Adam Kolton, environmental lobbyist

Washington — Adam Kolton, a Washington-based environmental lobbyist and legislative activist who crusaded for a quarter-century against industrial development of Alaska’s wild places, died April 26 at a hospital in Bethesda, Md. He was 52.

The cause was complications from cancer, said his wife, Laura Kolton.

Through leadership roles with the nonprofit Alaska Wilderness League (where he was executive director for the last four years) and from 2002 to 2017 with the National Wildlife Federation, Kolton helped shepherd the national effort to block oil and gas drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

As senior director of congressional and federal affairs at the wildlife federation, he also played an instrumental role in passage of the 2009 House climate bill that put a nationwide cap on greenhouse gas emissions linked to climate change, although the measure did not pass in the Senate. He also championed the 2012 Restore Act, which steered 80% of administrative and civil penalties from the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill to repairing the billions of dollars in environmental damage the industrial disaster wrought in the Gulf of Mexico.

Kolton’s ability to forge broad coalitions and operate strategically allowed him to play an outsized role on the national stage despite the fact that the group he headed since 2017, the Alaska Wilderness League, had a staff of just 16.

Known for his intensity — his voice built to a crescendo over the course of a speech, and he banged away so loudly at his keyboard that colleagues sitting far away could hear it — Kolton sought to unify the often-fractious environmental community while also enlisting other allies, including Christian conservatives, hunters and anglers.

Kolton established a war room in each organization where he worked, to rally staff and plot legislative strategy, at a time when environmentalists had more success in the courts than on Capitol Hill.