On March 20, 2025, former U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Director, Lynn Adams Greenwalt (1931-2025) passed away at the age of 94. Lynn was raised within the National Wildlife Refuge System and during his long career oversaw some of our nation’s most beautiful and remote places before ultimately running the agency that nurtured him over the decades.
Lynn was the son of a newspaperman turned refuge manager, Ernest Greenwalt, and he inherited his father’s eloquence and love for public lands. For the first five years of his life, Lynn lived on the Charles Sheldon National Wildlife Refuge (NWR), now the Sheldon National Wildlife Refuge, in northwest Nevada.
As there were no schools near this remote refuge, his family moved, and Lynn spent nearly 20 years at Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge in Oklahoma. During his Wichita Mountains childhood that was marked by the Great Depression in the 1930s, Lynn would watch motion pictures at one of the three Civilian Conservation Corps Camps located on the refuge, which was remarkable for that time and place. He collected scrap metal for World War II.
Having grown up surrounded by wildlife and their habitats, Lynn was inspired to earn a Bachelor of Science degree in Zoology from the University of Oklahoma in 1953 and a Master of Science in Wildlife Management from the University of Arizona in 1955.
While working on his undergraduate degree, Lynn worked summers at the Wichita Mountains Refuge cleaning toilets, hauling garbage, and repairing roads and facilities. There he met his future wife, Judy Cunningham, herself the daughter of a refuge manager, who shared Lynn’s passion and dedication to the refuge system. They married in 1955.
After serving in the U.S. Army for two years and briefly cleaning campgrounds and repairing fences for his father who was then at the National Elk Refuge in Wyoming, Lynn finally got a permanent job with the Service in 1957 as refuge manager at Salt Plains National Wildlife Refuge back in Oklahoma. He would go on to become manager at Bosque del Apache NWR in New Mexico, and then at a new refuge in a remote part of western Utah called Fish Springs NWR.
Lynn’s talents were evident and in 1962, he was promoted to refuge supervisor at the Albuquerque regional office, later moving to Minneapolis to serve as the Associate Regional Supervisor for the refuge system. In 1970, his career led him to Portland, Oregon where he served as the Regional Supervisor of Law Enforcement. Two years later, Lynn became Chief of the National Wildlife Refuge System working out of Washington, DC. He also acted briefly as Special Assistant to the Director.
In October 1973 at the age of 42, Lynn was tapped to be the Director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. He served in the role from 1973 to 1981, witnessing and stewarding a huge transformation in conservation serving under Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter.
During Lynn’s tenure he helped lead the implementation of the newly passed Endangered Species Act (1973), the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) (1975), and oversaw the 54-million-acre expansion of the National Wildlife Refuge System through the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (1980). Lynn managed these challenges and opportunities with political acumen and a compass that always pointed towards conservation.
After leaving the Service, Lynn worked for the National Wildlife Federation (NWF) for 13 years, following in the footsteps of an earlier director, Jay “Ding” Darling who founded NWF. Lynn continued to travel, teach, mentor many, and speak out passionately for the agency that he was so deeply connected to and so ably led.
Lynn’s contributions to fish and wildlife conservation will forever be remembered as part of the Service’s legacy. Our condolences go out to Lynn’s family and friends.
