The Slums of Aspen uncovers the dark realities of one of America’s wealthiest ski towns

Photo courtesy of AspenSnowmass, Jeremy Swanson

Aspen, Colorado evokes images of snowy mountain passes, fancy ski resorts, expensive retreats, and scenic winter views. Its long-standing reputation as the ultimate skiing destination for the ultra-elite in the United States has made it one of the most expensive towns in the nation. If you look closely though, underneath these alluring images of beauty and wealth lies something less enchanting – environmental privilege.

Environmental privilege is the ability for certain groups of people, through their economic, political, or social power, to retain exclusive access to environmental amenities like clean air and water at the expense of others.

Lisa Sun-Hee Park and David Naguib Pellow’s The Slums of Aspen: Immigrants vs. the Environment in America’s Eden calls attention to the environmental privilege that underpins Aspen. Though there has been a growing awareness of the environmental problems that face many poor communities and communities of color, the book seeks to highlight the people and institutions that place these communities in harm’s way in the first place.

Though there’s an abundance of books and studies that cover topics like environmental racism and environmental inequality, less abundant are those that look at the role of environmental privilege in outsourcing these injustices.

The book explains how environmental privilege operates within Aspen for its wealthy tourists at the expense of its immigrant residents. Park and Pellow demonstrate the profound irony that many wealthy tourists and residents are critical of the population growth of immigrants because of the supposed strain on environmental resources they are causing. Afterall, tourists often have 10,000-square-foot vacation homes with heated outdoor driveways and swimming pools that are maintained year-round, ready for a visit. Immigrant workers, on the other hand, barely get by with their meager wages and live far away from their Aspen workplaces in mobile homes located in low-lying regions where they’re susceptible to floods and other environmental harms.

The strength of Park and Pellow’s analysis comes from their ability to zoom out from Aspen and look at how the wealth and privilege of these tourists is magnified globally through capitalism. For instance, the wealth that has allowed tourists to even be rich enough to maintain a mansion year-round in Aspen stems, in large part, from the polluting and exploitative industries that allow the wealthy to line their pockets. These industries, in turn, inflict ecological violence through the disproportionate health impacts suffered by communities of color and working-class neighborhoods around the world that are often located near these industries.

The book does fall flat in the way it characterizes the environmental movement as predominantly nativist, affluent, and white. Park and Pellow blanket the environmental movement as being part of a “politics of the rich and comfortable.” The book even goes further by describing the mainstream environmental movement as one that is not concerned about racial or social justice.

This very broad portrayal ignores the long history that people of color have had as they struggled and fought for their rights to a healthy environment. The assumption that only white people care about the environment rings hollow.

Of course, I can’t be too harsh – this book was only published in 2011 and much has changed since then. For instance, issues concerning environmental justice (or privilege for that matter) have only recently been put at the front and center of the movement.

Despite these weaknesses, the book’s focus on how immigrants are forcibly marginalized and rejected drives the story forward through the very honest accounts of the struggles that they face. Lorena, an immigrant worker who works in hotels in and around Aspen, for instance, explains: “You just feel that you’re not wanted around those rich people other than to do their housekeeping, you know?” Even though immigrant workers are vital to the flourishing of the economy and the vibrancy of the community, they often find themselves left out at best, or targets for racist attacks at worst. Perhaps I shouldn’t be too surprised, merely disappointed. Afterall, the immigrant experiences recounted in this book are not unique to Aspen – not at all.

The book captures the frustration of the authors – a frustration that sits with the readers as they too try to understand the inherent contradictions of how a place like Aspen, often portrayed as environmentally conscious and liberal as it is so often portrayed, falls short of ever being truly aware of itself as a town rooted in environmental privilege.

But more than simply wallowing in their frustrations, Park and Pellow recognize the importance of calling out environmental privilege and the forces that stand in the way of a just and sustainable future – not just in Aspen, but everywhere.