During a winter morning in 2006, Bob Wright was having an ordinary breakfast with his wife, Yun, in their Victoria waterfront home when she mentioned reading that sea levels could eventually rise 15 metres because of global warming. The owner of the Oak Bay Marine Group, which includes Campbell River's Painter's Lodge, Quadra Island's April Point and many other coastal holdings from Victoria to the Queen Charlottes, noted his wife's worry, quickly assessed their distance above high tide and then said dismissively, "Honey, don't worry about that. I'll buy us a pair of hip waders and we'll wade through it." (The Vancouver Sun, June 22/07.)

But multi-millionaires such as Wright don't get wealthy by dismissing trends, particularly if their major investment is BC sport-fishing. "As a gumboot fisherman with very limited education," Wright confessed to Globe & Mail reporter Laura Drake, "I thought, what the hell is going on here?" (June 21/07). So he decided to find out — or, more accurately, have other people find out — prompting his $11 million donation to the University of Victoria. Student scholarships will receive $1 million and $10 million will provide a new Oceans, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences building to house the university's marine and climate scientists, together with Environment Canada's Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis. The money will help to integrate and co-ordinate these related scientific studies. "Extra dollars in a jam jar," said Wright.

He is not the only one who is finding "extra dollars in the jam jar". Frank Giustra, a Vancouver mining financier, has donated $100 million, plus half his future mining earnings, to a plan for fighting Third World poverty. Giustra will work in partnership with his friend, former American president Bill Clinton. The Clinton-Giustra Sustainable Growth Initiative will also receive funds from "a coalition of companies and organizations... to improve health and education and promote sustainable development" (The Vancouver Sun, June 22/07). Giustra's contribution of $100 million has already been matched by Carlos Slim, a Mexican telecommunications billionaire. Together with other money, the fund is expected to amass billions.

Similar acts of generosity are overcoming other wealthy people around the world. Scotland's richest man, Sir Tom Hunter, is donating $2.5 billion to charities that will help destitute children in his country and in Africa. An Israeli billionaire, Avi Shaked, has promised $1 billion to anyone who can broker a lasting peace agreement between Israelis and Palestinians. American billionaire Warren Buffett has pledged $100 million to establish a politically neutral international reserve for enriched uranium in order to reduce global nuclear tensions. Microsoft's Bill Gates has established a humanitarian foundation with a donation of $27 billion. And Buffett has added another $37 billion to it, bringing to $44 billion his total gifts in the last year.

Other money is going directly to green causes. Aside from the hundreds of millions donated to numerous nature conservancy and environmental organizations around the world, Sir Richard Branson, chairman of Britain's Virgin Group PLC, is investing $3 billion to fight global warming, saying that over the next 10 years he will contribute all profits from his travel companies to this cause. He is also offering $25 million in cash to anyone who can "devise a way of removing lethal amounts of CO2 from the Earth's atmosphere." Making reference to the year 1675, when King George III of England offered a large prize to anyone who could devise a method of accurately calculating longitude — it took 60 years before John Harrison invented an accurate enough chronometer to do the job — Sir Richard said of his so-called Virgin Challenge, "The Earth cannot wait 60 years. We need everybody capable of discovering an answer to put their minds to it today." In his dire estimation, nothing less than the "survival of our species" is as stake.

Sir Richard's motives may not be entirely altruistic. Branson is heavily invested in airlines, trains and travel. Despite the Kyoto Protocol and other efforts to cut global atmospheric CO2 emissions, global levels continue to rise at accelerating rates — now at least 2 parts per million per year. Pressure is building to cut these emissions. Airlines alone contribute about 2-3 percent of these greenhouse gases, with possible effects of 7-9 percent when considering their high altitude operation. The price of oil is also climbing, a combination of trends that has encouraged Branson to invest heavily in search of an economical biofuel substitute for conventional aircraft kerosene.

But something more than self-interest is driving the generosity of these billionaires. Frank Giustra offers some insights. "Money is an illusion if you have too much of it," he says. "It's useless and pointless unless it's doing some good for somebody." (This idea, incidentally, was planted by his wife, Alison Lawton, a human rights activist and producer of documentary films on humanitarian crises. "She gets full credit for this idea," Giustra concedes.) "These [billionaire] folks are starting to recognize two things," he said. "One, they've way too much money.... [And two,] they're basically filling a vacuum that, a generation ago, was occupied by government and other agencies."

However, something deeper and more disquieting can be gleaned from such acts of individual generosity. Aside from the tacit admission by these billionaires that they have been too successful at their game and that governments have been too negligent at theirs, these highly motivated and skilful entrepreneurs are signalling fundamental flaws in our political and economic priorities.

If the economic disparity between rich and poor continues to grow, the security and wellbeing of everyone is eventually threatened. If our global mechanisms of production, distribution and consumption collapse the natural ecologies in which this system functions, our entire economic process becomes self-defeating. Just as wealth ultimately depends on a judicious measure of sharing, a civilization — to answer Bob Wright's question of "What the hell is going on here?" — ultimately depends on a healthy environment. Even billionaires are beginning to understand that money isn't everything.