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http://www.heartland.org/environmentandclimatenews.org/article/13584/How_Alton_Jones_Foundation_Switched_from_Art_and_Culture_to_Radical_Green.html
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How Alton Jones Foundation Switched from
Art and Culture to Radical Green
by Environment and Climate News, November 1998
W. Alton Jones Foundation, now known as Blue Moon
Fund
"The Blue Moon Fund currently ranks as the world's tenth largest
financier of international causes"
List of some grants and
grantees from 2003
BELOW (way below) grantees from 2009
The metamorphosis of the W. Alton Jones Foundation has transformed the
54-year-old charity from supporting the arts and culture to warning of
environmental Armageddon. And because of its new mission statement,
Americans now are saddled with an " . . . apparatus necessary to embark
on another expensive and probably pointless 30-year inquisition against
man-made chemicals . . . ."
So argues environment writer Ronald Bailey in "Leading the Charge: The
W. Alton Jones Foundation's environmental scare tactics" in a recent
issue of Philanthropy magazine.
Bailey estimates that the foundation, based in Charlottesville,
Virginia, boasts an endowment of about $323 million, and gives grants
exclusively to environmental and anti-nuclear causes.
Founded in 1944 by W. Alton Jones, who began life on a Missouri farm and
rose to become the top executive of Cities Service Co., the
arts-and-culture foundation "radically changed its direction in 1982 at
the behest of the younger generation at a time when the nuclear freeze
furor was in its heyday," Bailey writes.
Jones' environmental crusade began in earnest with the hiring of John P.
Myers as the foundation's executive director in the early 1990s. Myers,
recruited from his position as a vice president of the National Audubon
Society, co-authored a Jones- promoted book,
Our Stolen Future: Are We Threatening Our Fertility, Intelligence, and
Survival? which contained a forward by Vice President Al Gore.
The book's coauthors, Theo Colborn, a senior fellow at the foundation,
and Boston journalist Dianne Dumanoski, were widely touted by
Environmental Media Services, a public- relations firm headed by former
Gore staffer Arlie Schardt. The book receive wide acclaim, and its
authors were lionized by much of the media.
Stolen Future advances the argument that "some man-made chemicals
interfere with the body's own hormones." Such chemicals are responsible
for medical problems that include low sperm counts, infertility, genital
deformities, breast and prostate cancers, and neurological disorders in
children. Even wildlife cannot escape the effects of these chemicals,
say the book's authors.
Despite opposing views, put forth by the National Academy of Science
among others, that nature's own chemicals present a much greater danger
to humans, the book's claims were put to the test in the laboratory by a
researcher at the Xavier/Tulane Center in New Orleans. The results of
the research, which were enthusiastically published in the June 1996
issue of Science magazine, claimed that man-made chemicals, while not a
health threat when used individually, became more potent and dangerous
when combined.
Congress and regulators picked up on the report as they were considering
the Food Quality Protection Act of 1996, and the resulting legislation
reflects the biases and assumptions in Stolen Future.
But Jones, Science and the federal government are looking downright
foolish these days because subsequent tests by the original
Xavier/Tulane researcher others and have not been able to duplicate the
findings.
In the end, Science repudiated its earlier article and published a total
retraction.
The retraction received virtually no media coverage, Bailey notes.
"There is just no doubt about it that (Stolen Future) had a very
profound and very bad effect on the regulatory system," said Philip
Abelson, a former Science editor. "There was legislation put in (the
Food Quality Protection Act of 1996) that is going to cost billions of
dollars."
Bailey noted a slogan that once appeared on the web site for the
Xavier/Tulane lab, "The quality of our lives will depend more than ever
on the quality of our science." He concludes his report, "Sadly, this is
a message that certain crusading foundations are quite willing to
ignore."
PolicyFax: For the complete text of "Leading the Charge: The W. Alton
Jones Foundation's Environmental Scare Tactics," call PolicyFax at
312/377-3000 and request document #2323145 (5 pp.).
