THE CRAZIES

How a proposed wind farm set off epic struggles on one of America’s new frontiers.

This account of a modern land battle in the American West, told dramatically in the form of narrative nonfiction, explores “a story centuries in the making, with millionaires and billionaires, cattle barons and Crow warriors, prospectors and politicians, meat-packers and medicine men.” A coveted region of Montana stands at the center of the complex disputes described here, with competing factions pursuing sometimes incompatible aims: developing wind power, securing ancestral tribal rights, or reserving the picturesque landscape for private and commercial interests. The various scenes that play out suggest a reiteration of the nation’s frontier history, with lax regulation of aggressive instincts and enormous disparities in power. The author’s brisk, consistently engaging storytelling vividly sets forth the financial stakes involved for those who control the land and its energy potential and the cultural and personal stakes for those who seek to prolong traditional ways of life. We gain a memorable sense, at last, of what this territory has meant to its Indigenous inhabitants as well as waves of settlers in the Montana region. A major difference from the 19th century, as the book makes clear, is that this 21st-century Wild West faces an existential crisis as the climate warms and ecosystems threaten collapse. Old ideals about the inexhaustibility of the nation’s resources must yield to new understandings of sustainability. An enormous expansion of wind farms in places such as this, Gamerman notes, will be essential for a successful transition to a clean energy future and the mitigation of harms produced by exploitative practices. This Western narrative is, she convincingly concludes, crucially relevant to the entire nation’s fate.

A dynamic, informed, absorbing exploration of literal and figurative power struggles.