Remember When Billionaires Actually Did Good Things for Public Lands?

Once, America’s wealthiest used their fortunes to build parks, protect landscapes, and serve the public good. Now most buy naming rights, social platforms, or silence.

There was a time when America’s wealthiest believed they owed something to the country that made them rich.

They built libraries. They founded museums. They gave away land for parks, schools, and public gardens. They didn’t talk about “brand alignment” or “philanthropic optics.” They talked about obligation. About building something that would outlast them.

Andrew Carnegie famously said “the man who dies rich dies disgraced.” John D. Rockefeller Jr. spent a fortune buying up land in Wyoming and Maine so it could become Grand Teton and Acadia National Parks. Stephen Mather used his own money to campaign for the creation of the National Park Service in 1916.

These weren’t saints. They were industrialists with blood on their hands. But they understood something today’s billionaires have forgotten. Wealth once carried a duty to improve the public realm, not to escape from it.

The very landscapes that define America – Yosemite, Acadia, Grand Teton, the Blue Ridge Parkway – all carry fingerprin…