Walton Family Foundation hires conservationist
Posted on Thursday, November 23, 2006
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The Walton Family Foundation has hired a manager for its latest charitable venture: saving oceans and wetlands.
Scott Burns, director of marine conservation at the World Wildlife Fund, will start his new job Jan. 1, said Jay Allen, a spokesman for the Walton family. The founding family of Wal-Mart Stores Inc. oversees the private foundation. Worth $ 1. 3 billion, it is one of America’s richest wellsprings for charity.
Burns could not be reached for comment Wednesday. He has worked 12 years for the World Wildlife Fund, a nonprofit conservation organization based in Washington that strives to protect endangered species and habitats.
The Walton Family Foundation, created by the late Sam Walton, Wal-Mart’s founder, recently took on marine and freshwater conservation as a cause. Previously, the foundation focused its giving on three areas: lifting the impoverished Delta of Arkansas and Mississippi, improving Northwest Arkansas and improving education.
Allen said Walton family members were unavailable to discuss their initiative in waters and wetlands. Employment ads for the position Burns took describe the new interest area as evolving but listed three early objectives: improving fisheries management, especially in the Gulf of Mexico and the Sea of Cortez; restoring Delta wetlands, primarily in the Mississippi River and Colorado River deltas; and developing networks of marine protected areas.
A scuba-diving adventure that brought together a rock guitarist, a leading conservationist and Wal-Mart Chairman S. Robson Walton helped to cement the interest in ocean conservation, according to an Aug. 7 article in Fortune magazine.
Walton was diving off Costa Rica’s Cocos Island in 2004 with his son, Ben, Pearl Jam guitarist Stone Gossard and Conservation International co-founder Peter Seligmann, when Seligmann pointed out fishing boats that he said were destroying the marine habitat, the magazine said.
Earlier this year the Walton Family Foundation awarded Conservation International a threeyear, $ 21 million gift to finance conservation work in three “marine biodiversity management regions.” Two areas lie within the “Coral Triangle,” an expanse of Pacific Ocean in the national waters of Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines. These waters are prized for their diversity of fish and reef-building coral, said Sebastian Troeng, director of regional marine strategies for Conservation International. The third area is a vast patch of the Pacific off Panama, Colombia, Ecuador and Costa Rica — including Cocos Island.
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