Wendy Dinner

A Colorado native now living in New Mexico, Wendy spent her early summers traveling in the back seat of the family station wagon (remember those?) to National Park units around the west.  Her appreciation of the great outdoors deepened during summers, when she learned to canoe in the boundary waters of Minnesota and spent time early in her professional career walking and cycling through the hills and fields of Ireland and the English Lake District with family who lived overseas.

A graduate of Brown University and Stanford Law School, Wendy’s studies as a history major, and her work as a newly-minted lawyer representing an Alaskan Native Village, added to her love of wild places by instilling a deep appreciation for the people, stories, and sense of place that also make up our nation’s cultural heritage.

Professionally, Wendy worked as an environmental and land conservation attorney for Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund (now known as EarthJustice), the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Office of the Solicitor, the Nature Conservancy’s Western Region, and the Centre for International Environmental Law — which Wendy co-founded with 3 other lawyers in 1989.  She also served on the board of the Thorne Ecological Institute (now Thorne Nature Experience), a Colorado non-profit offering hands-on environmental education and experiential learning for children.   In 2010, Wendy left The Nature Conservancy to return to government service, joining the National Park Service’s Land Resources Division, from which she retired in 2021 as a senior Realty Chief.

Wendy was honored to join the National Park Trust in 2022 as NPT’s 1st Leadership Fellow, applying her transactional skills and knowledge of the National Park System to further the Trust’s park preservation work.  Her two years working alongside the National Park Trust’s fabulous board and staff convinced Wendy to say yes when asked to join NPT’s Board and become the Chair of the Lands Committee.  Wendy couldn’t ask for a better group of people to work with or a better land conservation organization to volunteer with, and she is thrilled to remain a part of the wonderful NPT family.