Eco Barons: The Dreamers, Schemers, and Millionaires Who Are Saving Our Planet

Books That Matter

In an era in which government has been either broke, indifferent or actively hostile to environmental causes, a band of visionaries – inventors, philanthropists, philosophers, grassroots activists, lawyers and gadflies – have been using their wealth, their energy, their celebrity, and their knowledge of the law and science to persuade, and sometimes force, this country and the world to take a new direction. They use lawsuits, charitable foundations, land trusts, mass protests, armies of school children and billions in corporate profits. They use pictures of beached whales and videos of starving polar bears and murals revealing vast fields of stumps where towering pine forests once stood. They use anger and fear, and they use hope.

They are following in the tradition of Rockefeller and Carnegie and the storied initiatives that saved Yellowstone, Yosemite, and the Grand Tetons from the bulldozer and the Grand Canyon from the dams. Their goals are to save wilderness and rain forests from destruction. To slow the rising tide of mass extinctions and to “re-wild” large swaths of land and migratory corridors where development has long intruded. They are pushing new (and old) green technologies, farming methods and sources of energy, beginning the process of weaning the country and the world from the fossil fuels that drive global warming, whether government leaders like it or not. They seek to show, in deeds and words, that it is possible to strike a better balance between consumption and conservation and still prosper – to save the world, piece by piece, species by species, place by place. They are the Eco Barons.