward of New York’s Hudson River. As the Hudson
Riverkeeper and the Executive Director of the Riverkeeper
Organization, Alex works to safeguard the river, its tributaries
and the entire watershed of New York City. It’s a
big task but one Matthiessen is well qualified for. Alex
joined Riverkeeper from the U.S. Department of the Interior,
where he developed the Green Energy Parks Initiative, a
joint program between the National Parks Service and the
Department of Energy that promotes clean and sustainable
energy use in the national parks system. For his leadership
on this project, Alex received a Presidential Award from
the White House.
Matthiessen, who inherited his love for wild places from
his father, author Peter Matthiessen, has achieved much
in his long career working for the environment. But in
1984 he was just a 20-year-old kid on a Wind River Wilderness
course with NOLS. In the Winds he remembers discovering
the notion that if you’re going to enjoy a wild place,
you should leave it as you found it. “NOLS instilled
in me a deep appreciation and commitment to preserving
wilderness in particular and the environment in general,” he
says. “When I’m in the mountains I feel a certain
centeredness and freedom that I don’t find in the
everyday world.”
Today Alex calls himself an urban environmentalist, protecting
a river that’s as far from the mountains as it is
from most people’s idea of wilderness. Riverkeeper
Organization focuses on the Hudson River and its tributaries,
but Matthiessen asserts that the health of the river is
really indicative of the entire city’s health. “When
you’re working in an urban setting,” he says, “you’re
working on places where people live and where air and water
is being contaminated on a routine basis.”
As Matthiessen works to transform what was once considered
an open sewer into a healthy waterway, he draws on some
basic skills he learned at NOLS. “Part of learning
survival skills,” he says, “is learning team
building skills. I think it’s those same skills that
are needed if you live in a community that’s being
threatened.”
Alex and his volunteers and fellow advocates have rolled
up their sleeves and seen enormous success pulling the
community together to improve the health of the city’s
waterways. Riverkeeper has investigated and brought to
justice more than 300 environmental lawbreakers and today
the Hudson is the only large river in the North Atlantic
that retains strong spawning stocks of its historical migratory
species. And while Alex doesn’t get to the mountains
as much as he’d like to, he has found, in the middle
of New York City, a river worth keeping.
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