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February 16 - February 19, 2025
The first set of problems the rich seek to resolve are rooted in economic concerns: how best to enjoy, share, protect, and multiply the wealth they’ve acquired. The second set of problems are more social in character: how to wrestle with and respond to the social stigmas and personal guilt sometimes associated with great wealth. Nature comes to play a unique role in their struggles to deal with these ongoing financial, political, moral, and existential dilemmas.
The final reason these problems are seldom studied is because rural places are too often written off as irrelevant, or just interesting bucolic sideshows.
First, whatever their good intentions, those at the very top of the socioeconomic pyramid leverage nature to climb even higher. Ironically, environmental conservation becomes an engine for multiplying wealth and gaining social prestige for wealthy people and wealthy institutions. And seeking to enjoy their wealth, landscapes and wildlife are transformed into ultra-exclusive enclaves, where money ensures private access to the healing tonic of nature and a sanctuary from crass materialism.
Second, burdened by social stigmas, status anxiety, and feelings of inauthenticity or guilt, the ultra-wealthy use nature and rural people as a vehicle for personal transformation, creating versions of themselves they view as more authentic, virtuous, and community minded. They model their personal transformation on a popular idea of the working poor in rural, outdoors-oriented places in the West—people who, despite their low-status careers and lack of material comforts, seem free from the snares of wealth and power, and are thought to live a noble life of contentment, frontier authenticity,
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In the end, love for nature and rural people can create a thick veneer that helps to morally justify vast natural resource consumption, romanticize the ugly reality of rural hardship as an idyllic choice—iconically modeled in the past by rugged cowboys and noble natives and lived out today by lovable white ski-bums and “van-life” bohemians—rather than the actual face of modern rural poverty
In some ways, these two people could not be any more different, but they depend on each other to live their version of a good life.
He wonders aloud whether wealthy people care more about saving a moose or a bear than helping him and other immigrants who are suffering.
people like Hector are seeing more clearly how these same friends who have so much extra money and power to help nevertheless support the status quo and perpetuate a system that is making it increasingly difficult for Hector and his family to live a decent life.
We know relatively little about the flip side of economic hardship—namely, the lives and experiences of those at rarefied heights who sit atop the socioeconomic strata.
Empathy is more naturally given to the people and communities obviously suffering harm, rather than, say, a Wall Street financier who struggles with the life complexities and social-psychological dilemmas that accompany immense wealth and power.
“empathy walls,” “obstacle[s] to deep understanding of another person, one that can make us feel indifferent or even hostile to those who hold different beliefs.… In a period of political tumult, we grasp for quick certainties. We shoehorn new information into ways we already think. We settle for knowing our opposite numbers from the outside.31
Studying wealth can feel like studying everything at once and nothing at all. Everywhere we look, we see its influence. Yet paradoxically, money means nothing in isolation from culture, politics, and markets.
These massively important entities were right in front of my face, but they remained cloaked from view. Invisibly present, yet still immensely powerful as their tectonic plates kept pushing them upward, continuing to shape everything in their expansive range.
Surging further, in 2015, nearly 8 out of every 10 dollars of income made here was coming not from traditional wages or salary, but from financial interest and dividends.
Scholars point toward, among other things, the decline of tax rates on the top 1 percent, the erosion of unions and collective bargaining, Wall Street deregulation, soaring executive salaries and bonuses, new trade agreements, and transformations within real estate markets.
The luxury of free time, and the ownership of land, has allowed avid recreators like Jim to cultivate high levels of what we might call “nature capital.” Similar to other noneconomic forms of cultural and social capital, it is a particular way of experiencing nature, and involves the right combination of wealth, land, free time, recreation capability, romantic attachment, and gilded environmental concern.
Nature itself becomes a vehicle for economic gain through privatizing a huge swath of ecologically sensitive public land for billions of dollars in desirable land development and real estate construction, and providing private recreation services to those able to pay the exorbitant price. And despite romantic praise and emulation of the small Western community outside its gates, the reality is that their connections with these rural people are often motivated by economic exchange and services rendered, and actual levels of charitable giving by the Yellowstone Club Foundation are relatively
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found that this all leads to a mild, but pervasive, sense of paranoia and persecution complex among the ultra-wealthy, symptomatic of Colin’s defensiveness about three particular myths: (1) the ultra-wealthy aren’t deserving people; (2) the ultra-wealthy aren’t integrated into the community like other “normal” people; (3) the ultra-wealthy deserve to be taken advantage of.
Motivating the shock was a sense of entitlement, or assumed privilege of privacy that was, for them, self-evident given the high-profile nature of their careers, the threats that come with being ultra-wealthy, and that given how hard they work and the publicity of their lives, they deserve to relax in peace and quiet with their families, especially considering how much they’ve paid to an institution that promises such.
I found that the problem many low- and middle-class people have is not that a billionaire is allowed to purchase this private land, but that this pristine land is then locked up and overlaid with an elite culture of privacy so intense, so anxious, and so entitled, that it requires highly securitized protection from the public by former U.S. Secret Service agents.
Environmental Veneer—by which I mean the simplistic popular assumption that environmental conservation is assumed to be, in a vague sense, an altruistic public good, rather than a vehicle for protecting wealth, achieving social status and integration, expressing group identity, sustaining societal advantages, and generally reinforcing many of the social mechanisms that give rise to environmental problems in the first place.
