Louis Bacon named by Forbes as one of the greenest billionaires in the world

With a tough economic climate and austerity restricting governments across the world in their ability to fund conversation projects, many feel that the onus now rests on the world’s billionaire to use their considerable wealth for environmental causes.

Philanthropist Louis Bacon was recently named as one of the top ten greenest billionaires in the world following years of purchasing land and donating it to green projects.

Billionaires Elon Musk and Aloys Wobben of Germany, have founded their own renewable energy businesses; Christy Walton has invested in them; while others like Ted Turner and Louis Bacon  chose to preserve land by ranching it or giving it over for conservation.

Louis Bacon purchased the Trinchera Ranch from the Forbes family in 2007 and the $175 million price tag made it the most expensive residential sale in the history of the U.S.

For nearly two decades Louis Bacon has been assembling a portfolio of landscapes in New York, North Carolina and Colorado, and donating them to conservation easements, permanently saving them from further development.

Bacon even spent more than $10 million fighting a joint venture between Xcel Energy and Tri-State Generation & Transmission, which proposed to build “green” line that would carry solar energy across his ranch land, 90,000 acres of which have been donated to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.

Louis Bacon’s dedication to the environment is now twenty years old as, in 1993, he bought Robins Island, a 434-acre, in the middle of Great Peconic Bay off Long Island, for $11 million out of bankruptcy and donated it four years later Nature Conservancy.

Although Bacon has donated thousands of acres to conversation, most of his environmental activism has been in the form of donations. (Bacon has given $50 million in the last 12 years to such environmental and educational groups as Riverkeeper, the Natural Resources Defense Council, Friends of the Earth and the Sierra Club Foundation.)

The National Audubon Society also presented him its prestigious Audubon Medal earlier this year.