‘The system was broken’: How The Nature Conservancy prospered but ran aground

The Great Recession hadn’t yet found its bottom when Mark Tercek, an investment banker from Cleveland, left his job at Goldman Sachs in 2008 for another challenge: saving the planet from climate change and environmental destruction. And he was going to use his Wall Street experience to do it. In the following decade, Tercek rang up big results as CEO of The Nature Conservancy, the world’s largest environmental organization: Revenues doubled, to more than $1 billion. Operations expanded to dozens more countries. Corporate partners like Coca-Cola, BP and JPMorgan Chase signed up to further the group’s work of protecting rain forests, coral reefs and other imperiled habitats. But now that reign is in tatters. Tercek has stepped down, along with Conservancy President Brian McPeek and the heads of the group’s two largest programs, after an external report — first disclosed weeks ago by POLITICO — pried the lid off years of complaints about discriminatory treatment of employees, especially women. That report offered just a glimpse at the problem, according to interviews with dozens of current and former Nature Conservancy staff members during the past month. They revealed an organization adrift, torn between a senior leadership that aggressively cultivates ties to global corporations and a core of ecology-minded staff members who chafe against the Wall Street culture, along with female employees’ unhappiness with a “good ole boys club” that hampers their advancement. Even amid their relief and jubilation at the leaders’ departures, current and former employees express concern that the scandal will drive away key supporters and funders, jeopardizing the world’s most extensive network of land conservation projects. Several top donors declined to tell POLITICO whether they still support the Conservancy. At the very least, veterans of the group say, the trauma is a distraction from an environmental mission in which The Nature Conservancy plays a distinctive role — one that harnesses support from activists, corporations and political leaders of both parties, despite the increasingly polarized climate debate in Washington. Those who withstood years of discrimination did so because they believed in the organization’s overall goals, and they hope it can adjust...For The Nature Conservancy, tapping Tercek as its CEO was a natural extension of its strategy for wooing business partners and bringing in more donations. That strategy had long brought the group both growth and criticism.
What had started in 1951 as a band of ecologists who united to stop development on a 60-acre forest in eastern New York has exploded into a 4,000-employee, studiously non-partisan organization that has helped protect more than 100 million acres globally. Since the 1970s, however, detractors have accused the Conservancy of being too cozy with its corporate donors, many of them polluters seeking to green up their reputations...MORE

Some will remember a previous scandal at the Nature Conservancy.