Join authors Amy Gamerman and Mountain Words alum, Justin Farrell, resident expert on wealth in the West to discuss, The Crazies.
The Crazies is a Western for a warming planet, full of cowboys and billionaires and billionaire cowboys. But it’s also so much more. It’s an exquisitely reported, ruggedly beautiful elegy for a vanishing way of life and a bighearted inquiry into how you can love a place so much you risk destroying it.
A dazzling piece of narrative nonfiction about land lust and the
American West, The Crazies tells the story of a wind farm that triggers
a 21st century range war between a struggling fifth-generation rancher
and the billionaires next door.
Most locals in Big Timber, Montana learn to live with the wind. Rick Jarrett sought his fortune in it. Like his pioneer ancestors who staked their claims in the Treasure State, he believed in his right to make a living off the land—and its newest precious resource, million-dollar wind.
Trouble was, Jarrett’s neighbors were some of the wealthiest and most influential men in America, trophy ranchers who’d come West to enjoy magnificent mountain views, not stare at 500-foot wind turbines.
And so began an epic showdown that would pull in an ever-widening cast of larger-than-life characters, including a Texas oil and gas tycoon, a roguish wind prospector, a Crow activist fighting for his tribe’s rights to the mountains they hold sacred, and an Olympic athlete-turned-attorney whose path to redemption would lead to Jarrett’s wind farm. A wildly entertaining yarn, the brawl over Crazy Mountain Wind would become a fight over the values that define us as Americans—and a window into how this country actually works. All the while, the most coveted rangeland in the West was being threatened by forces more powerful than anything one man could muster: dwindling snowpack, record drought, raging wildfires.
AMY GAMERMAN is a longtime contributor to the Wall Street Journal's Mansion
section. Prior to, she was a WSJ’s drama critic and a staff writer. Her writing has appeared
in Vogue and Redbook and been recognized with several awards, including from the
National Association of Real Estate Editors. She attended Yale University and King’s
College, Cambridge. Gamerman lives in Connecticut with her husband, writer and editor
Kevin Conley, and their four children. The Crazies is her first book.
Justin Farrell is a writer and professor at Yale, School of the Environment.
He writes on nature, modern belief, and American culture, often using the rural West as a setting.
His work has won national awards and regularly appears in major media. He frequently presents work to policymakers, including the U.S. Senate, the White House, the Vatican, and the United Nations. His research has been published by Science, Princeton University Press, PNAS, the American Sociological Review, Nature Climate Change, among others, and funded by the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Science Foundation.
Justin is a first-generation college graduate and Wyoming native. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame. He splits time between rural Wyoming, Denver, and New Haven.
Speakers 
Amy Gamerman is a longtime contributor to the Wall Street Journal's Mansion section. Prior to, she was a WSJ’s drama critic and a staff writer. Her writing has appeared in Vogue and Redbook and been recognized with several awards, including from the National Association of Real...
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Justin Farrell is a writer and professor at Yale, School of the Environment. He writes on nature, modern belief, and American culture, often using the rural American West as a setting. His work has won national awards and regularly appears in major media. He frequently presents work...
Read More →
