Obituary: Peter M. Wege, Mich. Donor and Environmentalist

Peter M. Wege, a Western Michigan industrialist who poured tens of millions of dollars into the arts, education, and health care in his native region and was an early champion of environmental causes, died Monday at age 94, reports The Grand Rapids Press.

A retired chairman of Steelcase, an office-furniture company founded by his father, Mr. Wege established the Wege Foundation in 1967 and gave it most of the $214-million he made from stock sales in 1998 after taking the firm public. His grants ranged from $60,000 to stock a library in a small Michigan town to more than $20-million for the Grand Rapids Art Museum.

Mr. Wege donated numerous tracts of land to nature conservancies, worked with national green groups to clean up the Great Lakes, and insisted that his gifts—even those not directly related to environmental causes—be ecologically responsible in areas such as recycling and energy efficiency. “I want to be remembered as one of the people who tried to wake up the country on the environmental problems,” he said in 2004.