Emma Johnson
Billionaire Wilderness: The Ultra-Wealthy and the Remaking of the American West, by Justin Farrell, Princeton University Press, 392 pp., $27.95
Three miles north of Jackson, Wyoming, overlooking the National Elk Refuge, sits the National Museum of Wildlife Art. While the museum contains pieces from around the world, some of the landscapes depicted are just a stone’s throw away. One of these is a medium-sized painting, oil on canvas, titled Great Falls of the Yellowstone. A waterfall tumbles over a cliff, snowy peaks form the horizon, and rocks thrust up in the foreground like daggers.
Great Falls was painted in 1884 by Thomas Hill, an English-born artist who immigrated to the United States in 1844 and settled in Massachusetts. As a teenager, he worked alongside artists of the Hudson River School, a 19th-century American art movement that romanticized nature and its “discovery.” Hill moved to California and kept the style, painting piece after piece of the dramatic American West.
Over one hundred years later, people still leave the East Coast and the big cities for Jackson in search of the same idyllic scenes. But many of the new arrivals differ from Hill in a crucial way: they have personal assets of at least $20 million. They often have far more.
“Nature takes on unique power for the ultra-wealthy,” Justin Farrell, Associate Professor of Sociology at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, writes in his strikingly personal and narrative-driven book, Billionaire Wilderness: The Ultra-Wealthy and the Remaking of the American West, published March 2020. Writing for a non-academic audience, Farrell lays out how the picturesque landscapes of the American West provide places for the ultra-wealthy to grapple with two questions: how to best enjoy and grow their wealth, and how to cope with the guilt and alienation that comes with being very rich.
The wealth gap in Teton County, where Jackson is located, has never been higher than it is today, and the differences between those at the very top and everyone else are staggering: the top one percent of people in Teton County make 233 times more than the bottom 99 percent. This gap began growing noticeably in the mid-1980s when both incomes and housing costs in the area started to skyrocket. Since then, the ultra-wealthy’s income from financial investments has grown while service job salaries within Teton County have remained stagnant. As more and more ultra-wealthy people move to Jackson and buy land, the vast chasms between them and everyone else will only widen. For Farrell, Teton County’s wealth gap makes the area a useful case study for the wider phenomenon of wealth inequality in the American West.
Billionaire Wilderness emerged from what Farrell sees as a major gap in social science literature: the lack of ethnographic analysis of the people at the top rung of the socioeconomic ladder. More specifically, the book looks at the earth-shaking role that urban wealth accumulation has on the livelihoods and cultures of rural communities. Farrell interviewed hundreds of ultra-wealthy people reshaping the West, including hedge-fund millionaires, investment bankers, and oil and gas CEOs. “The increased concentration of wealth is not only an urban phenomenon,” he writes, “but it also deeply and directly affects tens of millions of Americans living in rural areas.”
Farrell wasn’t granted this level of access by chance: he is a Yale professor, a white man, and was born and raised in Wyoming. He writes that Yale’s prestigious reputation appealed to the ultra-wealthy, and, in a recent interview, he hypothesized that his Wyoming origins connected with “the American and masculine identity that [the ultra-wealthy] wanted to identify with.” If he were someone else, he may never have received an insider’s look into places like the Yellowstone Club, an exclusive private residential community located fifty miles northwest of Teton County. From the inside, Farrell describes attending the Club’s happy hours, dining at the mountaintop lodge, and skiing on the Club’s private slope. The Yellowstone Club is the perfect representation of the ultra-wealthy’s role in Jackson: the takeover and environmental destruction of a mountain for the recreation of a select few.
Farrell’s interviews show that the ultra-wealthy want to keep the natural environment (which they see as picturesque landscapes that are protected but open for recreation) just as it is – no matter the costs to others. Their desire to conserve the environment seems admirable. But seeing how this conservation work plays out in Jackson, Farrell’s research uncovers other motives behind their intentions. From joining the boards of local conservation groups to putting land under conservation easement to how they dress, all of the ultra-wealthy’s decisions tie back to this one idea: how nature can benefit themselves. And the lengths they go to keep the environment as “pristine” and secluded as in a Thomas Hill painting sends ripples through the rest of Jackson.
As Farrell finds, the natural environment in Jackson compounds the privilege that the ultra-wealthy already enjoy. Their homes in Jackson Hole offer respite from the pressures of their jobs, such as leisure time in which to recuperate before the next big business deal or political campaign. They work nature to their economic advantage more directly, too: Wyoming is a tax haven, so buying a piece of land, building a mansion, and putting the rest of the land under conservation easement can produce millions of dollars in tax deductions.
The natural environment has deep cultural significance, as well. The West is often romanticized as a place of authenticity and simplicity; to some of Farrell’s interviewees, it’s a place to shed or hide their wealth guilt. Clothing is one of the central ways that the ultra-wealthy meet perceived perceptions of authenticity and simplicity. One of Farrell’s interviewees said, “Jackson has as big an economic gap as exists anywhere on the planet, but you usually don’t ever see it. You can be at a party, and you don’t know if the person that is there in blue jeans is a billionaire or a struggling tree-hugger.” In an effort to make friends with the locals, the ultra-wealthy will often don flannels, jeans, and cowboy boots to downplay their vast wealth. They trade their Teslas for pickup trucks, a switch that was a point of pride for several of Farrell’s subjects. For many, being rich was synonymous with being “inauthentic.” In an irony that Farrell draws out, they dress the part of a middle-class American, putting on the “costume of the day,” as one ultra-wealthy person said. It was a way for them to pretend to live a simpler life, which many of them equated with a happier life, without losing the cushion of immense wealth.
