The Crazies
The Cattleman, the Wind Prospector, and a War Out West
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- ¥2,200
発行者による作品情報
“Yellowstone meets Matlock” (Tom Clavin) in this dazzling tale of land lust and the American West, chronicling the rise and fall 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 most 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 five-hundred-foot wind turbines.
So began an epic showdown that would pull in an ever-widening cast of 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, even as the most coveted rangeland in the West was threatened by forces more powerful than anything one man could muster: record drought, raging wildfires, dwindling snowpack.
“An epic tale of greed and resilience,” The Crazies “has the power to leave you feeling walloped, whip-sawed, and wildly invigorated, all within the same breath” (Kevin Fedarko, New York Times bestselling author of A Walk in the Park). It’s an exquisitely reported, ruggedly beautiful western for a warming planet—and a bighearted inquiry into how you can love a place so much you risk destroying it.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A new kind of range war roils a small town in this intricate debut account. Wall Street Journal reporter Gamerman recaps a zoning and development controversy in the picturesque Crazy Mountains region near Big Timber, Mont. On one side were Rick Jarrett, a debt-saddled cattle rancher worried about losing his land, and Marty Wilde, a wildcat wind prospector trying to develop a wind farm on Jarrett's property. Opposing them were billionaire oilman Russell Gordy and other wealthy ranch owners whose mountain vistas and property values would be compromised, they insisted, by having 500-foot-tall turbines nearby. The conflict led to lawsuits and a court showdown that spotlighted the muddled ideologies and class politics of renewable energy, with desperate but traditionalist ranch families haphazardly aligned with progressive environmentalists while squaring off against plutocratic NIMBYs—who championed pristine wilderness aesthetics over economic development, bemoaned the threat posed to eagles and bats by the turbine blades, and cited the potential human health risks of the whooshing noise and flickering shadows they produce. Gamerman's lush prose evokes the imprint of the harsh, beautiful landscape on its more hard-bitten inhabitants. ("The wind was a steady force that was always working against you.... The wind was as much a part of Rick's legacy as the land itself. People were buying wind? Well, goddammit, he had wind to sell.") It's a captivating saga.
