Jeff Bezos: Future Humans ‘Will Visit the Earth the Way You Visit Yellowstone’

Renowned conservationist Jeff Bezos has shared his imaginative and prescient for planet Earth. It’s not sufficient to guard it for the people residing right here. No. Instead, in response to the second-richest man on this planet, future generations “will visit Earth the way you visit Yellowstone National Park.”

It seems whereas we’ve all been taking part in checkers speaking about house tourism, Bezos is taking part in 3D chess. Everyone’s targeted on billionaires sending folks to the edge of space. But Bezos’ grand plan is definitely to ship all of humanity into house with the possibility to revisit Earth like so many vacationers hit the nationwide parks every summer time.

The remarks got here final week at an event held on the National Cathedral in Washington, DC, with NASA Administrator Bill Nelson and others talking about house coverage. Bezos sat down for a one-on-one chat with Adi Ignatius, the editor-in-chief of the Harvard Business Review. He introduced up themes we’ve heard earlier than, together with his imaginative and prescient that every one polluting industries will exist in house at some point and that we’ll all dwell on house colonies that would, in his estimation, help 1 trillion folks. But he expanded on his imaginative and prescient in higher element about what, precisely, will occur to the planet we’ll all go away behind for Blue Origin-branded house colonies.

“This is the most precious planet in the world and we have to preserve it and conserve it and make sure that our children and their children and so on have this beauty in their lives,” Bezos stated.

At United Nations local weather talks a few weeks in the past, Bezos upped his pledge to conservation to a total of $3 billion of his $10 billion Earth Fund. Speaking with Ignatius, he stated he doesn’t view that cash and Blue Origin as two separate issues however quite a “duality.”

“We need to conserve what we have, restore what we’ve lost,” he stated. “This planet is so small, if we want to keep growing as a civilization, using energy as a civilization, most of that needs to be done off-planet. … This place is special. You can’t ruin it.”

To do that can require us all to dwell in house colonies. That would depart Earth to ultimately be, in Bezos’ imaginative and prescient, a spot for future people to go to however not dwell. “They may visit Earth the way you visit Yellowstone National Park,” Bezos stated. Ignatius requested a follow-up about who will get to dwell on Earth on this imaginative and prescient, which Bezos didn’t reply. (Which is unlucky as a result of I’d like to know!)

It’s extraordinarily telling that Bezos’ imaginative and prescient for the way forward for Earth is Yellowstone National Park, a spot that folks go to quite than dwell. As a former park ranger, I’m contractually obliged to say nationwide parks are cool and good. But they’re additionally an especially Western assemble of what constitutes “natural.” Yellowstone turned a park as a result of Americans had been busy rapaciously exploiting the West as a part of the entire Manifest Destiny undertaking to colonize the area. Today, no one exterior park rangers and employees dwell throughout the park’s borders and there are strict guidelines that prohibit searching and taking any assets from the park.

In reality, people had been as a lot part of Yellowstone earlier than the park was arrange. Tribes used it as a spot to hunt and collect assets. An estimated 27 tribes have connections to Yellowstone from a geographic vary spanning from North Dakota to Washington. But whereas tribes have enter on the park to a level, the park itself largely fails to inform these tales or the truth that it’s basically stolen land.

In that mild, Bezos’ large thought of turning Earth into Yellowstone elides the truth that people are as a lot a a part of this planet as they had been a part of Yellowstone earlier than Americans confirmed up. He’s pitching a really Western answer to the very Western downside of local weather change and environmental degradation, issues that Bezos’ very personal companies have performed a significant function in whereas enriching him to the purpose the place he now has an enormous sway on humanity’s subsequent step.

I don’t say this to doubt that Bezos’ intent is sweet. Yellowstone is among the most lovely locations on Earth—who wouldn’t need to shield what’s nonetheless fantastic and restore what’s misplaced its luster attributable to human actions? But whereas “what if pollution, but in space” and area journeys again to Earth might have a sheen of science fiction stylish, additionally they present a scarcity of creativeness for what options appear like for these of us residing right here now. Meanwhile, research after research reveals that Indigenous tribes have an unimaginable monitor document of conservation. The #landback movement and Indigenous-led protests in opposition to extra extraction present one other pathway ahead, one which reconnects us with the planet quite than making it a spot to go to for a weekend.