By Benjamin Burr

The Post Scarcity Alliance

A Novel Series

Hailey Whelan has abandoned her college dream of becoming a professional artist to intern at the Bureau of Land Management in southern Utah, where she finds herself caught in the middle of the fight for the soul of the new American West.

On one side, environmental activists and their allies in the government look to consolidate their gains against the last stubborn holdouts of the West’s once storied cattle ranching industry and convert the old ranches into protected habitat for endangered species. On the other side, Hailey’s path crosses with Miles Mason, an entrepreneur from Silicon Valley suffering from sudden wealth syndrome. Together they recruit a self-immunizing, snake-handling austringer to turn an old cattle ranch coveted by the Nature Conservancy into a state-of-the-art venomics research facility.

As power centers shift and laws become obsolete, a disoriented environmental movement finds itself fighting against an existential threat it doesn’t see coming. In an escalating exchange of sabotage and extralegal direct action, a group of eco-vigilantes and government officials tries its best to reel in an opponent who fights for a new vision of the American West that is as expansive, ominous, and breathtaking as the landscapes that surround and define them all. On the precipice of these changes, Hailey and her allies must decide whether the cost of realizing their idealized vision for this land is worth it – or even possible.