Leonardo DiCaprio, 51, is getting serious blowback for his $200 million wildlife conservation initiative with billionaire Jeff Bezos, 62.
DiCaprio’s Re:wild and Bezos’ Bezos Earth Fund launched the Phoenix Species Project to support over 100 species facing imminent extinction. They plan to work with over 100 “local and international partners around the world — including Indigenous Peoples, local communities, conservationists, and governments,” DiCaprio wrote on Instagram before thanking the Bezos Earth Fund.
Less than 24 hours after announcing “the largest philanthropic initiative in history dedicated to the recovery of critically endangered species across continents,” as DiCaprio and Bezos called it, critics have started flaming both DiCaprio and Bezos for greenwashing—using the project as a means for the one percent to avoid real environmental accountability.
“I am excited about any investment in conservation, but I am deeply concerned by this,” one Instagram user wrote. “Bezos and Amazon are responsible for driving this species loss with their unsustainable practices—never mind exploiting their workers. Is this not just greenwashing so amazon can continue to destroy the environment but have better PR?”
Others pinpointed hypocrisy as an underlying issue.
“Repulsive hypocrites,” a Reddit user wrote. “Let them give up their private planes and yachts, which pollute way more than the average person does in a lifetime.
Another roasted DiCaprio specifically: “It’s frankly baffling how Leo could be the co-star of one of the most striking movies about the climate crisis ever made; yet doesn’t seem to grasp fundamental truths about it,” referring to Adam McKay’s 2021 satire Don’t Look Up.
Though DiCaprio is a longtime advocate for climate action, having given $80 million in grants to fund climate research and producing several films about the climate crisis, many seem skeptical of his partnership with Bezos. The Amazon founder sits at the helm of his company’s 900-plus data centers, which guzzle communities’ freshwater resources, destroy wildlife habitats—including those of endangered species—and drive up the cost of local utilities.
Users are pointing out that the emissions from DiCaprio’s and Bezos’ private jets destroy the species he claims to want to protect, calling the project “performative” and “propaganda.”
One person put it bluntly: “As soon as people realize and actually feel the effects of what those rich f---s did to our planet, they suddenly start their greenwashing campaign.”
