Billionaires Clash Over the Future in a Caribbean Eden

The Caribbean island of St. Barts has a kind of second Hurricane season. The world's biggest mega-yachts, Leonardo DiCaprio and Mike Tyson, and Jeff Bezos and his girlfriend canoodling in their bathing suits were some of the billionaires and celebrities that came in December.

Two days before Christmas, a judge threw the latest volley in a legal battle that pits billionaire against billionaire, and human development against fragile nature on this playground for the one percent. The court ruled that a company headed by an American hotelier must stop construction of her second luxury hotel on the island and refill a football field-size hole on a popular but precarious beach.

The ruling could signal a turning point in the development of the tropical Arcadia for the rich. The deconstruction alone will cost the developer at least 50 million euros. The company won't reveal the cost of the project.

The French royals once called the island the little pebble, but for the last four decades, two cultures have shared it. The current island natives are descendants of a clan of Normandy peasants who arrived on the island in the 17th century. Arawaks and Caribs were the original inhabitants of the island.

The forebears of the islanders survived centuries of pirate rule and even 100 years of Swedish rule before becoming part of the French overseas department. Frenchtown was established in the 19th century by workers from St. Barts for work on St. Thomas. St. Barts was not electrified until the 1980s.

American and European celebrities and Wall Street tycoons are the descendants of the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds, who were the first settlers on the island. The latter sailed onto this arid, minimally populated speck in the late 1950s and built a pair of Xanadus on mountaintops overlooking azure waters.

St. Barts is the location for a theater of consumption after forty years. In the last five years, the background noise on some parts of the island is not birds singing, but the grunt of drilling through rock, the buzz of small prop planes delivering and retrieving tourists and their Vuitton baggage from an airport, and the noise of earth- moving machines. A reporter from the cafe of a five-star hotel saw a small plane trying to land. No one would have reacted if any of the swells noticed.

Heavy trucks crack the asphalt of mountain roads dotted with construction sites, compounding a traffic problem that can be similar to Los Angeles, with its mingling of gorgeous weather, idling luxury cars and sour, but fashionable, drivers. Every hundred yards, another construction permit is attached to a wall.

The pace and scale of development has brought jobs and made millionaires. It has brought traffic, water pollution, dead reefs, housing shortages, and some scientists and locals say pushed the island to a tipping point, beyond which it cannot return.

The local government deems 60 percent of the island to be unbuildable. Wealthy people buying green-zoned property and moving the boundary lines is a common story. Islanders joke that the real green zone is the American dollar.

The American philanthropist and businesswoman who has taught at Harvard is not active in the social scene, despite having a house on the island for 20 years.

Her hotel development is planned as an ultramodern multistory concrete structure, on the footprint of a smaller resort destroyed by Hurricane Irma in 2017, on a crescent of sand along St. Jean Bay. David Matthews, the father-in-law of the Duke of York's sister, is the owner of the old luxury hotel.

A hotel with 50 rooms and a swimming pool was planned by the developers. The permit was granted by the government against the advice of environmentalists.

The company broke ground in March 2021. The Oetker Collection and Mr. Matthews co-owned the Eden Rock Hotel. Roman Abramovich is not a party to the lawsuit, but he is involved in the environmental restoration of the island. He built a soccer field for the community and paid to restore a salt pond that environmentalists accused the developers of pollution. The company denies this.

There were four emergency court hearings in 2020 and 2021. The judge allowed construction to begin in March of 2021. The company continued construction despite the judge suspending the modified permit in July 2021.

A group of young people calling themselves Ouanalao'sGuardians got 2,200 signatures on a petition against the project. St. Barts Essentiel collected signatures of about 2,700 islanders, demanding that the project be scaled back. The construction work continued throughout the year.

William von Mueffling is a New York hedge fund manager who is a supporter of the environmentalists. The Etoile project did not appeal to the vast majority of people on the island who have enough challenges with housing, traffic and water pollution. It is unfortunate that a nonprofit has to do the enforcement work, but that is the reality.

The court canceled the project's construction permit on the grounds that the foundation hole posed a risk to the safety of employees and guests in the event of a flood.

The five-star Le Barth Hotel & Spa is located on a beach called Grand Cul de Sac. Le Barth received two notices from the government about the leaking of chemical and biological waste.

Patrick Ubbeda said that he kite surfs at the lagoon almost everyday and his worst fear is not getting in an accident but falling into the polluted lagoon.

According to The New York Times, the government accused the company of ignoring a request to deal with the pollution problem in one of two formal notices signed by the island's president, Bruno Magras. A spokesman for the company denied that the company ignored the notices and said that the hotel will have a new system this year.

As the island was dealing with new concerns about sustainable living, the companies started the projects. The island's environment is rapidly degrading due to land-based pollution draining into the sea and destroying marine habitats. The housing shortage for workers worsened after Hurricane Irma devastated the island.

That tension may explain some of the animosity towards Mark Nunnelly and his wife. Someone wrote "Get Out Dupr" in red on the white wall of a construction site. One of the English-language island online forums has a chat titled "Death to Domino's Pizza" in reference to the hotel project.

Eddie Czopur, who has been staying in Ohio, said that in one corner there is a billionaire business firm and in the other there are a bunch of local people.

Ms. Dupr and Mr. Nunnelly are not the only superrich who have been accused of ignoring island scale or Caribbean aesthetic. Tycoons have been competing to see who can build the biggest yacht in the harbor or build the biggest villa.

The local government recently restricted the size of new villas to under 150 square meters. New mega mansions will surely be erected if at least 50 previously issued construction permits are still in the works. The waters around the island have turned cloudy due to construction-runoff. A marine biologist who works on the island told me she cried when she returned to a diving site that was barren.

Ms. Dupré and her husband did not respond to questions. The company will appeal the ruling against the permit to a higher court in France in March, but it will take at least 15 months. He said that Ms. Dupr still hopes to build a hotel, but will fill in the hole once permission is granted.

She has a deep background in hotel management, and the family has had a special affection for the island for more than 20 years.

If some of the world's wealthiest and most sophisticated people can't protect the air, water, coral reefs and sea turtles around their own playground, how can anyone expect them to?

Bruno Magras has been the president of the island for 27 years, since it became independent of Guadeloupe. He presided over a three-decade economic transformation unlike any other in the Caribbean. In the 1990s he founded and owned a local airline, St Barth Commuter.

Mr. Magras did not try to stop the development.

He decided not to run for a sixth term in February.

The face and voice of the SBE is running to replace him. A taxi driver like her father, in her 40s, Ms.Bernier is a new generation of islanders. She shares twin toddler daughters with her ex-wife and has positioned herself as a kind of island member of Parliament.

Ms.Bernie said she has faced harassment and death threats for her activism. She said that she was offered a million dollars to not challenge the green zone exemption on the land sale.

Ms.Bernier's passion and breezy charm have not convinced everyone that she has the shrewdness to manage big egos and vast money.

It wasn't that simple for Mr. Magras. During an interview at the airport, Mr. Magras boasted of the economic miracle he presided over. He is concerned that developers with valid permits could file a lawsuit if the island government tries to step in. He said that his power was hampered by democracy.

We can't prevent people from selling their land if we're in a democracy.

A journalist and author, she is the author of Virus: Vaccinations, the CDC and the Hijacking of America's Response to the Pandemic.