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Title is misleading. That's not excess. Excess is dropping $20k on a wedding when you have a mortgage and are only making $50k/yr. What Parker did was tasteless, but not the worst thing people with money do sometimes.
Building an environmentally damaging shrine in a protected wildlife zone for a one time event qualifies as excess.
This is absolutely disgusting. I wonder if it had been a more prominent natural area, such as Yosemite Valley or Muir Woods or Yellowstone where he decided to build his castle. Surely he could afford whatever fines would be levied anywhere, but the public outcry would have been far more prominent, the beauty of the areas well-known and understood and agreed-upon. These are places we have mutually determined to protes…
But Big Sur is hardly some little known park. It's well above Muir Woods in annual visitors (I'm seeing 3M vs 700k) and not too far behind Yosemite (3M vs 4M). I'm pretty surprised that there hasn't been an uproar over it yet. This is the first I've heard of it. Good on Madrigal.
Looks like the hotel was on private land, so really the issue is the waterway modifications and general carelessness with regards to laws and regulations. Those laws and regulations are still extremely important: water is a complex subject especially in the west. In this case the river flows directly through the state park and has many ecological considerations, as well as fishing (salmon spawning) and other wildlife.
So, it's still private land, but anything that happens to a stream in California has gotta be done right or you're in trouble, and there's a damn good reason why even if you don't like fish.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
| But it's the law in California that you can't cut off public access to the coastline or alter it willy-nilly, and has been for a long time. Really? What a great law!
Kinda. All coastlines are public-access, but if you own the property up to the coast (say, a cabin on a river), you do not have to grant access across your property. So, you could walk down the river and hang out in front of this cabin, but you can't trespass across private property.
I learned a lot of things during that period, but the weird thing is, the one that really stuck was how weird people with money can be. Oh, sure, we had our share of middle class customers, but for the most part we delivered to doctors, lawyers, business owners and the like, who would thrown down anywhere from $200 to $1000 per order on meat and act like it was nothing. I don't think they really cared about some of the values that come with the whole local foods movement, or the values that come with organic farming, they just heard about some health fad, decided to buy this meat, and stuck with it because it tasted good.
This is just the same really, only on a much more epic scale. Yeah, these people were rich, but at best their net worth was around $5 million, so their obscenities were limited to just buying ridiculous amounts of meat for an absurd amount of money while bringing it back home to their McMansion in a new BMW or a Mercedes, sometimes a Cadillac Escalade if they insisted on being that revolting. When you have a net worth that extends beyond the billion dollar line, then the obscenity of your purchasing choices is virtually unlimited.
And yet, you have these other titans with net worths that dwarf the net worths of so many other people who could do the most obscene crap with their money...but they don't. There's no shortage of rich people who are generous with their money, but at the same time there's no shortage of rich people who are just weird with it. I've ultimately decided that the difference is that the former never gave much priority towards money in the first place, but they got it anyway, or they had priority at first but changed their minds afterwards because they have large minds, and now money is merely a tool for greater things. Then you have that latter group of people who really wanted money, and made conscious efforts towards that goal, but in the end small minds are limited in ambition, so they make limited amounts of money and flaunt their petty wealth in ways only a small mind can, with fancy cars, McMansions, and large quantities of really expensive meat.
Sean Parker is just another one of those small minds, only he was one of the few who got a little luckier than most, acquired wealth those little fish could never possibly hope to achieve, and spent it in a way a small mind typically would, by disregarding the natural legacy of an old growth forest so he can build some tacky castle in the middle of it, all the while letting his construction crew make all these amateur mistake, because once again, a small mind.
I certainly hope my mind is bigger than such frivolities, just in case.
If I were him, I'd want to salvage my reputation and quick. Maybe donate some huge amount more (Wedding cost was $10M? Donate $10M.) and humbly apologize. Otherwise, he'll always be "that facebook guy who cut down the forest."
This is getting a lot of bad press for Mr. Parker--my eco-aware friends on facebook (yeah, I know) are going nuts over this. If I were him, I'd want to salvage my reputation and quick. Maybe donate some huge amount more (Wedding cost was $10M? Donate $10M.) and humbly apologize. Otherwise, he'll always be "that facebook guy who cut down the forest."
I respect him for what he did at Napster, what he attempted to do at Plaxo (as some start ups today have, in a way, picked up where he left off), what he helped Facebook become, and what he did at Spotify, but he comes off as incredibly cocky[1] and has a talking style filled with arrogance[2].
Again, nothing but respect for what he accomplished in the business world. But nothing seems to piss people off more than a rich guy who thinks he can do whatever he wants. Especially when it involves the environment...in California...in a National Park. It'll be interesting to see what happens.
1: http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenbertoni/2011/09/21/sean-pa... . The interviewer seemed to convey his tone pretty well.
2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCyMz-u-HcQ . Good interview, and he is obviously incredibly smart, but he comes off in such a way that seems very egotistical. Maybe when you're a billionaire you can get away with that.
This is getting a lot of bad press for Mr. Parker--my eco-aware friends on facebook (yeah, I know) are going nuts over this. If I were him, I'd want to salvage my reputation and quick. Maybe donate some huge amount more (Wedding cost was $10M? Donate $10M.) and humbly apologize. Otherwise, he'll always be "that facebook guy who cut down the forest."
Title is misleading. That's not excess. Excess is dropping $20k on a wedding when you have a mortgage and are only making $50k/yr. What Parker did was tasteless, but not the worst thing people with money do sometimes.
The reason Big Sur is the way it is, is that development has been tightly restricted. In this sense, the construction Parker did was directly counter to the spirit of Big Sur. It's more of a "take only pictures, leave only footprints" kind of place. It's one of the most magical places in the American West.