On the West Coast anyway, there’s been lots of buzz about Chinese investors buying up U.S. properties as investments. Now, Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba and China’s most wealthy individual, has spent $23 million to buy a property in the Adirondack Mountains and turn it into a wildlife preserve. It is a beautiful property — 28,000 acres of rolling, forested mountains with good wildlife habitat and pristine streams, ponds, and river stretches — according to the marketing video, below.

This rural New York parcel, surrounded by Adirondack Park, includes some of the best brook trout fishing in the country. A previous owner donated a conservation easement on the property to the Nature Conservancy. This restriction means that Mr. Ma may now carry out only certain activities on the property. In this case, he may do some logging and construct nine more homes on the land, but may do no commercial development. While enviros were hoping that the state of New York might purchase the property for a public park — or that a nonprofit might do so and hold it until it could be sold to the state — it was simply too expensive. In addition, the conservation easement already in place provides pretty strong protection, so this parcel wasn’t a high priority for state or nonprofit acquisition when compared to other properties at higher risk of development.

Now, if our many American billionaires would join Mr. Ma in protecting wildlife habitat by purchasing it, that would be great!