Another record gift by Intel co-founder
$261 million to help threatened species
BY PAUL ROGERS
Mercury News
siliconvalley.com
In the largest donation to an environmental cause in U.S. history, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore and his wife, Betty Moore, have agreed to give $261 million toward a sweeping campaign to slow the rate of plant and animal extinctions across the world.
The Moores will provide the money in installments over 10 years through their family foundation to Conservation International, a non-profit environmental organization based in Washington, D.C.
An announcement is scheduled for this afternoon.
The gift comes six weeks after Gordon Moore, 72, of Woodside, announced the largest charitable donation to a university in U.S. history, giving $600 million in October to the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
Four times the size of the Sierra Club's annual budget, the latest gift will focus money on the areas of the world with the richest concentrations of plants and animals.
Moore said he sees a realistic chance to slow or halt extinctions if the money is well targeted.
``Political lobbying is an important part of the environmental movement,'' he said. ``But it isn't the part I'm interested in. There are a lot of things that can be done on the ground, particularly in developing countries.''
The money will:
Establish national parks across millions of acres of rain forests in South America, Africa and Asia.
Build 50 scientific field stations in places as far-flung as Madagascar, Mexico, China, the Caribbean and Botswana to catalog the world's species and their health with equipment from microscopes to satellite photos.
Pay to outbid loggers by offering developing countries money to not clear-cut sections of the Amazon, Congo, New Guinea and other places, while setting up partnerships with local groups to promote tourism and sustainable agriculture instead.
Big returns
``This is transformative,'' said Peter Seligmann, chairman and CEO of Conservation International. ``We need actions on the scale to address the threats. This is a major stake in the ground. We can now go head-to-head and negotiate with anyone to preserve these places.''
Conservation International was founded in 1987 after Seligmann and 35 employees quit the Nature Conservancy because of a dispute over how to best preserve international landscapes. The group, thick with scientists and economists, now has 1,000 employees in 32 countries and an annual budget of $75 million.
Some of the nation's top conservation biologists, accustomed to decades of sounding an alarm with little funding, reacted to the quarter-billion-dollar gift with jaw-dropping astonishment.
``This is a splendid example,'' said Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson, winner of two Pulitzer prizes. ``I hope that others will see the environment and the preservation of nature as the new frontier of philanthropy. The returns-to-scale of giving right now are very high.''
Land in the Amazon, Congo and other pristine rain forests can be protected for as little as $10 an acre.
Yet from Brazil to Indonesia, logging, mining, cattle grazing and population growth each year wipe out millions of acres of forest. Most of the world's biologists agree that species are being lost at a rate never before seen in human history.
``This will help maintain the stability of natural processes, which has incalculable value,'' said Steve McCormick, national president of the Nature Conservancy, in Arlington, Va. ``You can't do these things on small scale. You can't do it on the margins. It's got to be big.''
The world's population is expected to grow from 6 billion to 9 billion by 2050, before it crests and falls, putting increased pressure on wild places. Wilson said the planet faces a race -- but one that is not hopeless.
``The grand goal is to see humanity through the bottleneck and hopefully out the other side, taking the rest of life with us,'' he said, comparing the challenge to the moon landing or the human genome project.
Apart from offering the hope of new drugs, new crops and new genes, there is an ethical reason to protect the world's species, Wilson said.
``There is something morally wrong about destroying other life forms in their entirety,'' he said. ``Religious people call it the Creation. Scientists call it biodiversity. If we squander it, we will impoverish future generations.''
400 million acres
The goal, said Seligmann, is to leverage the Moores' gift into $6 billion in new funding from private groups, the World Bank, the United Nations and individual governments to protect roughly 400 million acres of tropical forests -- four times the size of California.
The donation will be presented through the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation in San Francisco, founded last year by the Moores with $5 billion in Intel stock.
Gordon Moore is ranked 29th on this year's Forbes list of the richest Americans, with a net worth of $5.3 billion. A no-nonsense but low-key Republican with doctorates in chemistry and physics, Moore co-founded Intel in 1968 with Robert Noyce, helping it become the world's leading computer chip maker.
Conservation International has focused its efforts on 25 hot spots, a pragmatic strategy that won Moore's attention.
Under a theory developed in 1988 by Oxford ecologist Norman Myers, 25 threatened places in the world, making up just 1.4 percent of the earth's land surface, are home to 60 percent of the earth's terrestrial plant and animal species.
``This is an attempt to be science-based,'' said Moore, ``rather than picking an emotional problem and tackling that. Being trained as a scientist I thought that was a good way to go.''
Mostly located in the tropics, the hot spots make up 524 million acres, an area about three times the size of Texas. They are the world's biological treasure troves. In some parts of Brazil's Atlantic Forest, for instance, scientists have counted 450 species of trees in a 2.5-acre space. A similar space in the United States would have only about 10 species.
In recent years, the concept of setting priorities to save super-rich ecological areas has gained momentum as a practical, business-like approach to ``get the best bang for the conservation buck.''
An avid fisherman, Moore has traveled extensively with scientists from Conservation International in the past 10 years, visiting such places as Suriname, New Guinea and Costa Rica, and joining the group's board.
The organization, which has protected more than 80 million acres, has its detractors. Some environmentalists argue, for example, that areas without extraordinarily high numbers of species, such as the desert and the Arctic, cannot be overlooked.
But the group has won considerable support this year.
In June, Ford Motor donated $25 million to Conservation International. In August, the group landed a $25 million grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
Roughly 95 percent of Conservation International's staff are citizens of the countries where they work.
``It's critically important,'' said Russell Mittermeier, the group's president. ``If all you do is ship in Americans and Europeans you aren't building lasting local capacity. We've learned to respect the great expertise the people from the countries bring.''
Suriname park
One typical deal by Conservation International occurred three years ago in Suriname, a former Dutch colony north of Brazil with about 430,000 people and some of the planet's most remote jungles. Badly needing foreign investment in the mid-1990s, Suriname was considering a plan to allow Malaysian loggers to cut vast swaths of virgin rain forest across the Guyana Shield, an area of unexplored cloud forest, jaguars and hidden Indian tribes so remote it was the inspiration for Arthur Conan Doyle's ``The Lost World.''
Conservation International convinced the government to create a 4 million-acre park, twice the size of Yellowstone National Park. Then the group put $15 million in an offshore fund, with the interest funding game wardens to limit poaching and promote tourism. Suriname owns the land and runs the park.
``The whole point of hot spots is to look at where the most species are endangered,'' said Thomas Lovejoy, chief biodiversity adviser to the World Bank in Washington, D.C. ``That's where you send the fire engines first. But at the same time you have to address the big wilderness areas -- in essence to try and prevent them from becoming future hot spots. This gift will do both.''
For information about Conservation International, see conservation.org. For information about the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, see moorefoundation.org. |
