She reaches peak of the Sierra Club.

• Author: Elmore, Cindy J.
• Position: PEOPLE - Lisa Renstrom

Asked to name environmentally friendly businesses, the new president of the 750,000-member Sierra Club rattles off a litany. General Electric. Bank of America. Lloyd's of London. Missing from Lisa Renstrom's list, however, are the two Acapulco hotels she ran from 1983 to 1993. "I would have had to have been really blazing new trails to be running my hotel with environmental practices in Mexico in the 1980s."

Renstrom, 45, says her environmental awareness came after she moved to Charlotte 12 years ago. As executive director of the now-inactive Voices & Choices of the Central Carolinas, she tried to foster environmentally friendly development and preservation of open spaces. Elected to the Sierra Club board of directors in 2001, she was re-elected last year and chosen as the club's 51st president in May.

She grew up on a farm near Omaha, Neb. Her father, Carl Renstrom, owned Tip-Top Products, a hair-care company that employed about 2,000 before he sold it to Faberge in the 1960s. A year after getting a bachelor's in business from the University of Nebraska in 1982, she moved to Mexico to manage two hotels owned by her family. One had been the site of Elizabeth Taylor's marriage to Mike Todd, and Brigitte Bardot honeymooned there.

But the hotels, once haunts of the jet set, were struggling, mired in a land dispute with former managers. They filed civil litigation, then tried to pressure Renstrom by instigating a criminal case against her. Charged with fraud, she spent six months in a Mexican prison, without being tried or...