The Philanthropists July

July – August 2001

The Philanthropists

George M. Barley Jr. brought a gunslinger’s bravado and an entrepreneur’s drive to the Everglades restoration movement. In the 1980s Barley, a successful real estate developer and a seventh-generation Floridian, channeled his outrage over the demise of his beloved Florida Bay into a fiery campaign aimed at making its corporate polluters pay.

Many environmentalists feared his cause had died with him on June 23, 1995, when his charter plane crashed in the Everglades. Instead, his shocking death, at age 61, inspired two of his loved ones to lead an even more ferocious charge.

Barley’s widow, Mary, and his closest friend and fishing companion, Paul Tudor Jones II, made a graveside pledge to see George’s dream realized. “Of all of us here,” Jones declared, raising his right hand, “who will pick up the flag?”

Less than a year later the dynamic duo was continuing a campaign launched by George Barley. They obtained 730,000 signatures in 1996 for a state constitutional amendment that would have slapped a penny-a-pound tax on sugar produced in the Everglades and devoted the proceeds to cleaning up pollution caused by the sugar industry.

The fight ended up costing $50 million. Of the roughly $15 million spent by environmentalists, $10 million came from Jones, a commodities trader. Although the measure went down to defeat, Jones and Barley believe the fight was a prelude to a greater victory. “We raised Everglades issues to a global level,” Barley says. “And we put politicians and polluters on notice: We were going to do whatever it takes.”

The sugar-tax campaign proved to be a wise investment in conservation, Jones says. “Without that battle, we would not have been able to get the $7.8 billion restoration,” he says. “The penny-a-pound tax would have generated $900 million. The only sad point is that taxpayers get stuck with the bill.”

Mary Barley, 55, a Wisconsin native, learned to cherish the Everglades while fishing with her husband in Florida Bay. At first she was reluctant to move to the environmental battle’s forefront. “I was only trying to step into George’s shoes,” she says modestly. But Fowler West, the Washington-based lobbyist hired by George Barley to work on the Everglades, calls her a “real champion. She’s fearless. Odds don’t bother her.”

Jones, 46, is a lifelong conservationist who grew up hunting and fishing with his father, a Memphis lawyer and newspaper publisher. Though he won’t say for the record how much he’s given to green causes, environmentalists put the total at somewhere between $40 million and $50 million. Says Jones, “It’s important when you have the resources and the opportunity that you stand up and protect the things that don’t have the ability to protect themselves.” In 1996 Jones’s $1 million contribution enabled the National Audubon Society to expand its Everglades campaign. He has since given between $750,000 and $1 million a year to sustain Audubon’s Miami-based team of scientists and technical experts, who will be instrumental in keeping the restoration from running off the rails.

“There’s no such thing as a sure thing when it comes to protecting the environment,” Jones says. “There will always be a threat to some beautiful place or to some endangered creature. You can’t ever declare victory.”

More articles from this Audubon special issue: The Everglades Rises Again
http://magazine.audubon.org/content/content0107.html