On President Tokayev’s Criticism of Eco-Activists Defending Almaty’s Mountain Ecosystem

A translation from my original article in russian language

This is a translation of my original article in russian language: https://jaxaliyeva.substack.com/p/a9c

It also got published on exclusive.kz

Note: The original interview on which this article is based can be read here: https://turkystan.kz/article/273954-qasym-zomart-toqaev-qazaqstan-zangyrudyn-zana-kezenine-qadam-basty

Before talking about cities that never sleep, experienced development companies, or eco-activists who are supposedly “blocking progress,” it is worth starting with something far simpler and more fundamental: ecology.

Mountains are not just a pretty backdrop. They are complex, functioning systems. Forests stabilize slopes, regulate runoff and snowmelt, filter water, shape microclimates, and absorb stress long before the consequences become visible to people.

I say this as a forester and natural resource management specialist-and, paradoxically, as Kazakhstan’s first professional golfer. As someone who has spent years moving between elite urban environments and real, working landscapes.

When mountain ecosystems fail, tourism doesn’t decline. It simply ceases to exist.

President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev has instructed the mayor of Almaty to turn the city into a place that “never ceases to amaze” citing New York, Moscow, and Paris as models.

Those cities never cease to amaze me, too — with their traffic, noise, pollution, and constant background stress. I have lived in all three. They are undeniably large and impressive, but they are also precisely the kind of places more and more people are trying to leave.

From an ecological standpoint, it is hard to understand why Almaty-a city embedded within a mountain ecosystem-should copy the most dysfunctional features of global megacities that are now actively trying to undo them.

Almaty’s appeal was never about scale or spectacle. It was always rooted in nature and a human-scale rhythm of life. By turning the city into a louder, faster imitation of somewhere else, we risk erasing exactly what makes people want to come here and what makes life here worth living.

The president has also noted that neighboring countries are intensively building ski infrastructure, as if the intensity of construction alone were proof of its necessity. Neighboring countries have also, with similar “intensity,” destroyed inland fisheries and driven the baiji river dolphin to functional extinction. That is hardly an argument for doing the same in the Caspian Sea. The grass is not always greener on the other side.

Tourists do not need another Paris or Geneva. They need Alma-Ata.

And if we are going to look abroad for examples, we should do so honestly. My experience comes from the United States: working as a natural resource technician and moving cattle in the Bridger-Teton National Forest-the same landscape that supports Jackson Hole, one of the most exclusive ski resorts in the world.

What American ski towns actually teach us

The American ski resorts people admire today did not emerge because someone rushed into pristine nature with money and confidence. They developed within constraints and now clearly demonstrate what happens when success collides with ecological and social limits.

Jackson Hole is a telling example. The valley’s modern identity is inseparable from conservation. John D. Rockefeller Jr., through a land-purchase campaign, halted private development and folded key areas into what became the protected Grand Teton-Greater Yellowstone landscape. Conservation came first; tightly limited development followed. That scarcity is precisely what made Teton County the wealthiest county in the United States.

But Jackson also illustrates the cost of success. Housing for workers has become scarce and unaffordable. Long commutes are now routine, businesses face labor shortages, infrastructure is strained, water is increasingly contested, and wildlife migration corridors are under pressure. Jackson Hole’s experience shows a simple truth: conservation buys time, not infinity. When demand exceeds the capacity of land, water, and labor, limits reassert themselves-even in the most protected places.

South of Jackson, in Pinedale, a different model took shape. After several years of uncertainty, the White Pine ski area was purchased by Joe Ricketts, a billionaire and owner of the Chicago Cubs. This immediately raised fears that White Pine would be turned into a second Jackson Hole. That scenario met firm resistance rooted in local identity. In Sublette County, pride of place is not rhetoric, it is practice. People live here deliberately, for quiet, working landscapes, proximity to largely intact wilderness, and a cost of living that allows ordinary residents to remain part of the community. Jackson Hole is viewed not as a model to emulate but as a cautionary tale of what happens when those qualities are sacrificed to tourism scale and real-estate pressure.

