Virtual Event—Justin Farrell: Billionaire Wilderness

Date
Wed May 6th 2020, 2:30pm
Event Sponsor
The Bill Lane Center for the American West
Location
Zoom

Join us in welcoming Justin Farrell to Stanford!

From the publisher:

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.

Weaving unforgettable storytelling with thought-provoking analysis, Billionaire Wilderness reveals how the ultra-wealthy are buying up the land and leveraging one of the most pristine ecosystems in the world to climb even higher on the socioeconomic ladder. The affluent of Teton County are people burdened by stigmas, guilt, and status anxiety—and they appropriate nature and rural people to create more virtuous and deserving versions of themselves. Incisive and compelling, Billionaire Wilderness reveals the hidden connections between wealth concentration and the environment, two of the most pressing and contentious issues of our time.

 

About Justin Farrell

Justin Farrell is a professor and author at Yale University. His research tackles questions of environment, politics, human culture, and policy using a mixture of methods, blending ethnographic fieldwork with large-scale computational techniques from network science and machine learning.

His research 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. 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 Economist, Washington Post, HBO, WIRED, Bloomberg, and the Financial Times.

Justin is a proud first-generation college student from Wyoming.

Sponsor

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