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http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/funderProfile.asp?fndid=5301
W. Alton Jones
Foundation, now known as Blue Moon Fund
"The Blue Moon Fund currently ranks as the world's tenth largest
financier of international causes"
433 Park Street
Charlottesville, VA
22902 |
Phone :804-295-5160 804-295-5160
Email :Info@bluemoonfund.org
URL :http://www.bluemoonfund.org/
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- Assets: $173,631,303 (2009)
- Grants Awarded: $9,735,736 (2009)
W. Alton Jones, who was a top executive at Cities
Service Company, created the original Foundation bearing
his name in 1944, for the purpose of financing artistic
and cultural ventures. The W. Alton Jones Foundation
changed its funding priorities in the early 1980s when
it became interested in the nuclear freeze issue, a
Soviet-sponsored initiative that would have frozen
Soviet nuclear and military superiority in place, and
would have rendered the new American President, Ronald
Reagan, unable to close that gap by any appreciable
degree. A decade later, the Foundation hired the
zoologist John Myers, who had previously worked for the
National Audubon Society, to be its Director, and
thenceforth began to earmark much of its philanthropy
for organizations committed to the anti-capitalist
agendas of radical environmentalism, whose ultimate
goal, as writer Michael Berliner has
explained, is "not clean air and clean water, [but]
rather . . . the demolition of technological/industrial
civilization."
In 2001, the W. Alton Jones Foundation was restructured
into three separate foundations. One of these was the
Blue Moon Fund, which
Diane Edgerton Miller (granddaughter of W. Alton
Jones) and
Patricia Jones Edgerton (daughter of W. Alton Jones)
together established in April 2002. The other two newly
created entities were named the Oak Hill Fund and the
Edgerton Fund.
The Blue Moon Fund currently ranks as the world's tenth
largest financier of international causes; many of its
grants are intended to help build the resources,
infrastructure, and food production capabilities of
Communist China.
The Blue Moon Fund condemns the fact that the U.S. has
only 5 percent of the world's population but accounts
for 25 percent of all energy consumption and (allegedly)
one-fourth of all air pollution: "There is a complex
relationship between human consumption, economic
advancement and the condition of the natural world that
profoundly affects human quality of life. Consumption is
the engine of growth, but it can also fuel misery.
Demand for cheap food leads to chemical use that can
cause human disease; demand for goods leads to natural
resource depletion; and demand for energy leads to
pollution and global warming. Communities, economies,
and the natural world all suffer.”
Among the many recipients of Blue Moon Fund philanthropy
are: the
Energy Foundation; the
Tides Foundation; the
Tides Center; the
Sierra Club;
Rainforest Action Network (affiliate of the World
Wildlife Fund); the Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace;
Planned Parenthood; the
Natural Resources Defense Council; the
Union of Concerned Scientists; the
American Friends Service Committee; the
Environmental Working Group;
Environmental Media Services; Greenpeace; the
Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy; the Western
Organization of Resource Councils; the National
Environmental Trust; Conservation International; the
Nature Conservancy; the
Brookings Institute;
EarthJustice Legal Defense Fund;
Friends of the Earth; the
National Wildlife Federation; the Worldwatch
Institute; the Council for a Livable World Education
Fund; the
Environmental Defense Fund; the
Rainforest Alliance; the
Earth Island Institute; the
World Wildlife Fund; the Western Environmental Law
Center; Consumers Union; the
League of Conservation Voters; the Rocky Mountain
Institute;
Physicians for Social Responsibility; the
Environmental Law Institute; the Institute for Social
Justice; Earth Day Network; the Alliance to Save Energy;
the World Resources Institute; the Conservation Law
Foundation; the Earth Trust Foundation; the EarthWays
Foundation; Focus Project; the Center for Rural Affairs;
Clean Water Action; the Lawyers Committee for Human
Rights; the Foundation for Global Sustainability;
Citizen Action; Lighthawk;
Public Citizen; the
U.S. Public Interest Research Group (U.S. PIRG); the
Blue Mountain Native Forest Alliance; the Center for
Science in Public Participation; Ecotrust; the Center
for Environmental Citizenship; and the Association of
Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics.
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