Edward P. Bass

Edward Perry "Ed" Bass (born September 10, 1945) is a businessman, financier, philanthropist, and environmentalist who lives in Fort Worth, Texas. He financed the Biosphere 2 project, an artificial closed ecological system, which was built between 1987 and 1991. He is the chairman of Fine Line, an investment and venture-capital management firm in Fort Worth, and president of the board of directors of the Sid W. Richardson Foundation, a philanthropic organization. He was listed as #239 on the Forbes 400 list of wealthiest Americans in 2012, with an estimated net worth of $2 billion. wiki

"Mr. Edward Perry Bass serves as the Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of Fine Line Inc. Mr. Bass has been in this position since 2001. He serves as the Senior Fellow at The Yale Corporation. At the Corporation, Mr. Bass presides in the absence of the President, and also, with the President, is jointly responsible for setting the Corporation’s agenda and appointing its committees. Mr. Bass serves on the Executive Committees of the New York Botanical Garden and the Botanical Research Institute of Texas and has been a leader in the decade long redevelopment of downtown Fort Worth. He serves as Chair of the Corporation’s Committee on Development and Alumni Affairs. Mr. Bass joined the Yale Corporation on June 30, 2011. He has been active in business, conservation and ranching. A committed environmentalist, Mr. Bass co-founded Biosphere 2 in Tucson, Arizona (now operated by Columbia University) and helped guide its transition to a major research center of the University of Arizona. He serves as the Chairman of Fine Line Inc. He serves as a Director Emeritus of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), of which he served as a Co-Vice Chairman earlier. He serves as Trustee of Yale University. Mr. Bass served on the Board of WWF from 1988 to 2007. He serves as also the Founding Trustee of the Philecology Trust. Mr. Bass' service to Yale includes Co-Chair of the Leadership Council of the School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, Member and Founding Chair of the External Advisory Board of the Yale Institute for Biospheric Studies, former Member of the University Council, and former Chair of the Council Committee on the Peabody Museum. He is one of the co-Chairs of the Yale Tomorrow Capital Campaign, which concluded on June 30, 2011. He studied at Yale School of Architecture from 1968 to 1970 and is a 1967 graduate of Yale College."

"In 1974 a lanky young Texan and Yale dropout named Ed Bass wandered up the driveway to Synergia Ranch. Like Allen, Bass had a strong interest in the environment. Unlike Allen, he was the billionaire heir to an oil fortune. Later that year Allen and his followers drove an old school bus to Berkeley, California, where they built an 82-foot sailboat. None of them had ever built even a rowboat. In 1975 they began sailing the Heraclitus around the world. They took her up the Amazon River, dove coral reefs in the tropics, and sailed her to Antarctica to do research on whales.

"With John Allen’s big dreams and Ed Bass’s big money, the Synergians began taking on bigger things. They acquired a huge cattle ranch in Australia, started a sustainable forest in Puerto Rico, built a hotel and cultural center in Kathmandu, and took on other projects in Nepal, the United Kingdom, France, and the United States. Now calling themselves the Institute for Ecotechnics, they began hosting international meetings on ecology, sustainable development, and then space colonization. At a conference in Oracle in 1984, Allen announced his plan to build a prototype Mars colony on Earth before the decade was out. The destiny of human beings was to seed Earth’s life into space, and the first stop would be a working colony on Mars."

Affiliations

 * WWF USA: Board of Directors