Prosperity is not always pretty

As Walter Russell Mead points out on his blog, prosperity is not always pretty when we find it in the wild, unlike this achingly beautiful photo essay in the January 2008 National Geographic on the ghost towns of western North Dakota.  Now less than four years later those ghost towns are springing back to life with oil and gas exploration, and it's all so...untidy.  Fifth generation newspaper mogul A.G. Sulzberger writes in his great-great-grandfather's newspaper of the boom town horrors being visited upon the once-unspoilt prairie.

More than ten years ago, when young A.G. was just a teen, his father's newspaper was writing off North Dakota, and not for the first or last time.  ("As Others Abandon Plains, Indians and Bison Come Back")  In May 2001, the Times' Timothy Egan wrote,

"In writing the obituary of the Great Plains, social historians have looked out at the abandoned ranches, collapsed homesteads and dying towns huddled against the wind in a sea of grass and seen an epic failure."

Sadly for the Times, North Dakota has failed to fail on schedule.

Mead captures this sentiment from the Timesmen, across the generations,

"Decline is so much more decorous.   Prairie towns slowly wither on the vine; the young people quietly leave, the stores gradually empty and close.   Reporters from the Times write haunting and moving stories about the gentle, drifting sadness of it all.  Novelists in creative writing programs can write delicate tales of rural decline; filmmakers can make understated little films about the lost hope and vanished promise of the American dream."

Long live North Dakota.