Say Anything Blog

So which is it?  Are we supposed to be concerned about urban sprawl in a nation that has a ~80 people per square mile or about open prairies?  I’m so confused.

I browsed through it last night at the Bis. Pub. Lib.  It’s one of those “let’s do piece on how ‘some people live’ and see how bad we can make it look” Never mind that we have really bad scenes in NYC, DC, Baltimore, Houston, Boston, Cleveland, LA, Miami, etc. etc.  It’s always consoling to the big city cats to know that things are really worse somewhere else--you know, where the nearest Starbucks is a few miles away.

NG has done several pieces about the shift of population in the prairie states. And they always play the sentiment card. I believe in the next 5-10 years there is going to be a shift back to a lot of those areas. Technology marches on, and with it people can move back into the regions that are depopulating. Look at the small towns in which there are so many empty homes and structures, with the advancing reliability of satellite and cell communication those towns can be just as commercially viable as any suburb. With decentralization of industry businesses do not have to huddle next to cities anymore. And the kicker? Green tech. Wind and solar are quite usable in the prairie state region. Hell, wind don’t EVER stop blowing out there, and with the advances in wind turbine design and efficiency even the bird lovers will not be able to complain. Win win!

Una Salus Victus Nullam Sperare Salutem

Does National Geographic do an online version or is there a link to this article somewhere?

It’d help pass the time on a restful Friday evening.

Congress is the only whorehouse in history to consistently lose money!

Here it is.  It was at Julie’s link in the post.

When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.

-- Thomas Jefferson

Rob’s recently listened-to songs:

I didn’t realise there were so few of you. Around 640,000 inhabitants of ND in a land area of 70,762 square miles. Consider my county Norfolk has a population of 832,500 in a land area of 2074 square miles. It must be quiet.

Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.

Get out alone and listen to the earth around you. Even here in Pennsylvania it is empty and wide open in a lot of places.

Here is their public page. Beware, there be propaganda here!

Una Salus Victus Nullam Sperare Salutem

Get out alone and listen to the earth around you.

Are you turning into hippy, 2H9?

Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.

For those that follow ND History:

The NG article states the following regarding homesteading in ND:

what one state historian calls the Too Much Mistake

This quote is from Robinson’s History of North Dakota published in the 1960’s -

It is the most disputed (and hated) quote in his book - (I don’t have a reference but trust me)

Also - Another twisted comment:

Twice the legislature has considered changing the name to simply Dakota to shake the chill from its image.

They phrase it as if our legislature nearly passed such a silly thing…

To a non North Dakotan reading this article, they might think that we live in some prairie wasteland.

I have no idea why this article is wasting my time tonight - but…

Bowden (the author of the piece) might be interested in this: (he’s from Arizona)

http://home.earthlink.net/~ghosttowns2/arizona/

Naw, Flamer. Being a hunter is as close as I get to that. Though I do love listening to the snow falling. Different textures have very distinct sounds. And in the Army I had several opportunities to do long range recon patrol work, in the States training and in Honduras. Spend several days at a stretch moving through the forest as silent as possible and you really get attuned to the sound of the world. Been trying to impress this on my son, kinda hard for a 12 year old.

Una Salus Victus Nullam Sperare Salutem

Methinks she doth protest too much. First I read Julie’s piece, then I read the National Geographic article. And I have to say, there isn’t much in there that isn’t true, and there isn’t much there that doesn’t apply almost anywhere in North Dakota. You don’t have to go to Slope county to see houses like that or hear stories about people like that- that all existed in Pembina county, on the opposite corner of North Dakota, and it all existed twenty years ago.
The reality, painful as it is, is that the countryside IS emptying out. And a popular blogger here or an interesting art studio there really doesn’t change the fact.
The thriving little town I knew as a kid had two bars, two grocery stores, a bowling alley, a barber shop, a dry goods store, a farm equipment dealership, two gas stations, a four- room, eight-grade school, a fire hall, a community hall, two grain elevators, and 30 houses.
Now my little town’s population is barely thirty people, the elevator is the only business that is left, and this decay has come amidst some of the best farmland in the whole state. A trip home truly is a depressing sight.
It is painful when someone holds a mirror up to us and we see what has become of our state, but the market (our old friend, right Rob?) has made it what it is. It may stop declining someday, but we’ve been wishing for that decline to stop all the thirty years of my adulthood- anyone want to lay odds when it will finally happen?

