Jeff Tannenbaum’s new firm, Titan Grove, is funding businesses rooted in sustainability. Lake Nona Institute, backed by billionaire Joe Lewis, hosts an annual forum to explore health and wellness solutions. Socially responsible investments reached $31 trillion at the start of 2018 in Europe, Japan, Canada, the U.S., Australia and New Zealand, a 34% increase in two years, according to the Global Sustainable Investment Alliance. About 45% of family offices have said they plan to increase their sustainable investments over the next 12 months.

Zero Waste
The Camerons, who met on the set of “Titanic,” have gone further than most. They now solely eat plant products and have stretched their holistic approach to their children’s education. In 2006, Amis Cameron and her sister Rebecca Amis opened the private Muse School in Calabasas, California, the first in the U.S. to be solar powered, zero waste and with a fully organic, plant-based lunch program.

They shifted the lunch offering to entirely plant-based in 2015 over the objections of some parents.

“We had major pushback and we actually lost quite a few families,” Rebecca Amis said. “But now we’ve got families moving from all over the United States and even some families from Europe coming to the school.”

Amis Cameron’s One Meal a Day initiative is designed to make her call for a vegan approach accessible for people without the resources of a Hollywood couple. It aims to persuade people to eat one plant-based meal daily.

“One person eating one plant-based meal a day for a year saves 200,000 gallons of water and the carbon equivalent of driving from Los Angeles to New York,” Amis Cameron said. “Every time they look at what they’re putting on their plates, they can make a difference. That’s really empowering."

Even Cameron’s movie productions have joined the movement. He’s working on two sequels to “Avatar,” his science-fiction blockbuster set in a universe where Earth’s natural resources have been depleted. Catering on set was solely plant-based, while his studio operates on solar power.

The potential of the kind of incremental progress championed by his wife has been enough to make the director of such dystopian films as “The Terminator,” “Aliens” and “Avatar” feel some optimism, Amis Cameron said.

“My husband’s a doomsday kind of guy,” she said. “But we were walking on the beach about a month afterwards and he stopped and he said, ‘For the first time in my life I have hope.”’

--With assistance from Blake Schmidt.