Nature's Own Hedge Fund

On the day in May 2008 when Mark Tercek, a managing director at Goldman Sachs, got a cell-phone call from a headhunter informing him that he’d likely gotten the job of running the Nature Conservancy, he was so excited that he backed his Jeep Grand Cherokee into a tree, shattering the back window. Anxious that gouging a tree might be a bad omen, he jumped out to see how bad it was. To his relief, he’d done far more damage to his vehicle than the tree.

Tercek spent more than two decades on Wall Street, and none of those years in green think tanks or chained to a bulldozer blocking a logging road. As a city kid from Cleveland who camped and hiked infrequently, he had come late to the joys of the outdoors. Now, it appeared, he’d be leading the world’s largest conservation organization, which has a million members, chapters in 50 states and 34 countries, and more than $5 billion in assets. The Conservancy’s $1 billion in annual income dwarfs all conservation competitors. And it had been run, for most of its 60-year history, by lifelong conservationists. Tercek had big ideas about how to radically change the traditional approach to solving environmental problems and improving the Conservancy’s operations, but would career greenies listen to the theories of a banker?