Learn more about the book club
Fall 2020: Billionaire Wilderness
Closing Chat
Thursday, November 19 @ 12pm ET. Register here.
Reading Group Meetups
Sign up for a meetup for parts 1 and 2 to discuss the book. You are welcome to join as many meetups as you like.
Part 1: Introduction through Part II
Part 2: Part III through Epilogue
Billionaire Wilderness: The Ultra-Wealthy and the Remaking of the American West, by Professor Justin Farrell
| About the Book Billionaire Wilderness takes you inside the exclusive world of the ultra-wealthy, showing how today’s richest people are using the natural environment to solve the existential dilemmas they face. Justin Farrell spent five years in Teton County, Wyoming, the richest county in the United States, and a community where income inequality is the worst in the nation. He conducted hundreds of in-depth interviews, gaining unprecedented access to tech CEOs, Wall Street financiers, oil magnates, and other prominent figures in business and politics. He also talked with the rural poor who live among the ultra-wealthy and often work for them. The result is a penetrating account of the far-reaching consequences of the massive accrual of wealth, and an eye-opening and sometimes troubling portrait of a changing American West where romanticizing rural poverty and conserving nature can be lucrative—socially as well as financially. Read a Los Angeles Times review of the book here. |
Justin Farrell is associate professor of sociology at Yale University in the School of the Environment. His research tackles questions of environment, politics, human culture, conflict, and policy using a mixture of methods, blending ethnographic fieldwork with large-scale computational techniques from network science and machine learning. His work has been published by Princeton University Press, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Nature Climate Change, the American Sociological Review, Environmental Research Letters, Social Problems, among others, and funded by the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Science Foundation.
He is the author of the award-winning book The Battle for Yellowstone: Morality and the Sacred Roots of Environmental Conflict (Princeton). His books and articles have won national awards from the American Sociological Association, American Library Association, used on the floor of the U.S. Senate, and covered by major media outlets such as the New York Times, The Economist, LA Times, Washington Post, HBO, WIRED, Bloomberg, and the Financial Times.
Justin is a proud first-generation college student from Wyoming, and lives in New Haven and Denver. Follow him on Twitter: @J_Farrell.
Buy Billionaire Wilderness
Billionaire Wilderness‘ publisher Princeton University Press has graciously offered a promotional code for YBG Book Club members for 30% off and free shipping through 9/30. Please register for the book club to receive the code.
You can also purchase a copy from these other online reatilers:
Amazon
Barnes & Noble
Bookshop (to support independent and local bookstores)