Cool. If we had a working tax code, we wouldn't need billionaires' charity and could actually regulate carbon in the atmosphere instead of these sort of band-aids and PR stunts.
This is by Hansjörg Wyss the founder of biotech company Synthes. His focus is on nature conservation.<p>But i do feel this is treating the symptoms rather than the disease e.g. excessive population growth, extraction rather than recycling, free externalities.<p>The US, EU & Japan are still on an urbanizing uptrend, and nature areas (e.g. forests) actually growing.
> the idea that wild lands and waters are best conserved not in private hands, locked behind gates, but as public national parks, wildlife refuges and marine reserves, forever open for everyone to experience and explore.<p>This has not been my experience. I happen to live in a area that has seen a handful of new sequestrations in the last 20 years--3 or so in the last 5 years. The result has been to lock the public out. Locations that my family have enjoyed for decades are now off limits.<p>This is distinct from the military land grabs in Nevada. But it's interesting to see the contrast. After evicting families from their own land to expand Air Force testing grounds, the government has decided they still don't have enough control of Nevada public lands. So they are annexing[0] more than 270,000 acres of wildlife refuge for military use. That's right, "forever open for everyone to experience and explore."<p>[0] <a href="https://www.reviewjournal.com/news/military/air-force-finalizes-plan-to-take-big-bite-of-nevada-wildlife-refuge/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reviewjournal.com/news/military/air-force-finali...</a>
$1B? This guy gets my respect. He's putting his money where his mouth is.<p>Talking heads like Matt Damon (who rents luxury yachts for solo use and flies jets across the ocean for convenience) earn my total contempt.<p>For a guy like me, hearing about Mr. Wyss's efforts move the needle. My thanks go to him.
Is the environment being ruined because environmental advocacy groups or research institutions are starved for cash?<p>It really seems the only answer is consuming less...which is free.<p>$100 billion in donated wealth won't matter if people won't consume less.
Excessive population growth runs straight into the third rail of today's culture war: privilege.<p>Africa and Islamic cultures are projected to be the Lions share of pop growth the next 30 years.<p>Western culture pretty much guarantees curbing population growth is a non starter.