Pulling up to the red boat slip under a fiery sunset, no one in the boat was looking at the vivid pinks of the Caribbean sky. Instead, our eyes were on the towering hilltop ahead of us, with its wind turbines and precarious Balinese-style treehouses. Night was falling, and glowing ambient lights flickered on as if by magic to light up a maze of jungle-nestled villas and dirt paths. A man in well-tailored dress pants, a button-down, and loafers emerged; not the billionaire we’d come for, but one of the many trusted Sir Richard Branson whisperers in a staff of 134 we’d encounter over the next few days. “Welcome to Necker,” Eddie beamed.
I arrived at Necker Island under the cover of night and in a fog of disbelief. Whizzing in a golf cart through the thick bushes and past a two-deep clay tennis court, the sounds of an evening tennis match penetrated the near-darkness: “There’s Richard,” Eddie said with a half wave—a clearing in the trees revealing a six-foot-tall man with a wild mane of white hair raising his tennis racket mid-serve. Moments later, at my shared five-bedroom, three-villa complex called Bali High, Eddie pointed out a well stocked pool-deck bar area before moving on to the enclosed rooms—one of which I recognized from an MTV Cribs episode in which Mariah Carey showed off the suite. “If you wanna throw a party, the only person who’s going to be bothered is this central one,” Eddie laughed. The roar of the waves just below us made it clear we’d have the sound lulling us to sleep each night.
“Ok, so it’s a bachelor pad,” I reasoned to myself as I fell asleep that night with many preconceived notions still strong, having only seen a small slice of an island well-documented for its lemurs, swim-up bars, and celebrity guests. Waking up the next morning for a hike up to the wind turbines with one of the island’s engineers—and over the course of conversations with Branson himself over the next few days—I’d find out just how wrong I was about that.
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A self-sustaining paradise found
It should maybe come as no surprise that environmentalism is front of mind for a 73-year-old who has ambitions in commercial space tourism and owns hospitality properties all over the globe—but the rise of certain 21st-century billionaires in a modern space race may fog the perception people have of someone like Branson. Necker Island, once a flat, scrubby cay bought for $120,000 in the 1970s, is actually something of a testament to his life’s work in sustainability—but equally, it holds a mirror to both the sustainability advancements and issues of our lifetime.
The lush hills, sunken lagoons, and beachfront watersports and pool pavilions at Necker give way to fields of solar panels, three 120-foot wind turbines, and an underground sewage irrigation that grows much of the produce in a garden behind Branson’s private villa (the Virgin CEO lives on the island much of the year). Today, Necker Island is powered by wind (40%), solar (30%), and diesel (30%), with all of its water and electricity processed on-island. It is hoped that Necker will achieve full, daily carbon neutrality in the near future—and produce enough extra power to make other islands in its periphery self-sustaining, too. Perhaps even more impressive, everything here has been rebuilt, first (in part) when the main Great House was leveled by a 2011 fire, and again in 2017 after Hurricane Irma—a storm that devastated much of the British Virgin Islands.
Branson speaks wearily of those fits and starts when I ask him what’s next for Virgin: The island and the broader BVI’s recovery had demanded much of his attention the past several years. But now, he said, he can “finally” focus more squarely on his sustainability ventures, and most recently unveiled an initiative dubbed Planetary Guardians. The program unites scientists monitoring global climate change to biannually audit nine key climate change markers across sectors, from biodiversity to water use to chemical pollution.
