Mr. Johnson’s early career included serving as the Western Regional Director and later president of The Nature Conservancy where he was instrumental in many Western conservation victories such as Maui’s Seven Sacred Pools and Marin County’s Bolinas Lagoon and Marincello. Mr. Johnson founded The Trust for Public Land and The Grand Canyon Trust, as well as the international arm of Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Wangari Maathai’s Green Belt Movement. His pioneering policies and land acquisitions helped define much of the land trust movement that has flourished over the past sixty years.

His pioneering policy, Investing for Prosperity, was one of the first comprehensive and long-term environmental plans in existence, proposing a 100-year plan for resource management in the State of California. In 1996, Resource Renewal Institute and the California State Resources Agency received the Presidential Award for Sustainable Development from President William J. Clinton for the Investing for Prosperity policy.

In the early 1990’s, when the first nation-scale environmental policies appeared in the Netherlands and New Zealand, Mr. Johnson and the Resource Renewal Institute began promoting these and other Green Plans. Mr. Johnson became an authority on the subject and the third edition of his book, Green Plans: Blueprint for Sustainable Earth, was published in 2008 by University of Nebraska Press.

Mr. Johnson received the United Nations Sasakawa Environment Prize in 2001, capping five decades of success building political coalitions to achieve substantive policy change. Among numerous awards, Mr. Johnson received the 2009 Armory Pugsley Medal for outstanding promotion and development of public parks in the United States. He has also received honorary doctorate degrees from Dominican University and Utah State University, where he completed his Masters degree in biology.