I’m hauling crude oil in the northwest oil fields of North Dakota. I enjoy the beautiful scenery & the rare wildlife I see every day on the prairies. It’s a great paying job but at the same time you realize that this boom will devastate the landscepe & its habitat … eventually.

i hate it the places i grew up are being destroyed for greed!

I love it its made my life better financially. My wife gets more time with the kids and they’re here with me supporting them.

It has helped the whole nation in the midst of a recession and I will proudly pay twice as much for the cost of living to work here and avoid my family the embarassement of bieng denied assistance for food stamps because of our potential or past income. The whole country should learn from example of what’s happening in Montana and North Dakota. It’s pretty obvious that we are perfectly capable of sustaining our reserves and resources while maintaining and creating jobs for generations.

The boom changed my life for the better and my family. I wish my father could have seen it. He knew their was oil under our land. And it did change our little town .

It has given my husband a good paying job as a rig manager.

For the first time in our married life my husband and I are able to survive and be comfortable. I am able to stay home with my kids and I love that.

it’s an ecological disaster both short and long term. The jobs won’t last and these workers lives will be shortened. It is wrong headed and backward thinking , not good or fair for America. It destroys towns and families. A very few will get very rich and oil prices will not go down.

Opportunity!

Ah, yes, I drove across the ND prairie last weekend and it was so beautiful that it was hard to describe. The crops are magnificent and I stood in wheat up to my waist. There were all these little pot-hole ponds and sloughs and relics of days gone by in old school houses and old Lutheran churches and old homesteads, abandoned now and moldering into beautiful shades of gray and brown. I took my camera and photographed them, for soon they will all be gone. Another time has come and change is in the wind and in the dust of hundreds of trucks hauling supplies to oil rigs…change has come again to North Dakota.

The prairie has been changing for eons and once was not even a prairie, but an inland sea. There weren’t any domestic animals such as you see now of black and red Angus cooling off in the ponds on a hundred-degree day. They were huge and dinasourous in those days. And in the Lewis and Clark days they were buffalo further than you could see and elk and antelope and deer and grizzly bears and wolves and a fantastic people that made their living from these things and had a whole culture and world as much loved as we love North Dakota now. Then came the settlers and the little farms and school houses and churches and small towns and cows grazing all across the prairie and other people with hopes and dreams, what we know of North Dakota in recent past. I imagine they thought it would last forever and hoped it would. But then the homestead farm didn’t last either and the little towns emptied out and all those sentinels of a hopeful past are moldering now in moss and lichen and overgrown shelter belts and leaning at absurd angles and falling down and rotting in the earth.

I think we must listen up and although I do not know what we should hear, can we really love or hate this change? Or are we called to embrace it somehow without understanding it necessarily?; it is here anyway! Is there good that comes to many with employment and new people coming to the prairie? Perhaps they will learn to love it as the predecessors have. And although a disregard and hemorrhage happens to the old way of life that will never be again, little sleepy towns and old farmsteads gone, a new and vigorous life arrives and the old gives way to the new in unprecedented creativity and possibilities.

Such it seems is this prairie that I love so well and like so many others can find no beauty in an oil well site or burning flares that shut out the star light, or hundreds of trucks tearing up the roads. I’m leaning at absurd angles these days and moldering into shades of gray and brown. If only I can catch a moment in the camera of what once was before it is all gone, then good for this generation and my soul. But for a New North Dakota, an ever-changing prairie, a New Soul and New Life has begun!

It isn’t so much to love the boom or hate it, more to try to understand it. That isn’t so easy to do. How does one understand change?

And here it is in North Dakota. Change is not new here, change has been occurring for millenniums. Little more than a hundred years ago there was a vastly different prairie. The prairie that Lewis and Clark came upon in 1804 had enormous herds of buffalo and elk, antelope and deer, and grizzles and wolves. They could not have imagined that a couple hundred years later there would be hundreds of oil wells.

The Indians of a short time ago in geological terms were devastated by the change that occurred in a very short time; a whole culture was nearly exterminated and the flora and fauna

Haiku for the ND Prairie…

prairie opens wide
she gives use all we will need
we take for our dream
-JB

I came back to my home town and found it to be something out of the Twilight Zone. I can’t say that what I experienced was bad. There seems to be a great ethnic diversity that I had neaver dreamed I would see in Williston. After moving away from my home town, I’ve found that this type of diversity is what made some of the other cities I’ve lived in great. I hope the boom will last and that Williston, along with the giant oil companies, will make this little town into a good place to visit. I vote that Todd should spend a day in Worm’s Corner with the camera and recorder!

It is an open book with a blank page and anyone can go there to write their own story. My husband and his friend are there reaching out to the new comers and home grown North Dakotans through amazing food and a real love for people and the spirit of entrepreneurship! Check them out at (at the “Rolling Stove” in Dickinson) No time like the present to take a risk!

We farm/ranch s.w. of Mandan & are kind of hoping the boom doesn’t reach us soon. We hear so much about the noise, traffic, crime, and other problems of western ND but we don’t hear the personal stories. Thanks, Todd, and thanks Prairie Public!

Todd is great at what he does, people are starting to realize where ND is !!! He is a fatastic person and his speech is articulate!!!

The boom has given me a chance to return home to North Dakota. I’m originally from Hettinger and it’s been great to go back and experience Dakota culture again and see people I know and love. But it’s also been tough to see the landscape north of I-94 altered by rigs, trucks, dust. The “quiet beauty” of western North Dakota isn’t so quiet anymore.

It’s providing numerous job opportunities for workers nationwide, while supporting local industry and retailers. But, like Robert Mitchum’s character in “Night of the Hunter ,” Love and Hate are on each fist.