Earlier this year, a billionaire investor and philanthropist named Tom Kaplan auctioned off a small Rembrandt drawing of a lion at Sotheby’s in New York City. It sold for nearly $18 million. A press release prior to the auction noted that Kaplan would donate the proceeds of the sale to an environmental organization that he co-founded, called Panthera, which conserves wild cats like lions and jaguars.
At face value, Kaplan’s gift is extraordinarily generous. Kaplan, owner of the world’s largest private collection of Rembrandts, is redeploying wealth that could have stayed locked up in a private collection or bank account to support the conservation of threatened felines and their habitats across the globe — all at a time when environmental causes are facing a massive funding shortfall. This seemed like a feel-good story all around. And that’s how it was pitched to me by a PR agency.
My colleague Sara Herschander and I went to the auction in early February, and I spoke one-on-one with Kaplan the following week. I was expecting a fairly straightforward conversation about philanthropy and what he sees as the responsibility of billionaires, told through the lens of his recent gift. But instead, our chat exposed a more complicated and sometimes troubling side of big-money environmental giving.
Kaplan became a billionaire through exploring for, mining, and investing in natural resources, including silver, gold, and natural gas. He remains active in metals mining to this day. Kaplan is the founder and chair of The Electrum Group, an investment firm focused on mining precious metals, and the chair of the gold mining company NovaGold Resources, which is developing a mine in Alaska that it expects to be the largest single gold mine in the US.
That work sits awkwardly next to what Kaplan told me is his primary passion: wildlife conservation, and in particular, the big cats that Panthera works to protect. Mining is, by any measure, an unusually destructive industry for the environment and for wildlife. So I asked Kaplan: Does he see, in any way, his environmental philanthropy as a counterweight to the impact of his industry?
It seemed an obvious question to me, but not to Kaplan. “You know, people don’t ask me these questions,” he told me over Zoom from a car. “First of all, I’m not going to spend time on educating you about why mining has a very, very tiny footprint when you compare it to agriculture and climate change. Everyone knows that if it’s a choice between my business and Panthera, I’m always choosing Panthera. With all due respect, I’m busy, so do you have anything [else] that you’d like to discuss?”
I pressed further, explaining that the public often sees a tension between mining and conserving wildlife. “You’re wrong,” Kaplan told Vox. “Please don’t make things up. When you say this is the public tension, with all due respect, it doesn’t exist. You’re making it up. It’s a very hack journalist thing to say, ‘How do you answer, you know, the criticism of X, Y, and Z.’ I’ve never faced it, ever, nor should I have.”
Kaplan went on to say that mining has no detrimental impact on wild cats — a claim disputed by four mining experts we later interviewed. Mining metals can destroy habitat, leach chemicals into the environment, and accelerate other threats, such as deforestation, that in turn impact wild animals, including big cats. Panthera itself, the group Kaplan cofounded, lists mining as a threat to at least two wild feline species: the flat-headed cat and the Andean cat. Meanwhile, the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN), the global authority on endangered species, lists “mining and quarrying” as a threat to 19 cat species including jaguars, Andean cats, and tigers.
After I pressed Kaplan about the impact of his mining work, he said we could talk more about it another time. But when I reached out a week later to set something up, he declined. Vox shared a detailed list of our reporting with Kaplan before publishing this, and he declined to comment further.
I pressed further, explaining that the public often sees a tension between mining and conserving wildlife. “You’re wrong,” Kaplan told Vox. “Please don’t make things up. When you say this is the public tension, with all due respect, it doesn’t exist. You’re making it up. It’s a very hack journalist thing to say, ‘How do you answer, you know, the criticism of X, Y, and Z.’ I’ve never faced it, ever, nor should I have.”
Kaplan went on to say that mining has no detrimental impact on wild cats — a claim disputed by four mining experts we later interviewed. Mining metals can destroy habitat, leach chemicals into the environment, and accelerate other threats, such as deforestation, that in turn impact wild animals, including big cats. Panthera itself, the group Kaplan cofounded, lists mining as a threat to at least two wild feline species: the flat-headed cat and the Andean cat. Meanwhile, the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN), the global authority on endangered species, lists “mining and quarrying” as a threat to 19 cat species including jaguars, Andean cats, and tigers.
After I pressed Kaplan about the impact of his mining work, he said we could talk more about it another time. But when I reached out a week later to set something up, he declined. Vox shared a detailed list of our reporting with Kaplan before publishing this, and he declined to comment further.
What our conversation highlighted is a bigger problem with environmental philanthropy. For every dollar spent to protect nature, the UN recently reported, more than $30 goes toward destroying it, largely from private industries like energy, agriculture, and mining. The giving, as generous as it sometimes seems, isn’t close to enough on its own. And the people writing the checks are often the same people making business decisions across industries that cause environmental harm in the first place — whether they acknowledge that fact or not.
