A World Far Far Away and Long Long Ago

I’m in North Dakota. We have been seeing grandkids, friends and parents. Tomorrow we go to Jamestown to the museum. I’m along for the ride.

We have been gone 20 years this fall from North Dakota. Coming back every time it seems more like/unlike I remember/imagine it to be. Despite fantasies about returning to the home country fair, I doubt it will ever happen.

Fargo is amazing. The only way they can get more retail is to make it smaller. I have imagined that the time would come where there would be a town about every hundred miles or so and nothing else in the state. Let’s see, Fargo, Grand Forks, Devils Lake, Minot, Jamestown, Bismarck, Dickinson, Williston, and probably as a bedroom community, Wahpeton. All other towns and villages would either dry up and blow away or become satellites to the majors.

I don’t think this is what anyone really has in mind. This is the frog being boiled in the pot.

I am reading Jared Diamond’s book Collapse. I love sociological study. Pleasant Valley etcetera. His core postulate is that societies don’t collapse because they make a radical mistake, they collapse because the people in the societies don’t understand the trend lines which lead to ultimate destruction. One of his societal studies is the bitterroot valley in Montana.

North Dakota is lurching toward oblivion in many ways. Driving the change is the urbanization of 8 cities and spiraling depopulation of the rest of the area. The net result of this is not a pretty site. If you want to see it visit western Kansas, Wyoming, and much of eastern Montana.

Add to this the increasing vector of climate change (I didn’t say global warming). This represents the ultimate change that has the longest impact. Soybeans and Corn are now grown in North Dakota on a scale and success level of Iowa 50 years ago. This will cause a push pull effect which as things change will present a climatic crisis event of Biblical proportions.

I know this, the difference between Northern Illinois and Eastern North Dakota is widening rapidly. It wasn’t always so. Long views are the best views. I look back and look forward and it’s not what I hoped to see. We can do better.