This is Climate One. I'm Greg Dalton.

The wide open spaces of the American West loom large in our country's mythology.

But that romantic narrative has always left something out.

You know, the virgin wilderness, a place that was unpeopled, where only animals roamed.

But the reality of that is that native people have always inhabited

these spaces. One percenters have contributed generously to preserve America's wilderness, going back

to the founding of our national park system. But leveraging wealth and privilege for access to

nature glosses over the human cost.

The idea of giving your time and philanthropy to protect nature is through this elite sort of white

lens that can be based on this romanticized view of nature.

And for example, for Yellowstone, had to remove certain people to create that even.

How much is access to so-called wilderness tied to wealth?

Climate One's empowering conversations feature all aspects of the climate emergency, the individual and the systemic,

the exciting and the scary, people who are in power and people who are disempowered.

Today, revisiting the idea of billionaire wilderness, up next on Climate One.

For many of us, the story of the American wilderness begins when Europeans arrived on these shores and began

conquering it.

What often gets written out is the history and culture of those native societies who are

here to begin with and whose relationships to the land is very different.

Because when you see the natural world and all the things in it as relations, as relatives,

you are then responsible to them.

Dina Jiliah Whitaker is a lecture of American Indian Studies at California State University, San

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