It was precisely the defense of this way of life, not opposition to development per se, that led to early limits through county planning, zoning, public hearings, and permitting. As a result, White Pine remains a local, accessible ski area with prices incomparable to destination resorts, while surrounding rangelands and watersheds continue to function as working landscapes rather than lifestyle marketing backdrops.

Other high-profile U.S. resorts- Park City, Utah, and Aspen, Colorado -followed a different trajectory. Both began as mining towns, and ski tourism arrived as a form of reuse of already disturbed land. That lowered ecological barriers early on, but it did not eliminate the need for regulation. Over time, both cities were integrated into strict land-use, zoning, and water-management systems that now define the limits of further growth.

Vail, Colorado, developed from the outset within an even more formalized framework. Its existence was made possible by the Multiple Use-Sustained Yield Act of 1960, which allowed ski resorts on U.S. Forest Service land only under continuous federal oversight. Every expansion requires environmental review, watershed protection, and justification within a multiple-use framework that considers wildlife and grazing alongside tourism. Vail grew not because of an absence of rules, but within them and those rules now define its limits.

Big Sky, Montana, and Deer Valley, Utah, are examples of pre-planned growth. Their capacity to absorb demand without destabilizing land use, infrastructure, and housing stems from early decisions about ownership, access, and scale, made before demand exploded. Big Sky developed through land swaps involving federal agencies, allowing land consolidation and phased growth. Deer Valley went even further, imposing strict limits on skier numbers, access, and use from the start-including the use of pricing as a demand-management tool-to align development with the capacity of land, water, and infrastructure.

The conclusion is straightforward: American ski towns exist and endure not because of construction speed, but because of pre-defined limits designed to protect nature.

On the convenience of blaming eco-activists

Let me be direct: eco-activism can be chaotic, politicized, and at times detached from reality. But dismissing it wholesale and then blaming it for weak tourism outcomes is not an argument.

Tourism, like almost everything in life, does not suffer because people ask uncomfortable questions. It suffers when those questions reveal that no one has done the basic math.

Reclamation.

Erosion control.

Long-term environmental monitoring.

Watershed protection.

These are not activist slogans. They are the dull, unglamorous foundations of mountain tourism. And yet, if you look at Shymbulak’s official website, it is hard to find a serious discussion of even one of these issues. The mountain is treated as scenery, not as a system that requires constant maintenance to function at all.

And water is where abstraction ends.

We have already polluted the air. Are we now going to pollute the water too?

Mountain forests are the most effective water filters we have. Few people realize that New York City, despite its size and density, drinks some of the cleanest municipal water in the world without conventional filtration. The city invested not in massive treatment plants, but in protecting mountain watersheds and forests-not out of romanticism, but because it was cheaper, smarter, and safer for public health.

In Utah, the mountains above Park City and Deer Valley are treated not only as recreation areas, but as water infrastructure for Salt Lake City. That is why any development there faces strict scrutiny: whatever happens uphill inevitably ends up in the tap downhill.

This is not environmental ideology. It is infrastructure policy.

So perhaps the real reason tourism is stalling has nothing to do with eco-activists. Perhaps the problem is that we ourselves have not fully thought through why and for whom we are building endlessly trying to copy someone else’s model instead of valuing our own land.

If we treated the land the way our ancestors did-as something to be stewarded, not exploited-we would sound much closer to those same activists. We would talk less about large resorts at the edge of one of the region’s most polluted cities, and more about the pollution itself, understanding that secluded mountain villas close enough for a morning tee-time at Zhailyau golf club or a glass of wine on the terrace of La Barca are not a tourism strategy.

Why I’m saying this at all

I am a patriot. That is precisely why I care.

If Kazakhstan truly wants eco-tourism, it needs healthy ecology first. Not slogans. Not speed. And not comparisons with countries already paying for their mistakes.

Ecosystems do not care how impressive a project looks in a presentation. They care about one thing only: whether they can still function afterward.

And if we get that wrong, no CNN Travel feature will save us.

Originally published at https://jaxaliyeva.substack.com.