Luxury community of "conscience"

When the locals cried green-wash, the elite developer cried class envy. Welcome to Paradise Valley.

By Fred Haefele

Read more: Environment, Opinion, Global Warming

Image: Ameya Preserve

Rendering of home at Ameya Preserve.

May 3, 2008 | LIVINGSTON, Mont. -- Somewhere on his 9,500-acre ranch in Montana's Paradise Valley, maybe as he watched the sun-dazzled Yellowstone River slide by the 12,000-foot Absaroka Mountains, Wall Street tycoon and self-described conservationist Wade Dokken must have had a vision: He would create a new kind of luxury community in the heart of the American West. Different from the typical recreation-based developments, utopian in concept, his Ameya Preserve would be a place of unsurpassed beauty, where bright and uncommonly well-heeled people could, however briefly, take their ease in a community implementing the kind of cutting-edge technology that could one day save the planet.

Along these lines, Ameya (Sanskrit for "without boundaries") would be powered entirely by solar, wind or geothermal sources, the buildings would be constructed according to the most advanced environmental specifications. Most prominently, Ameya would also be designed to "zero out," which means that the carbon emitted in the construction process would be scrupulously calculated, then offset by planting forest tracts somewhere else in the West.

In place of golf or skiing, residents could participate in a variety of Chautauqua-like events, conducted by Ameya "cultural directors," community members with distinguished backgrounds in the arts and sciences. Indeed, the people Ameya would have on board include some of the brightest stars on the American scene: best-selling author and restaurateur Alice Waters; soprano Renée Fleming; paleontologist Jack Horner; and former head of New York's Metropolitan Museum, Thomas Hoving, to name a few.

In terms of best and brightest, Dokken could hardly hope for better. The only thing he might wish is that Park County locals stay too dazzled to notice that his project is a meticulously designed biosphere for the über-riche, built smack in the middle of habitat that conservationists are fighting to save.

It's fair to say that, for the world's wealthiest, environmental issues have not always been a prime concern. Often enough, ignoring the environment is exactly how they got rich, and nowhere is this more true than in the American West, where the ravening extractive industries have run roughshod for over a century. It's not surprising that plush developments like Big Sky's Yellowstone Club (where skiers schuss on trademarked "Private Powder") occasionally have issues with the EPA.

The ultimate glitzification of sleepy mountain towns like Aspen, Colo., and Jackson Hole, Wyo., was more about insouciance than noblesse oblige. So to many, it was refreshing to hear a high-end developer talking knowledgeably about aquifers and habitat depletion. At first, Dokken got a lot of good ink about how painstakingly his initial proposal was put together. "I was kind of blown away (with it)," Jim Barrett, director of the Park County Environmental Council, told David Nolt, who penned an in-depth investigation of Ameya in NewWest.net ("The Voice of the Rocky Mountains"). "It's not perfect, but if we were to write the handbook on smart growth development ... that's basically what it was."

A North Dakota native, Dokken made his fortune on Wall Street as president of American Skandia, a financial services company. He sold Skandia to Prudential in 2003, returned west to deal in high-end real estate. (Price for an "Ameya Estate Preserve Lot": $2.1 million.) A tycoon who votes Democratic, a developer who sees himself as a conservationist, Dokken had straddled enough fences to know that if he was to build Ameya in a place like Paradise Valley, it would help to win over the community, and a fairly sophisticated one at that.

For years, the cowboys, ranchers, artists and working people of Livingston coexisted peaceably with celebrities, from movie folk like Sam Peckinpah and Jeff Bridges to famous writers like Jim Harrison and Tim Cahill. What they all had in common was they knew a great place when they saw one, and they liked it the way it was. In this manner, except for the bank account, notoriety and charisma, their move to the Montana Rockies was much like my own. I know a good place when I see one, too.

By last June, Ameya seeded the local papers with ads trumpeting the smorgasbord of benefits that the development, were it approved, would bring to Park County. These included a large spike in property tax revenues, a $50,000 donation to the rural fire department, the building of one Habitat for Humanity house for every 50 built at Ameya, funding for two advanced-placement teachers at Park County High School, and a 200-acre reservation for Livingston's "Farms for Families," a local program that promotes organic farming.

If such high-flying P.R. made locals a bit leery ("One can't help but notice the lengths to which Ameya is going ... to make their project palatable to the public," one letter to the Livingston Enterprise observed), the discovery that Ameya would try to buy two sections of public land made them downright skeptical. Though the project was still in the early planning stages, by July, locals began airing their doubts in a series of blogs and letters to the papers.

While some thought it laudable that Ameya eschewed the traditional 6,000-square-foot "Log-Mahal" for more discreet 4,000 footers, and that these homes would be powered renewably, and that the acreage upon which they'd be built was subjected to exhaustive impact studies, many struggled with pronouncements like "Ameya will be the most sustainable community ever built." Other project descriptions seemed almost nonsensical. A "private national park"? A "community of culture and conscience"? Finally, Ameya's assertion that "this project preserves natural resources that couldn't be preserved by any other means" involved the kind of death-defying, leap-of-faith logic few besides Dokken could manage.

Next page: There followed a brief communal gasp