Curtis White rightly concludes that plutocratic philanthropoids are primarily in the business of “risk management.” Indeed, the institutionalized tax evasion that enables beneficent elites to replenish their philanthropies provides them with the ideal means of undermining the government’s already limited provision of public welfare, and for “managing and limiting the ambitions” of grassroots activists to boot.

Unfortunately though, White fails to point out the central role that such philanthropic elites have played in nurturing supernatural sensibilities within their environmental grantees: an issue of magical dimensions that will be explored in this essay by scrutinizing the philanthropic communities ties to the original commissioning (and then decommissioning) source for his article, Orion Magazine.

Orion has long been a favorite fixture for environmentalists of a deep-ecological bent, which makes it all the more astonishing that so many capitalists support this crusading magazine — a particularly notable one being Google. Likewise for a magazine that regularly publishes the work of anarcho-primitivist Derrick Jensen (Jensen prefers the term anarcho-indigenist) — an individual who forthrightly advocates the necessity of violent action to bring an end to capitalism and modern civilization — it is ironic that they benefit from a philanthropic trust derived from the wealth of the the most infamous of all robber barons, Henry Clay Frick (that is, the plutocrat whom the anarchist Alexander Berkman attempted to assassinate in 1892).