Louis Bacon Pledges $1m Aid

Louis Bacon, founder of The Moore Bahamas Foundation, an affiliate of The Moore Charitable Foundation (MCF), pledged $1m for a combination of short-term and long-term hurricane relief and reconstruction following the devastation caused by Hurricane Dorian.

#His donations began with funding for emergency relief measures last week.#“The extraordinary suffering of thousands of people in the Bahamas and the struggle to address such widespread need has left a deep impression on people everywhere,” Mr Bacon said in a statement.

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This Colorado ranch-made-lab is turning beetle-kill trees into lumber in the name of forest health

BLANCA — Dead trees raked from the forest floor are piled into fences more than a dozen feet high. Inside the tangled-timber barricades are verdant forests of aspens. On the other side is a barren landscape, where armies of marauding ungulates munch every aspen shoot that pushes through the dirt. 

The aspen havens span hundreds of acres across the 172,000-acre Trinchera Blanca Ranch flanking southern Colorado’s San Luis Valley. And they are only a sliver of the forest-management strategies at the ranch that are emerging as a model for the most progressive science bolstering forest health across a drought-stricken Intermountain West. 

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Taos First Ski Area Named B Corp

This week Taos Ski Valley became the first ski resort designated a B Corporation. B Corporations are for-profit companies recognized by the nonprofit B Lab that meet “rigorous standards of social and environmental performance, accountability, and transparency.”

Long known for its steep and rowdy skiing, the northern New Mexico mountain is the first ski area to join the likes of Patagonia and New Belgium in a group of businesses who view success more holistically than just a short-term bottom line.

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Can a ranch sawmill improve forest health in rural Colorado?

Lots of things about the Trinchera Blanca Ranch are big. Sitting on the east side of the San Luis Valley near La Veta Pass, its 176,000 acres are believed to make it the biggest ranch in Colorado. Its owner, hedge fund manager Louis Bacon, ranks among the richest people in the country. And, after decades of fire suppression and a recent prolonged drought, its forest health problems are huge, too.

Overgrown and insect-infested forests aren’t unique to the Trinchera Blanca Ranch, known locally as simply the Trinchera. But its response has been uncommon. Last fall the ranch began seeking state and local approvals for a timber mill that could take wood off its ailing forests. It’s currently under construction and slated to open for test runs this fall. If it opens according to plan, the mill could help improve the health of the Trinchera’s forests and boost the struggling economy of Costilla County, where it could become the largest private employer. The mill’s influence could also extend down the Sangre de Cristos Mountains into New Mexico and to a small part of the San Juan Mountains thanks to its capacity to handle both small diameter timber and larger-scale timber sales.

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Britain to create marine reserve the size of UK in waters of Ascension Island

The British Government is to create a marine reserve only slightly smaller than the UK in the waters of Ascension Island in the South Atlantic, it has been announced.

A grant of £300,000 from the charitable Bacon Foundation will be used to close an area of just over half the island’s waters to fishing, to police a tuna fishery in line with the best international standards in the other half and to work out the final boundaries of a marine reserve which could be declared, subject to local agreement, as soon as 2017. It will measure 234,291 square kilometres. The grant, which will be administered by the charity Blue Marine Foundation for the government of the island – part of a British Overseas Territory – will enable the protection of waters described as a “hope spot” with high marine biodiversity by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.

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Middlebury College’s Historic Bread Loaf Campus to Be Conserved in Perpetuity

MIDDLEBURY, Vt. — Nearly a century ago, the visionary Vermont environmentalist Joseph Battell bequeathed to Middlebury College the large tract of land that is home to the Bread Loaf campus. Bordering the Green Mountain National Forest and encompassing numerous areas of ecological and natural interest, the Bread Loaf campus and surrounding forests have long provided the Middlebury community with spaces for outdoor recreation and environmental education.

Now, thanks to another inspired benefactor, Middlebury can ensure that many of those same lands—approximately 2,100 acres—in the Green Mountains are conserved, protected, and remain with the College in perpetuity.

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What’s Behind Louis Bacon’s Impressive Conservation Record?

How does a Wall Street hedge fund guy end up caring so much about conservation that he spends $175 million on a huge chunk of the Southwest — and then basically hands most of it over to the federal government a few years later? (See Wall Street Donors.)

Louis Bacon — the  billionaire founder of Moore Capital Management who recently agreed to put a 90,000-acre track of land he owns in a conservation easement — has pointed to the influence of his grandfather, Louis T. Moore.

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Hedge Fund Giant Louis Bacon’s Bold Mission To Save The American West

In the main lodge of his Trinchera Blanca ranch in Colorado, Louis Bacon, the founder of the giant hedge fund firm Moore Capital Management, takes in his pristine and wild 172,000-acre tract from a plush leather chair. A ghost herd of animals–the heads of elk, mule deer, bison and bighorn sheep, a few of which he killed himself with a bow and arrow–silently watches over him from the surrounding walls.

The 54-year-old Bacon, who is compact, blue-eyed and handsome in the manner of an Eddie Bauer catalog model, is doing something he almost never does and generally despises: sitting down with a member of the media. Right away he begins shifting uneasily in his seat, unable, it seems, to get comfortable. He parries away the first few questions, answering in short declarative bursts. “How did Annie get me into this?” he wonders aloud, referring to Ann Colley, the head of his charity, the Moore Charitable Foundation, and the person who had pushed him to do this rare interview.

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