'Quietly philanthropic' tycoon makes his mark in the West

Wyss

Phil Taylor, E&E reporter

A Swiss billionaire is forging a conservation legacy across the western United States and having an outsized influence on federal policies.

His name: Hansjorg Wyss.

The media-shy 79-year-old built a $6 billion fortune manufacturing medical devices, and he's pledged to give more than half of it away to preserve the American West, among other philanthropic pursuits.

Hansjorg Wyss (pronounced "Hans-yorg Wees") and his nonprofit, the Wyss Foundation, have so far donated more than $350 million to acquire land and buoy dozens of green groups molding lands policy in Washington, D.C., and Western communities.

"Hansjorg Wyss is a godsend to the conservation community," said Bill Meadows, former president of the Wilderness Society, which has received significant Wyss funding. "Without their funding, all of our organizations would be much less equipped to do serious research, serious policy analysis."

Industry-aligned groups say Wyss promotes radical environmentalists who block energy development and destroy jobs on Western lands.

"Wyss's foreign money -- tens of millions of dollars of it -- takes American natural resources out of productive uses," according to a profile of Wyss by the Center for Organizational Research and Education. The center is run by Richard Berman, a D.C. public relations consultant who runs attack campaigns against green groups.

Love him or hate him, Wyss' policy footprint on Western lands is growing.

In late 2013, Wyss signed the "Giving Pledge," an initiative started by Warren Buffet and Bill and Melinda Gates that asks wealthy individuals to give at least half of their wealth to charity.

Among Wyss' biggest gifts:

• $4.25 million in 2013 to help buy back 58,000 acres of oil and gas leases in Wyoming's Hoback Basin, a prized retreat for rafters, fishermen and hunters, and a major migration route for wildlife.

• $2 million in 2013 to remove the century-old Veazie Dam and restore fish passage in Maine's Penobscot River.

• $35 million in 2010 to help purchase 310,000 acres of private timberlands to protect grizzly bear and wolverine habitat in northern Montana, stitching together a checkerboard of federal, state and private lands.

In 2013, the politically connected Wyss Foundation quietly donated roughly $19 million, much of it to conservation nonprofits that lobby for new wilderness and national monuments and curbs on drilling, mining and grazing on public lands, according to the foundation's most recent 990 report to the Internal Revenue Service.

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He apparently gave $280,000 to the NM Wilderness Alliance.