From Gold to Green

If you’re going to invent an entirely new business category–say, e-commerce in China–it helps to have tunnel vision. For years that’s how Jack Ma saw the world. A former English teacher turned digital entrepreneur, Ma founded Alibaba in 1999 and built it into an e-commerce juggernaut that’s bigger in mainland China than Amazon and eBay put together: its 2012 sales topped $150 billion. Ma became a billionaire, made the cover of Forbes and was named to the TIME 100 list in 2009. Things were good for Alibaba and for China, which saw its economy boom and hundreds of millions of people lifted out of poverty–thanks in no small part to the efforts of entrepreneurs like Ma.

But as entrepreneurs get older–Ma, 48, says he is “old for the Internet”–they start to slow down, look around. What Ma saw was a country paying an environmental price for rapid development. His father-in-law developed liver cancer, a disease Ma–and some scientists–connects to the terrible water pollution that is now common in much of China. Ma saw the skies in Beijing and other Chinese cities grow foul with pollution. On a trip to the countryside near his hometown of Hangzhou, he saw that a lake in which he had nearly drowned while swimming at age 13 now barely came up to his ankles. Farmers told him that they were so afraid of the poisoned soil, they wouldn’t eat some of their own produce. “I knew something was very wrong,” Ma told TIME during a recent interview in Santa Monica, Calif. “This is serious–and we have to make people pay attention to it.”

Now Ma is making it his mission to get China to pay attention to its environmental mess. On May 10, he stepped down as CEO of Alibaba, though he’ll retain a strategic role with the company. The next day he took a new job, as chairman of the China board for the Nature Conservancy (TNC), one of the richest environmental groups in the world. TNC has generally been U.S.-focused, but the sheer size and influence of China ensure that global environmental and climate issues will increasingly be decided there. If China is going to change for the greener, it will need local champions. Ma has volunteered.

In the West, environmentalism has always been a grassroots cause, but it’s also had the support of a cadre of the very rich–think Ted Turner with his buffalo preserves or California billionaire Tom Steyer’s financing green political candidates. In China, the emergence of a superrich class is relatively recent. Now there are more than 300 billionaires in China and Hong Kong, and the wealthy could drive social change if they ultimately decide to follow the example of megaphilanthropists in the West like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. “We all know how important it is to have Chinese leaders in this effort,” says Mark Tercek, TNC’s CEO. “So you can imagine how important it is for us to have Jack Ma in this.”

Ma made his first foray into environmentalism almost by accident. When Alibaba went public in 2007, he was accosted at a Hong Kong press conference by a pair of activists who pressed him to stop selling shark-fin soup online. (The growing market for the pricey delicacy, popular at Chinese banquets, is responsible for the bloody slaughter each year of millions of sharks, many of them members of endangered species.) “I didn’t even know what the problem was,” Ma says. “But I said I wouldn’t eat it.” After doing his own research, and with the support of Alibaba’s employees, he decided to stop selling shark fin altogether. Though a growing number of other prominent Chinese, including former NBA star Yao Ming, have come out against shark fin, Ma’s refusal still marks him as unusual. “If rich people don’t eat shark fin, then the market will disappear,” he says. “It was just a dumb promise I made, but then you start to believe it.”

The shark-fin story fits Ma’s almost innocent vision of environmentalism: countless individual actions adding up to real change. It’s what you’d expect from an entrepreneur whose business success was built on empowering the individual. And it makes sense–Ma has always been more Internet evangelist than ordinary Chinese businessman. He’s skeptical that the Chinese government can be pushed to change: “[It’s] such a big organization, so hard to move. And the environmental situation is not something that can wait.”

Already Ma is inspiring his peers to dig into their own pockets. In early May he announced that he and other Chinese businesspeople would raise up to $15 million for the China Global Conservation Fund, which pays for green projects in developing countries like Kenya and Brazil. Consider it a small contribution to balancing out China’s enormous impact on the global environment as its economy grows beyond its borders.

But China’s biggest environmental woes are at home–and sometimes, when the Beijing smog settles in, they can seem unsolvable. Not to an Internet entrepreneur, though. “Forty years ago, Los Angeles was the same as us,” Ma says, gesturing toward the Santa Monica sky. “If they can fix it, why can’t we? And if we do it smart and we take it seriously, we can do it even quicker.”