Jeff Bezos thinks the world has vastly improved from where it was a hundred years ago — except for this one thing: The state of the planet and its natural resources.
“The world is so much better today than it was a hundred years ago, 200 years ago, 500 years ago,” Bezos, 60, said during a fireside chat with his fiancée Lauren Sánchez and Paul Tudor Jones at the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation’s 40th-anniversary gala in New York on Saturday, Oct. 19.
He continued, “Except in one way… the natural world is not as good today as it was 500 years ago, in our pre-industrial society.”
“The question is: Can we take that one exception to life not being better and turn it around?” he posed. “And we can. And it’s not that our problems are small, it’s that our human capacity to solve problems is so large. We will solve these problems. And I have great faith.”
At the event, the Bezos Earth Fund announced a donation of $60 million to the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. The new donation will be used to revitalize 1.6 million acres of vital U.S. landscapes – the northern great plains grasslands and longleaf pine forests of the Southeast.
According to a statement from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, over the next two years, 80-100 local projects across Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Nebraska in the Northern Great Plains and Texas, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia in the longleaf pine region, will be supported to restore health to degraded ecosystems, boost at-risk species populations, and enhance carbon sequestration and storage.
“America’s landscapes are treasures that reflect the very heart of our country. By restoring these grasslands and forests, we’re safeguarding their natural beauty for future generations,” Bezos said in the statement.
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This wasn’t the first time the Earth Fund has donated to the cause.
Over the past three years, the Bezos Earth Fund provided $90 million in funding to NFWF and over 200 local partners, enabling the restoration and improved management of 2.7 million acres of land, an area larger than Yellowstone National Park, across 47 states.
Another one of the Bezos Earth Fund’s initiatives is Greening America’s Cities program, which Lauren Sánchez, Vice Chair of the Bezos Earth Fund, says she hopes will inspire the country’s youth to care more about protecting green spaces.
“Kids don’t want to protect what they don’t know,” she said during the talk.
“That’s why I’m so excited about the Bezos Earth Fund’s Greening America’s Cities program and the work they are doing in transforming spaces like parking lots into beautiful parks … they then recognize how beautiful nature can be, and they want to protect it,”
