Chip Brown, a contributing writer for the magazine, wrote this week's cover article about life in and around the Williston Basin in North Dakota, which is experiencing its biggest oil boom. He last wrote for the magazine about the filmmaker Whit Stillman.
What was your biggest surprise when you arrived in North Dakota?
What surprised me the most was my own ignorance of the history of the land, and the role of the Missouri River, which is really the great river of North America, not the Mississippi. For much of the east and west coasts, North Dakota is flyover territory, insignificant, easily ignored. But it was once the territory of some of the great indigenous nations in North America, the Sioux and other tribes. It is extremely beautiful, but its beauty is of a modest, unflamboyant kind that partly depends on forbidding temperatures and a subtle sort of scenic quality that doesn't draw hordes of people looking to build tourist motels and summer homes.
You write that objections to hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, as a way to get oil from shale are much milder in North Dakota than in parts of the northeast. Why is that?
I think there are fewer objections to hydraulic fracturing because it represents a set of opportunities in a land that has a long history of economic blight and distress. Plus North Dakota has had experience with oil development since oil was first discovered in the state in 1951. What's more, the situation in North Dakota is fundamentally different than it is in New York, where you have a watershed that is one of the greatest feats of far-sighted urban planning and civil engineering in the history of cities. Given that it provides superb drinking water for millions of people, the New York City watershed has to be considered a resource as valuable if not more so than the fossil fuel reserves beneath it. To paraphrase W.H. Auden, millions have lived without love (and oil); none without water.
I don't think holding libertarian or Republican views automatically means you are in favor of fracking or are by definition hostile to environmental issues. In my experience, people in North Dakota have political views but their political views don't prevent them for enjoying the company of someone who might have a different set of views. As is true of all places that have some aspect of the frontier about them, some quality of being "on the edge," it is easier to see people as individuals and maybe harder to lump them into dumb generalized categories like ''political party.'' It was a relief to visit a place where people look at the person before their party.
So people weren't talking to you, say, about how the boom might help achieve political goals like "energy independence"?
Unless they have a kid in the military, or they themselves were in the military and were posted to Iraq to guard oil wells, I think they see "energy independence" as a slightly more abstract virtue on the continuum of benefits that includes jobs and economic vitality.
One way boomtown North Dakota seem to resemble traditional frontiers is the scarcity of women. Was that immediately apparent?
The scarcity of women is very striking in Williston and Watford City, but probably not as striking as the profusion of women in New York City. More striking in small towns like Tioga and Crosby and Grassy Butte is the absence of people altogether, though that is changing. But the feeling of decay and decline in many small towns is still very powerful. I took a photograph of a church in a small town called Fortuna that will give you a feel for what I mean.
Were most of the people you met recent transplants?
It is getting harder to find a native North Dakotan in the hordes of newcomers, though most of the people I talked to had been living there all their lives or had been there for 30 or 40 years — long enough to remember the boom that busted in the 1980s. I wanted to talk more to people with a historical sense of what the boom means; I was less interested in the transient workers who are flocking to the state for jobs — whose stories were nicely captured in some of Alec Soth's photographs accompanying the story.
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