Golden Empire: A True Tale of Oilmen, Farmers, and the Remaking of an American Boomtown

From a dazzling young journalist whose first book was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence comes the unforgettable story of a community of oil men and farm workers struggling with an epic drought, a rapid green energy transition, and the great questions of the 21st century.

Depending on who you ask, Kern County, California, is either a goldmine or a wasteland. In the hills that surround the city of Bakersfield, tens of thousands of oil pumps crowd together in herds, nodding up and down as they yank crude from the ground, while in the valleys below migrant farmworkers toil in grape vineyards and dust swirls through desiccated pistachio fields.

For over a hundred years, Kern County developed around the 20th century’s two great extractive industries: oil and industrial agriculture. But in the last decade, as drought’s descended and California has pivoted to clean energy, it has found itself forced to give up both. And so its residents have become the protagonists in a strange and unprecedented drama of transformation. Teenage activists and lumbering old oil tycoons, fifth-generation almond farmers and shrewd county planners all began wrestling in public over the future of their shared home. Was this a death knell for blue-collar culture, or an opportunity to restore a place that had been pillaged for the sake of unsustainable industries? Could the county create a new economy and a new identity for a new century?

As Jake Bittle spent years watching the residents of Kern County fight each other, betray each other, and (at last) begin to understand each other, he came to see the story of Kern County as a parable about grief and growth. Written with the emotional intimacy of a small-town drama and the narrative sweep of an epic western, The Golden Empire is the story of a forgotten community confronting an existential change, one that holds profound lessons about what it will take to revive and redefine the American dream.