David Kaiser, a scion of the Rockefeller family who steered one of its philanthropies into a pitched confrontation with the company that provided the family’s prodigious wealth, died on Wednesday at a family home on Mount Desert Island, Me. As president of the Rockefeller Family Fund, and as an official of Just Detention International, a group dedicated to fighting sexual abuse in prisons, Mr. Kaiser pursued twin passions: combating climate change and reforming the criminal justice system. His climate work took one of the family’s most prominent charitable organizations in a highly unusual direction for any philanthropy: scrappiness. It was all the more unusual for a great-great-grandson of John D. Rockefeller, the founder of Standard Oil, to directly confront Exxon Mobil, a successor company to that oil monopoly. “It’s hard enough to get anyone to take on powerful interests, but when they’re the powerful interest from which your family derived its wealth, that’s really brave,” Mr. McKibben said.

Source: International New York Times July 16, 2020 18:22 UTC