Global Investments
Peter Malik was just a child when he became aware that acid rain was destroying the forest surrounding his family’s cabin two hours north of Prague, deep in the mountains of what was then Czechoslovakia.
"The country was a disaster zone," recalls Malik, now director of NRDC’s Center for Market Innovation. "The Communist government was going after cheap energy to feed its highly inefficient and declining military-industrial complex. They were strip-mining; there were coal-burning power plants everywhere. They moved entire towns to dig for the stuff. My parents were vocal about their opposition to the pollution, so I knew I was against it, even as a kid."
As devastating as the destruction was, Malik and his family had more pressing issues to confront. His father’s political activism landed him in jail, and as word spread about his incarceration, Malik’s mother, a patent attorney, was demoted to the position of secretary. "We were basically dissidents -- people on the wrong side of the tracks politically," Malik says.
In 1984, with no indication that the decade’s end would bring democracy, Malik, then 18, and his 23-year-old brother fled by foot, carrying nothing but small backpacks, to a refugee camp in Austria -- a 15-hour trek through thick forest. In 1985 the brothers were allowed to emigrate as political refugees to the United States and eventually landed in Chicago. Malik earned a bachelor’s degree at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and then attended Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Unsure of his ultimate career path, he headed to New York to "check out" Wall Street. "I thought it was the immigrant’s ultimate coming of age," he explains, "to wear a suit and have an office at 60 Wall Street at J.P. Morgan." After two years there, he moved to London to work as an investment banker for Credit Suisse, where he led a 20-person team that connected governments and private enterprise in emerging economies to global investors.
When he took time off, Malik was perhaps one of the few people in his business to leave his Blackberry behind -- though it’s doubtful he would have gotten reception anyway in the far-flung locales he favored. During trips kayaking above the Arctic Circle in Canada and hiking through remote parts of Africa and Greenland, Malik’s passion for the environment grew deeper.
When the financial crisis hit in 2008, Malik took the opportunity to step back and reexamine his life. "I was burned out," he admits. It wasn’t long before he spotted a job opening at NRDC’s Center for Market Innovation, whose mandate to connect the business world with the environmental community seemed tailor-made for him.
During the past three years, CMI, with Malik at the helm, has made groundbreaking progress on several projects. One example: the center, which was founded with the support of NRDC trustee Shelly Malkin and her husband, Tony Malkin, has been working with the City of Philadelphia on a plan to divert rainwater away from an overtaxed, often overflowing sewer system. Instead, the water will gradually be absorbed into the ground through new green infrastructure such as permeable surfaces, gardens, and trees. "The businesses that appear, at first, to be losers -- shopping malls, car dealerships -- gain incentives to install this green infrastructure," Malik says. "They actually come out of it as winners financially."
"Money, for better or worse, is the main motivator in the world as we know it," Malik says, "so we try to use money as a powerful motivator for the right ends."
