[Curiosities] Wendy Schmidt gives big to protect oceans, planet's future

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As a child, Wendy Schmidt didn’t think about how the ocean intersected with human life. It was a nice place to go swimming, but it was mostly a murky, unknowable realm that didn’t have much to do with her day-to-day life.

That outlook changed 15 years ago when she started sailing and learned to scuba dive. Now the health of the world’s oceans looms large in Schmidt’s thinking about the planet’s future and in her giving.

“People commonly encounter the ocean from the shore, the deck of a ferry boat, or from an airplane. It’s historically been a place of mythology, sea creatures, and scary stuff. In some ways, you could say it’s your worst nightmare, and yet, ironically, it’s also the source of all life. It’s 71% of the earth’s surface,” Schmidt says. “Suddenly you see that’s a different planet than you thought you lived in. It’s mostly ocean and the life in the ocean, and we’re just a small player here with a really outsized footprint.”
Schmidt leads a collection of philanthropies through which she and her husband, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, work to help protect the planet. They give to support clean energy, marine science and ocean conservation, and efforts to address climate change, plastic pollution, and food insecurity. The couple have also built programs that support and connect young leaders, scientists, and others working to solve an array of global problems.

The Schmidts have poured nearly $2.2 billion into their philanthropies since 2019 and during that time have pledged and given away more than $1.4 billion.
Since 2009, the couple have given more than $360 million to the Schmidt Ocean Institute, which operates a research ship that it makes available free to scientists worldwide. It also helped develop SuBastian, an underwater robotic vehicle scientists use to conduct deep-sea research experiments.

While they are not the largest contributors to ocean conservation and marine science, their insistence that the institute share its findings with scientists and the public is important, says Ashley Enrici, an assistant professor of philanthropic studies at Indiana University’s Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, who studies philanthropy’s role in marine conservation.

“That knowledge can be used for policy decisions by the government and to support public awareness and education campaigns,” Enrici says. “It has the potential to fill lots of different gaps.”

 

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