Moving Water by Amy Green

Author:Amy Green
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 2020-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

BY 1996, AS Mary Barley’s penny-a-pound campaign reached full intensity, Jones was forty-two and married (to the Australian model) with three girls. He wore round, wire-rim glasses, and his sand-colored hair was beginning to recede. He lived in an $11 million mansion in Greenwich, Connecticut, and maintained two retreats, including a $2.7 million home in Islamorada not far from Mary’s. He was not unlike many in Florida who had come seeking endless sunshine and found instead that the paradise was less than it seemed. Jones’s contributions on behalf of penny-a-pound were believed at the time to be the most anyone had ever given toward a political campaign in Florida history, but Audubon’s Charles Lee believes his influence was even greater.

“More important than that was his contact list of people in New York and Washington and other financial centers around the country, who through his business and personal life he had detected were also either hunters or fishermen, or they had an emotive reason to be interested in protecting the environment,” Lee says.

Jones infused the boards of the Everglades Foundation, the nonprofit organization he established with George, and other environmental groups with influential and wealthy business leaders and persuaded them to give, too. He also helped organize and unite the environmental groups by coordinating weekly conference calls, first called the “Paul calls” and later the “Barley calls.”

“It was both his bringing his personal financial support and the financial support of his friends to the table,” Lee says. “But it also was the skill he had to make the environmental organizations begin to think strategically and to begin to apply the same kind of business planning and campaign planning to their efforts that major business interests active in places like New York would bring to the table. He was a change agent that was successful in causing a much more professional and much more analytically driven approach to be adopted by the environmental groups that he influenced and came in contact with.”

Mary Barley remembers Paul Tudor Jones as her greatest supporter after her husband’s death.

“One hundred percent. Just everything. You have to remember he’s putting millions of dollars in a campaign, and he’s trusting me with his money to do the right thing. He never ever questioned me. To me that just says a lot about his trust, his values. It says that he knows me enough to believe that I would never take a penny from him, and he trusts me enough to tell him if I need help,” she says. “It’s not many people who would do that.”

As Floridians were preparing to vote in October 1996 on penny-a-pound, the following op-ed, written by Paul Jones, appeared in the Palm Beach Post.

Four years ago, the late Everglades activist George Barley said to me, “Did you know that we are actually paying the sugar industry to pollute Florida’s Everglades?”

George explained how problems associated with the harvest of sugar cane in the Everglades were killing this irreplaceable natural environment at a rate of 4 to 5 acres every day.

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