National Park
What motivates many of the Prairie Reserve’s most ardent supporters is the chance to get in on the ground floor of something as lasting and majestic as a national park. George Matelich, a managing director of New York-based private-equity firm Kelso & Co., joined the cause and then the board after hearing Gerrity speak at a 2006 fundraising dinner at auction house Sotheby’s headquarters in New York.
“I would boil it down to a single line,” says Matelich, 56, who owns a vacation retreat in Montana. “How would you like to have had the opportunity to be a co-founder of Yellowstone National Park? This is an opportunity that is personally attractive both because of the scale and the chance to do something for all time -- not for the credit but for the satisfaction of doing it.”
F. Gibson “Gib” Myers Jr., a former partner of the $3 billion Mayfield Fund in Menlo Park, California, equates his mission with that of Theodore Roosevelt’s. The rough-riding, big game-hunting 26th president of the U.S. established five national parks and signed the powerful Antiquities Act, which allows presidents to unilaterally designate historic monuments.
‘Great Park’
Myers, 71, was so taken with the project after an early, rain-soaked visit in 2002 that he agreed to go on the board, and then become chairman, even before the Prairie Reserve had bought any land.
“I can’t think of anything better than being a Teddy Roosevelt, the founder of a great park,” Myers says. “Companies come and go, but the thought of being involved in something of such grandeur that will last forever is one of my dreams.”
Wealthy individuals replacing government as the primary protectors of sensitive land has become popular in recent years, with hedge-fund managers, broadcast and cable billionaires, and Europeans in love with the wide-open American West pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into acquisitions.
Feathered Women
Billionaire hedge-fund manager Louis Moore Bacon has spent more than $400 million on 200,000-plus acres of land in the U.S., including the 172,000-acre former Forbes family ranch in Colorado in 2007. Bacon is preserving much of the land -- which includes three 14,000-foot (4,300-meter) peaks -- in its native condition and donated 167,000 acres to the federal government for conservation easements.