And speaking of Honduras, that link you gave, Eric, had a couple of pics reminded me of some of the abandoned vills we would go through in the Cordillera Entre region. Nothing but wild dogs and pigs, and bones in the street.

Una Salus Victus Nullam Sperare Salutem

Good ‘Ol Boy, not to sound harsh but I’m still wondering why the decline of the small rural communities is such a terrible thing.  Most of them came into being around the turn of the century, and existed for no other reason than to serve the surrounding farms.

That there were so many of them was because the farmers simply couldn’t travel very far very fast.  My grandma (who was born on her parent’s homestead farm south of Ryder in 1919) told me as much.  We were driving around her old stomping grounds and she was pointing out all the little towns that were gone now, and I asked why they were all so close together.  She said that because when you were traveling by horse, or even with the early cars, it took a long time to get to these places.

The world was a bigger place back then.  Technology has shrunk it.  And while I can understand the nostalgia for these little towns, I no more want to go back to the times that necessitated them than I want to go back to the time before indoor plumbing.

When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.

-- Thomas Jefferson

Rob’s recently listened-to songs:

That was kinda MY point- the market works, and this is the end result. The gist I got from your and Julie’s posts was that what NG portrayed wasn’t a true reflection of what is happening in North Dakota, when actually it was, in most all rural areas.
It IS sad in a sense (I would have been happy to stay where I grew up were that possible), but it is what it is. And to freak out on some overwrought wordsmith’s boilerplate prairies-are-dying screed just struck me as being too defensive.

Fair enough, it seems we’re on the same page.  Though in my defense, I’d point out that I didn’t challenge any of the facts on the article.  I simply disagreed with the “The Prairies Are Dying” theme.

And maybe I’m being defensive, but sometimes the constant digs at North Dakota become tiresome.

When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.

-- Thomas Jefferson

Rob’s recently listened-to songs:

Good, with the further advance of technology people are going to return to rural America. The majority of rural people HATE cities. They moved to them because of economics. That paradigm is shifting, rapidly, and people want out of cities. Hence the expansion of urban sprawl. And yet, people do not want to be in spread out cities, either. A change is already underway.

Una Salus Victus Nullam Sperare Salutem

And to freak out on some overwrought wordsmith’s boilerplate prairies-are-dying screed just struck me as being too defensive.

I highly doubt that what I wrote could be considered “freaking out”, Good Ole’ Boy.

what NG portrayed wasn’t a true reflection of what is happening in North Dakota, when actually it was, in most all rural areas.

There are many ways to write an objective piece based on facts. The list of adjectives I included at the bottom of my post would not be found in such an article, at least to the excessive extent that Bowdon relied upon. The population continues to shift and people continue to move out—not once do I disagree. I do point out, however, that it is less than it used to be (Michigan tops ND for out-migration now) and that the idea that it might be about stabilization rather than pure uni-directional hemorrhaging should have been considered.

Now my little town’s population is barely thirty people, the elevator is the only business that is left, and this decay has come amidst some of the best farmland in the whole state. A trip home truly is a depressing sight.

The same technology advances that are allowing people to move back to rural areas are also the same culprit for making farms much larger and the need for many farmers much smaller. Again, part of the stabilization concept: things are still in flux. It is too early to say it is only about endless depopulation until there is nothing. Instead, there are other ways to interpret the numbers.

There’s no doubt the way of life is changing; not once do indicate otherwise. We’re not going to have hundreds of little towns like we used to. However, to say the entire state is DYING is quite a leap.

Sentimentality can run both ways. You seem to suggest I’m unwilling to look in the mirror, and I’m telling you that you are unwilling to to view the changes as anything but negative since they seem to be only that in comparison with “how it used to be.”

“Used to be” is past. Done. Something new is coming. And it isn’t the death knell of an entire state.

There are different ways of portraying facts.

actually the less people that are in ND the less people I have to compete with for hunting land. I think its a win in my opinion.

Check out:
Goon’s North Dakota Red Neck
Goon’s World