'Eco Barons: The Dreamers, Schemers and Millionaires Who Are Saving Our Planet' by Edward Humes

Excepting the facts that the title is absurd and the premise conceptually fractured, this is a fine little book: a collection of starry-eyed portraits of environmentalists who have devoted their lives and/or fortunes to saving the Earth. And yet by invoking the industrial barons of the 19th century -- the dangerous men who amassed inconceivable wealth in railroads, real estate, steel -- Humes' title creates the expectation that his subjects will be farsighted ecopreneurs, who are profiting in solar and wind energy, biomass technology and sustainable farming. The wind and solar barons are out there, and they are making a bundle. In ignoring them, Humes fumbles the promise of his own trope.

Humes devotes most of this book to conservationists such as Doug Tompkins, the fashion mogul who founded Esprit and then took his fortune to South America to buy up vast swaths of Patagonia, forming Pumalin Park; Ted Turner, the media empire-builder who is now the nation's largest private landowner; and Roxanne Quimby, the hippie-chick workhorse behind Burt's Bees products who, after cashing out in the 1990s with nearly $400 million, devoted her fortune to saving the Maine North Woods. God bless them all.

These philanthropists are evidence of "a plan," writes Humes, in a passage that sounds directly lifted from the book proposal. "It is audacious. It is huge. . . . It is already unfolding, a secret plan to save the Earth."

Well, excuse me for saying so, but this is a lousy plan. To suggest that a handful of chlorophyll-loving millionaires' fencing off paradise somehow spells deliverance for our suffering Earth is not only implausible but actually risible. Such a notion embraces, to an astonishing degree, a messianic faith in the world's financial elite that -- perhaps you've noticed lately -- is indifferent to the general welfare. Bear in mind that the baron-philanthropists of the Gilded Age -- the Rockefellers, Carnegies and Stanfords -- converted their wealth to an honorable posterity out of a sense of noblesse oblige. "The man who dies rich," Andrew Carnegie famously said, "dies in shame."

If we take no other lesson from the Wall Street apocalypse -- from the spectacle of inept, paper-pushing functionaries walking off from their ruined companies with tens of millions of dollars -- we should at least recognize our collective failure to stigmatize extreme wealth. One percent of the U.S. population controls 50% of the nation's wealth. The current crisis was predicated on a handful of elites expropriating vast sums of the nation's industrial and social fortune, and the devil take the hindmost.