August 15, 2013 — Although the public image of environmentalist finance has shifted from the 1960s Birkenstock-clad hippie, the results of my new survey of Big Green grant amounts may pop a few eyes.
In the past decade or so, there were 345,052 foundation grants for the environment, totaling $20,826,664,000 (that's over twenty billion dollars), according to an authoritative database.
In the mid-1990s, I began using $10 million as the baseline for a Big Green big grant, which is what I surveyed this week. That was generous for a single gift at the time, but things changed. Generosity had less and less to do with foundation donations as "prescriptive grants" appeared and took command.
"Prescriptive" is foundationese for "here's some money to do what you're told, and we want an accounting of the results." Environmental groups complained, but pioneer "prescriptivist," Donald Ross, then executive director of the Rockefeller Family Fund, told an audience of fellow foundation executives in 1992, "Too bad. They're players, we're players."
Donor foundations formed cartels such as the 200-plus member Environmental Grantmakers Association and the smaller, farther-left National Network of Grantmakers.
Donors began posting notices saying, "We do not accept unsolicited applications," and "Applications by invitation only." Foundations had quietly taken substantial control of the environmental movement by 2000.
Washington Examiner columnist Ron Arnold is executive vice president of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise.