So, here’s a fun one. Jeff Bezos and Leonardo DiCaprio just teamed up to launch something called the Phoenix Species Project, and — I want to be really clear about this up top — it’s genuinely a big deal. The Bezos Earth Fund and DiCaprio’s Re:wild are putting $200 million total ($100 million from Bezos, $100 million from Re:wild and friends) toward pulling 100 critically endangered species back from the edge. Not “slow the decline.” Not “manage the loss gracefully.” Actual recovery. Population rebound. The kind of five-year, sustained funding that conservation groups almost never get, because usually they’re stitching together one-year grants and praying.
I read the announcement and, honestly, was pretty impressed, which is not a sentence I expected to type about a Bezos press release.
Diademed sifaka lemur peeking through green foliage
(Emad aljumah via Getty Images)Okay, but what actually is this thing?
The Phoenix Species Project is the largest single philanthropic initiative ever dedicated exclusively to recovering critically endangered species. A hundred species, thirty countries, every taxonomic group you can think of — mammals, amphibians, reptiles, birds, fish, invertebrates, plants. And it’s not just throwing cash at pandas and calling it a day. We’re talking about the golden-crowned sifaka, a lemur in Madagascar that Association Fanamby has been protecting on a shoestring budget for years. The bowmouth guitarfish, a shark-like ray getting hunted for the fin trade. A tiny South African desert succulent called the fuzzy belly button that’s being illegally poached for houseplant collectors, which, sure, of course that’s a thing. The Hickory Nut Gorge green salamander, which lives in exactly one canyon in North Carolina and wasn’t even discovered by science until 2019. A pupfish in Mexico whose entire freshwater spring dried up. Australia’s night parrot, which vanished for 150 years and was basically a cryptid before anyone rediscovered it.
More than 100 partner organizations — Indigenous communities, local scientists, conservationists, the IUCN — are going to run point on the ground, tailored species by species. And the funding structure matters here: five years of committed support per species instead of the usual scramble for the next grant cycle. That’s the actual innovation. Conservation groups have known how to save species for a while. What they haven’t had is a rich guy willing to fund the boring, unglamorous, multi-year slog it actually takes.
So yes. Genuinely good. The people at Fanamby and Bush Heritage Australia and the Amphibian and Reptile Conservancy are, I promise you, thrilled, and they should be — this is real money for real work that was previously done on fumes.
Guam kingfisher
(Mohamad Hasan via Getty Images)Now here’s the water-cooler part
Okay so. Okay so.
Here’s the thing about Jeff Bezos, whose first title isn’t usually “beloved conservation philanthropist.” This is all a little like your neighbor showing up after your garage burned down and offering to mow your lawn. Very nice gesture! Genuinely useful, your lawn needed it! But also — and I cannot stress this enough — he’s the guy who burned down the garage. And he hasn’t said he won’t do it again. In fact, he’s been actively funding the guys who want to burn down your next garage too. And, increasingly, your house.
Let’s do the receipts, because this is Yahoo and I know you want the receipts.
The public lands thing. Amazon’s corporate PAC has a long, well-documented habit of funding the exact lawmakers working to open up public lands and roll back environmental protections — while Bezos simultaneously postures as a climate guy. Back in 2020, E&E News found that Amazon had given $224,000 to Republican Senate campaigns since 2019, compared to $94,000 to Democratic senators, and that roughly 70% of the company’s Senate-focused political giving in that window went to Republicans — including senators who’d voted to block the EPA from regulating carbon and fought methane restrictions on public land drilling. That’s not ancient history, either: campaign finance trackers show Amazon’s PAC is still splitting its money in a way that reliably funds officials with anti-conservation voting records, all while its foundation writes checks for lemurs.
The Trump inauguration money. In December 2024, heading into this administration, Amazon and Meta each donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund, and Amazon added another $1 million in-kind by airing the inauguration on Prime Video. For context, that’s a massive jump from the $58,000 Amazon gave to Trump’s 2017 inauguration. This is an administration that has moved to shrink national monuments, fast-track drilling and mining leases on public land, and gut Endangered Species Act protections — the exact category of policy the Phoenix Species Project exists to counteract. Bezos didn’t have to write that check. He wrote it anyway.
The small-business thing. This one’s less about wildlife and more about, you know, your town. The FTC’s antitrust suit against Amazon lays out how the company’s pricing and platform tactics have been one of the leading factors in the decline of small and medium businesses, noting that the U.S. lost about 65,000 independent retailers between 2007 and 2017 alone, wiping out roughly 40% of small apparel, toy, and sporting goods makers. Amazon also gets public subsidies for warehouses and data centers that smaller local businesses simply don’t have access to, pushing them toward higher prices or lower wages just to compete. That’s not a direct wildlife issue, but it is a “what kind of world is Bezos actually building” issue.
And yeah, the warehouses themselves. This isn’t some abstract climate-math thing — it’s dirt-under-fingernails literal. In Eugene, Oregon, a developer with ties to Amazon proposed filling about 6.5 acres of wetland with concrete and imported fill for a 318,000-square-foot warehouse, in an area with documented sightings of the Western pond turtle, a species on Oregon’s sensitive-species list. Up in Pickering, Ontario, Amazon was this close to leasing a site on a provincially protected wetland for what would’ve been Canada’s largest retail warehouse before public backlash killed the deal. These aren’t one-offs. This is the standard growth model — cheap land, fast build, worry about the ecological line-item later, if ever.
Sirocco the Kakapo, the national treasure and media superstar of New Zealand
(Lei Zhu via Getty Images)So, uh, where does that leave us?
Look, I keep coming back to the garage metaphor because it’s the most honest way I can describe how it feels to read this news. The Phoenix Species Project is real. The golden-crowned sifaka is going to get real help. The night parrot ecologists are not being scammed — Bush Heritage Australia is getting actual money for actual fieldwork, and that fieldwork will actually matter for that actual bird. None of that is fake or hollow or PR-only. I don’t think it’s fair to call this greenwashing, exactly, because the money is landing on real, effective, needed conservation work, done by people who’ve been underfunded for decades.
But it’s also happening at the same time Amazon’s political machine keeps funding the people trying to shrink the very public lands this project’s spirit depends on, and while the company keeps hollowing out the small businesses that make towns feel like towns, and while its warehouses keep eating wetlands one Army Corps permit application at a time. Both of those things are true. Bezos gets to be the guy funding the golden-crowned sifaka’s comeback tour and the guy whose PAC dollars have gone toward officials trying to auction off the sifaka’s American cousins’ backyard.
So: save the 100 species, Jeff. Genuinely, please do. Please! More billionaires and celebrities need to step up to the plate like this. Just also maybe stop helping elect the people who’ll make sure there’s a 101st, 102nd, and 103rd needing saving five years from now.
And, yeah, mow the lawn. Thank you! But maybe also, I don’t know — stop matching gasoline donations to the guy holding matches near everyone else’s garage.
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