Money is power in this community and across the New West because it promotes what I have called “compensation” and “connoisseur” conservation, and is more deeply motivated by an attempt to recapture what was lost, to preserve the myths of the Old West, to achieve authenticity, to make a big Rockefeller-type conservation splash, to be socially integrated into elite circles, and as a form of leisure. This way of seeing the world, and this brand of philanthropy, has become institutionalized, and taken for granted as good, despite the ways that it disproportionately benefits the ultra-wealthy, and
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