Property owners receive such compensation—usually as a charitable deduction to their adjusted gross income for up to fifteen years or a cash payment from a land trust based on the appraised value of the land—in exchange for agreeing to put their land under easement, meaning that it is closed from any further developments, such as new housing or commercial construction.
Conservation easements can become an instrument for what social scientists call “cumulative advantage” or the “Matthew Effect.”
First, conservation has directly and indirectly intensified wealth inequality by making the area uniquely attractive to the ultra-wealthy, creating intense housing demand and land scarcity that has dramatically reshaped who lives in the community, and how people make their money.
I found that nature provides a special dispensation for purchases and practices that may otherwise be viewed as morally suspect, opulent, or greedy. Nature is priceless, but priceless experiences can be quite expensive. In communing with nature we experience something much deeper, honest, and True than our everyday experiences in society that are seen as inauthentic, morally hazardous, or just the product of selfish economic exchange.
“Connoisseur Conservation”
Nature becomes a medicinal storehouse, tapped for its health-giving mental and physical rewards, administered by immersion in its aesthetic beauty.
Most interestingly, I found that because these goods and services are purchased with a practical aim to access the therapeutic benefits of nature, they are not as likely to be considered impractical opulence or crass materialism. Money spent on nature can be a moral loophole. Opulence with an ethical twist.
Where some critics might point to the contradiction between environmental sustainability and vast resource consumption like massive mountain homes or über-private ski clubs, the contradiction doesn’t apply here for the ultra-wealthy because they tend to judge their actions using a different moral rubric when these actions involve therapeutic enjoyment of nature.4 One cannot put a price tag on self-care and the nurturing of the soul.
Nature’s a lot bigger than I am—I’m just looking.”
money simply opens the door to these experiences, which are themselves viewed as priceless.
Additionally, the notion of “balance” implies maintaining a delicate equilibrium that discourages drastic changes that might disrupt the status quo. Change should happen carefully and incrementally, but not through radical or disruptive actions advocated by some environmental groups that might interfere with private property rights or laissez-faire economics.
Connoisseur Conservation describes the cultural worldview through which the rich relate to and use nature.
Connoisseurship of nature becomes not just an outward signal of social status, but a producer of it.
This important philanthropic paradox—can wealth solve the very problems wealth creates?—has implications far beyond Teton County itself, in a nation increasingly defined by wealth imbalance.
Philanthropy became a valuable form of social currency in the community, and a status market emerged that conveyed higher prestige on some charitable issues, but not others.
Only 37 percent of local nonprofits are private foundations, but they own 65 percent of the total assets in the community, meaning that the bulk of the resources for the community might be locked away, or not even go toward many of the local needs.
In other words, assets for health and human service organizations remained stagnant, especially when compared to other organizations that enjoyed an economic bonanza over this same time period, all while the needs of the working poor continued to escalate in scope and intensity.
In other words, nonprofits at the top—conservation and arts—enjoy a disproportionately large slice of social and human capital that all organizations rely on to raise money and carry out their mission.
philanthropy is an important venue for socializing and integrating into elite circles—especially through environmental leisure and the arts—this means that issues like poverty, affordable housing, or immigration are viewed as what I call “buzz-kill” issues that spoil the experience of paradise,
The top 10 percent of families owns 76 percent of all wealth in the United States ($67 trillion in 2013).2 The bottom 50 percent—meaning half of the entire population of the United States—is left to divvy up just 1 percent of all wealth.
When the ultra-wealthy lament such loss and sacrifice, they are talking specifically about a lost sense of authenticity. Put differently, they aim to regain a part of themselves that is more genuine, sincere, virtuous, and uncontaminated.
Indeed, there is honor associated with the success, but the deeper and more authentic honor—especially given American reverence for self-determination and myths about rags-to-riches—is in the early stages of the struggle itself, where individual will seems the only fuel for survival.
Certainly, these conundrums are all relative, because such money would make a transformational difference for people and communities that are in poverty—but for these ultra-wealthy individuals, more money isn’t necessarily transformative, but can be quite the opposite if more authentic aspects of life are sacrificed in exchange.
Nature becomes a purifier, a source of goodness, and a protector from the shallow allure of crass materialism.
This powerful relationship to nature stimulates philanthropic giving. In contrast to charitable giving to human and social services issues, which are mired in human failure, unintended consequences, and the complications of politics, this simple romanticized and spiritualized view of nature provides a more predictable return on charitable investment.
The longing for Old West traditions—qualities like frontier grit, honest work, common sense, rugged symbolism of the cowboy, closeness to nature of native tribes, and material contentment in rural environs—are an especially appealing antidote to counteract the loss of authenticity felt by some ultra-wealthy.
the ultra-wealthy find unique meaning in Old West culture because contentment keeps our most dangerous ambitions in check, and counterbalances the problems and superfluous temptations they face in modern times.
Locals resisted what they viewed as the tyranny of outside control, whether it be the billionaires or the federal government. For example, a letter circulated by locals in the 1940s warned fellow neighbors that “your recreational privileges in Jackson Hole will be practically at an end. There will be ‘don’t’ signs staring you in the face every mile or less.”
land conservation remains the goal, but is accomplished through a more cautious, and politically safe, form of conservation that leapfrogs the advocacy arena and largely sidesteps the political snares of bureaucratic land management.
