Something appears to be in the rarified air that billionaires breathe. Last week, it was announced that Patagonia’s founder and former owner, Yvon Chouninard, and his family are giving away ownership of the outdoor apparel company, to donate any profit not reinvested in the business to fight climate change. This week, at an event held in Vancouver’s Stanley Park, we have our very own Canadian billionaire, Chip Wilson, the founder of Lululemon Athletica Inc, who is donating $100 million to the British Columbia Parks Foundation to “help protect and enhance the province’s nature.” The CBC reported that this donation is earmarked in three ecosystems: the Falling Creek Sanctuary, Teit’s Sanctuary, and Bourguiba Springs, to work to protect more than three square kilometers of land. The donation also helped the BC Parks Foundation kick-off its 25 x 25 campaign, to work with Indigenous peoples in the protection of twenty-five wild places by 2025. BC Parks hopes to use the money to buy forests and repurchase mining, forestry, and other resource licenses turning “massive amounts of land” into parks that indigenous groups would manage and use for revenue-making purposes such as tourism, Wilson said in an interview.
Wilson is no stranger to the world of philanthropy, and in the past has donated to nature conservation, to preserve the coastal Douglas-fir in the Salish Sea Area, and to education efforts in Ethiopia. He has also committed over $100 million to medical research. Chip’s wife Summer, at the unveiling of the donation, said, “being out in nature, movement, is how we came together as a family,” and signed on with the foundation’s objectives lined up with their own vision and goals. Wilson, who has accumulated most of his wealth from his nine per cent stake in Lululemon, and holds a large stake in Amer Sports Group, owner of brands such as Wilson sporting goods, Atomic ski gear, and outdoor apparel brand Arc’teryx, is a huge proponent of environmental protection and combatting climate change. This is his biggest philanthropic gift yet. Hopefully, the actions of Chouninard and Wilson represent a growing trend among the ultra-rich to spend more money on fighting climate change, instead of seeing who can colonize Mars first.