But the power that the ultra-wealthy have over nature comes at a price. Teton County includes the town of Jackson, Grand Teton National Park, and part of Yellowstone National Park, which means that 97 percent of county land is under federal control. This land is restricted from development, a stipulation that Farrell cites as the major barrier to affordable living in Jackson. After the ultra-wealthy buy large swaths of property and place it under conservation easement, little remains of the three percent that’s not under the purview of the federal government. The land that is left becomes more expensive and exclusive. While Jackson’s low-income population struggles, the ultra-wealthy seldom support the organizations working on immigration issues or affordable housing. Instead, as Farrell shows through his network analyses, most of the philanthropic money goes to organizations in conservation, wildlife, and the arts. Non-profits and foundations in Jackson are primarily supported by philanthropy rather than by grassroots fundraising, which means that the ultra-wealthy dictate who gets money and who doesn’t. The ultra-wealthy then use their philanthropy dollars as ways to ensure that undeveloped land stays that way, to secure the picturesque landscapes full of charismatic animals for themselves, and to build their own social and cultural networks. The people and organizations who don’t fit into the ultra-wealthy’s visions for Jackson’s future are left to the wayside.
“Connoisseur conservation,” “environmental veneer,” and “gilded green philanthropy” are just a few of the catch-phrases that Farrell uses to describe the ultra-wealthy’s relationship to nature. These sociological buzzwords come to life in his interviews. Said one billionaire:
I am interested in the stuff [of conservation], yeah because I spent the summer looking to buy a piece of property… I chartered this helicopter and spent the summer all over Wyoming and Montana with the idea of buying one of them and putting a conservation easement, and at some point, I probably will.
This is “nature benefits” in action. By Farrell’s analysis, the conservation idea is mostly an excuse – an excuse to fly a helicopter, buy a piece of land out West, pay less taxes. What becomes clear through these interviews is that very few of the ultra-wealthy are conscious of the effects of their casual purchases: how, for instance, buying land makes affordable housing harder to build. In Billionaire Wilderness, however, Farrell traces these causal chains while mapping the psychology behind the ultra-wealthy’s refusal to see them.
The focus of Billionaire Wilderness is on the ultra-wealthy, but the book would ring hollow without the perspective of the working poor in communities like Jackson. Farrell makes it increasingly clear that everything the ultra-wealthy do affects the one-third of the Jackson population who clean their houses, take them fishing, and serve them food. From Farrell’s interviews, the reader learns that the impacts the ultra-wealthy have on the people who work for them extend far beyond income inequality. The rise in cost of living has skyrocketed, forcing many working people to move out or be evicted from their homes – something that is becoming standard in Teton County, where affordable housing is practically nonexistent. Some families are forced to leave Wyoming for neighboring Idaho, where they must drive to work every day over the treacherous 8,432-foot Teton Pass. Social life has changed too. One local interviewee told Farrell: “No, I don’t feel like part of the community. When you are Hispanic, you are not included. As Hispanic, you can’t be included, or the activities are very expensive and you cannot do them.” By pricing out and socially excluding the working poor of Teton County, Farrell highlights how many are living on razor-thin margins while working in $20 million homes.
Farrell’s conversations also dispel some critical misconceptions that readers could have about the low-income folks of Jackson, including the stereotype of the white “ski bum.” In fact, many Jackson residents are undocumented immigrants who work in the homes of the ultra-wealthy. Their stories highlight the alarming wealth disparity that Teton County is now known for. What the book lacks, however, is a discussion of the relationship between the working poor and nature. How do the low-income residents of Jackson use the natural environment? How have their experiences in nature changed with the growing number of ultra-wealthy people moving in, buying land, and putting tracts under conservation easement? How has the presence of the ultra-wealthy affected the ways that the working poor see and experience the natural world? Answering these questions could better inform how local conservation organizations could transition to community-driven conservation efforts that better serve those with the least access to nature.
One can’t help but wonder if a few of the Jackson Hole ultra-wealthy might one day pick up Billionaire Wilderness, wondering if what they said once upon a time to a young Yale professor ever made it into print. Will they be angry, confused, hurt, inspired, enlightened? The book’s purpose isn’t necessarily to inspire change; it is more descriptive than prescriptive. One goal for public action that Farrell suggests is strengthening Wyoming’s loose tax laws, which welcome extreme wealth while requiring little contribution in return. Electing representatives who support revisions could slow down the rampant speed of inequality.
The question still remains, though, if the ultra-wealthy did read the book: would it make them alter their behavior? Because if the ultra-wealthy continue to leverage the natural environment for their own gain, especially at the expense of those most vulnerable in our society, what is happening in Jackson could spread—and is already spreading—throughout the rural United States. Which town will be next?
Emma Johnson is a Master of Environmental Management 2020 student at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies. She was a 2019 Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting Fellow and the Editor-in-Chief of the Yale Environment Review.