One morning earlier this year, I interviewed a well-known billionaire and environmental philanthropist. Our conversation quickly took an unexpected turn.
Said billionaire is mining titan Tom Kaplan. He’s made his fortune exploring for, mining, and investing in natural resources, including silver, gold, and natural gas. But his primary passion, he told me, is wildlife conservation. In fact, Kaplan co-founded the environmental nonprofit Panthera, which works to conserve wild cats like jaguars and leopards. The reason we were talking that morning is that he had auctioned off a Rembrandt drawing from his private art collection days earlier for close to $18 million and donated the proceeds to Panthera.
I asked Kaplan what felt like an obvious question: Does he see a tension between the industry that enriches him and the environmental causes he cares about? He replied that no such tension exists, that I was making it up, and that it was a “hack journalist” type of question. “You know, people don’t ask me these questions,” Kaplan said. “I’m not going to spend time on educating you about why mining has a very, very tiny footprint when you compare it to agriculture and climate change.”
He then said mining has no impact on wild cats. (In fact, mining is a threat to more than a dozen species of wild cats.)
Kaplan is no outlier in his failure to own up. This week in Vox, my colleague Sara Herschander and I wrote about my conversation with him and the big problem it reveals: The industries that make donors rich are often causing the very problems their charities seek to fix. And yet these contradictions rarely go acknowledged by the wealthy elite, who are increasingly driving the nonprofit environmental sector.
“What you’re describing is very, very common,” one philanthropy expert told us.
We hope you’ll read this important and undercovered story.
—Benji Jones
