Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos and his actor buddy Leonardo DiCaprio are catching some heavy flak recently, but for a seemingly bizarre reason: pledging millions of dollars to protect 100 of the world’s most threatened animal species.
The charity initiative, called the Phoenix Species Project, was first revealed on DiCaprio’s Instagram account, where the six-time academy award nominee described it as the “largest single philanthropic initiative ever dedicated to the recovery of Critically Endangered species, across 30 countries.”
“I could not be prouder to announce this,” DiCaprio continued. “Save these species, and we protect everything around them. The forests, the rivers, and the climate itself.”
For such a seemingly altruistic venture, the response to the announcement was strikingly polarized. As the Independent noted, DiCaprio and Bezos were summarily blasted for engaging in “greenwashing,” a negative term given to the strategy employed by massive corporations and the wealthy to cover their outsize impact on the environment with a little eco-charity.
“As soon as people realize and actually feel the effects of what those rich f***s did to our planet they suddenly start their greenwashing campaign,” one Redditor wrote in response to the announcement, per the Independent.
“Uber-wealthy people helping a fraction of the problems that they cause,” another commenter lamented. “For publicity.”
It certainly wouldn’t be the first time Bezos has been accused of greenwashing, especially given the immense carbon footprint of his flagship company Amazon. In 2020, for example, the billionaire’s Bezos Earth Fund pledged $10 billion to protect biodiversity, bringing a massive amount of money to the global effort to mitigate climate change — at least on paper.
As the backlash illustrates, your reaction to the those types of efforts probably hinge on your economic and social worldview.
The haters aren’t just being petty, though. As the Journal of Political Inquiry observed, Bezos’s wealth is only possible thanks to his previous position as chief executive of one of the largest corporate polluters on the planet. Between 2020 and 2021 alone, Amazon’s carbon dioxide emissions grew by 18 percent, while his space company Blue Origin is altering the outer atmosphere in ways we’re only starting to understand.
And his empire’s carbon emissions have only skyrocketed since then, as the demand for cloud computing supersedes previous pledges to clamp down on Amazon’s extraordinary excretions of noxious pollutants.
In other words, it’s no wonder the masses are rising up in opposition to the billionaire and his actor friend — if only online, at least for now.
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