Follow the money, away from land
Do the rich really want to plunder the West’s public lands?
When you look at Forbes’ list of the richest person in every state and focus on the interior West, a couple of insights jump out. First, these folks aren’t that wealthy. Second, they didn’t get where they are by raping the land.
In this post, I want to argue against a widely held fear/assumption: that the future of the American West and its magnificent public lands will be controlled by the “economics” of “the rich” and their hideous investments in “extractive industries” such as oil, gas, mining, ranching, and logging. The theory has some historical merit (although I use the scare quotes for a reason). But today, it’s a false story, poorly supported by economics, powerful only to the extent that people on both sides believe in it.
To make that argument using this Forbes list, I must first acknowledge some obvious caveats. Identifying the richest person in each state is a hilariously imperfect measure of power. Alaska, Delaware, and West Virginia lack even a single billionaire, while California has 197 of them. And you can live in one state while making money in others.
But to me, the list does tell us something about regional economic engines. California’s richest person is in social media; Connecticut’s in hedge funds. Louisiana’s richest person made money on fried chicken, Nevada’s on casinos. Arkansas’ biggest fortune comes from Walmart; Iowa’s from corn and soybean genetics.
And yes, the richest people in Kansas are the politically active Charles Koch and family. They fulfill the troubling archetype: they fund libertarian institutions that oppose environmental regulations so as to make ever more money for the Kochs’ oil-based interests.
But in other Western states? Arizona’s Ernest Garcia II is a used-car magnate. South Dakota’s T. Denny Sanford is a banker. Idaho’s Frank VanderSloot made his money through multilevel marketing of nutrition and wellness products. North Dakota’s Gary Tharaldson has built and run 480 nationwide hotels since first buying a North Dakota Super-8 in 1982. And New Mexico’s Ron Corio is known as the “Godfather of Solar” because he popularized systems that rotate solar panels to maximize exposure.
Granted, I’d never heard of any of these people before studying this list. By most measures, they are not terribly rich or powerful. (Tharaldson is today’s 2,454th-richest billionaire, Forbes says.) But as Matthew Yglesias recently noted, when national political reporters go out to the sticks, they too often ask questions about inside-the-Beltway issues like “climate change, vibes, [and] the idea that people vote badly due to bad information.”
They fail to ask about, Yglesias says, the issues that actually impact voters in that region. Yglesias argues that Maine voters might particularly care about regulation of the lobstering industry. Along similar lines, Idahoans might care about any potential regulation of multi-level marketing schemes.
If so—if people vote based on regional economic interests—what they shouldn’t care about, according to this list, are bugaboos like privatizing public lands or loosening regulation on coal mining. Kochs excepted, these billionaires aren't getting rich from extractive industries.
Sure, Montana’s Dennis Washington got his start in mining, and Colorado’s Philip Anschutz in energy, but their empires are now diversified. The Lords of Yesterday (as Charles Wilkinson once termed the laws governing natural resource plunder) just aren’t generating much wealth today.
To be clear: this line of thinking suggests that old-fashioned extractive uses shouldn’t power political crusades. Not that they don’t. My politically active friends tell me that dismantling environmental regulations and public lands infrastructure remains a top priority for many conservative Western politicians.
And all I can say is, this analysis suggests they’re not doing it for economic reasons. That is, not for a society-wide increase in wealth, the creation of large numbers of jobs, or even the interests of the richest people in their states.
They may be doing it for money—for out-of-state donations, for greed, to aid the fortunes that a small number of people would make by privatizing the public benefits built by the investments of American taxpayers. But that’s not economics. That’s political corruption.
In short, continuing to grant too much power to the Lords of Yesterday is not only foolish politics but also bad economics. It’s thus not a problem of economics but of narratives. If we want everyone, rich and poor alike, to vote in their economic self-interest, we need to be sure they’re hearing the right natural stories.
Discussion:
All numbers and biographies sourced from Forbes’ list of the richest person in every state.
In Charles Wilkinson’s book Crossing the Next Meridian: Land, Water, and the Future of the West, the law professor identified the Lords of Yesterday as a set of laws giving undue favor to extractive industries. More recently, as in this article, the phrase has evolved to refer to people taking advantage of those laws.
I moved to Hamilton, Montana, from my hometown of Riverside, California, in 1992. My first look at the Bitterroot was on my drive to town to take a reporting job at the Ravalli Republic. I like to imagine I knew even then, as I noted how the ranchette sprawl south of Darby reminded me of Southern California on a much smaller scale, the extraction paradigm of the West I’d learned from books and newspapers had already been replaced.
In truth, I didn’t figure it out until a few years later when the fight over Mitchell Slough access began in earnest.
While there were still a few folks focused on getting the last of the “big pickles” — a phrase an old logging adjacent Forest Service employee once used with me to describe the Bitterroot’s still-standing old-growth ponderosa — to the mills, even then that extraction focus was already passé.
Access is now one of the most valuable scarce resources in the West and the wealthy have taken notice. Mitchell Slough. The Ruby River. The Crazies. Wyoming’s corner-crossing tyranny. That’s where the real action is these days.
A friend noted this recent article: https://www.outsideonline.com/culture/opinion/utah-lawsuit-public-land. But the richest person in Utah is the widow of car dealer Larry Miller. They sell Jeeps and big trucks to recreationists. Wouldn't economics dictate that politicians listen to them instead of the Lords of Yesterday?