Bakken "There and Back Again" to Bismarck Highlights the Problems of Our Civilization

I lived for many years in an apartment a few blocks from the beautiful North Dakota Capitol grounds. It was a walkable neighborhood that had restaurants, stores, parks and libraries all within walking distance.  I could handle most of my daily needs by walking or biking:" a true "15-minute city". The beauty of the city is being blotted out by ugly development on all sides. Photo Wikimedia Commons

 An appointment in Bismarck today was a magical mystery tour of the Bakken.  It was a sort of "There and Back Again" to quote Tolkien, a trip through Mordor to the golden capital of Minas Tirith. It has been a long time since we drove there, but in an age when driving hundreds of miles for a single appointment feels gluttonous and wasteful, I wish we had other options, especially as the air was again filled with haze from climate-driven fires in Canada today and the AQI was around 180. A regular, twice daily (each way) bus or rail service between the major regional cities would be a nod toward the realities of a future when we all need to lower our heavy footprints, but that is a fantasy in our current reality. Then the trouble is once you get there, our cities outside of the old central core are so poorly designed for anything but cars that you still need a car to get around. But, back to the mystery tour.

 

 The map above created by blogger Hi/Zeph/400 shows existing and potential passenger rail routes that with added service could transform sustainable transit between major cities in ND.

 

It is challenging to gauge what is really happening in the Bakken from month to month. To get an idea of the level of activity, I often employ the unscientific method of observing traffic on the streets and at the grocery stores. By that measure, things must be really hopping. Lately, it has become an art to visit the local Walmart and find products on the shelves, as they sell faster than they can be replenished. Good news for my home value, but bad news for a stable climate and a civilizational future, as I like to say. At the moment, we and the rest of the world are doubling down on burning every last drop of carbon. While renewables are becoming a bigger part of the picture every day, despite what the Orange Eminence (Trump) might say, Jevon's Paradox is the rule, meaning we just add that to all the stuff we are already burning without cutting down on burning (on a global scale). Oh well, there goes the neighborhood.

Both Highway 1804 to New Town going to Bismarck and returning home via Highway 2 were packed with vehicles. In summer, I usually like to take scenic 1804, but it can be slow if you get stuck in traffic. I was surprised by the sheer number of rigs on this round trip, which is the most I've ever seen at one time in the six years of living in this area. Add that to the number of rigs on the road between Beach, ND, and Williston from our trip last week, and it might be a record. Again, I'm sure there is data out there, but this is my very unscientific roadside assessment. Flaring is at an all-time high as well. If I had the time, I would map and name every one of the flares as a way of lampooning this profligate waste and wanton contribution to global heating. Flares are a symbol of the broken value system that dominates everything from the Bakken to Wall Street. 

We drove into Bismarck from the north on Highway 83 into a city that keeps expanding-- and not in a good way. I always find it striking that the city now begins miles north of where it ended when I first moved there in 2000. The wonderful urban core between Expressway and Century Avenue (where I lived for decades) is surrounded (as are most American cities) by a veritable fortress of roads, parking lots and ugly boxes. As is the brainless standard of much of America, most of this is strip malls, parking lots, and labyrinthine housing developments, all isolated from each other by vast roads and acres of pavement. A north Bismarck street looks no different from any other part of the country with the same fast food, box stores and cul-de-sac-ed houses.  It pains me to see beautiful land paved over with ugly structures that, instead of building at a human scale, leapfrog over open land and leave vacant dead properties to rot, like the new Fleet Farm that has popped up since we last visited. An ugly temple to excessive American consumerism that will make an even uglier ruin one day, just like the vacant Kmart and dying malls just a mile or so away. From bad urban design to car-centric planning, we are heading the wrong direction for a future that requires us to use energy more wisely.

 If one could chop off everything north of Century Avenue and densify what is already a vibrant urban core, it would be great. The cities of the future are more like the cities of the past, more dense and mixed use, where mobility doesn't have to depend on a personal mobility device (such as a car), but Bismarck developers didn't get the memo. Not only are sprawled landscapes ugly, but the extra resources (and money) needed for all that (extra) infrastructure for building things that are (far apart, big parking lots and needing to drive to everything) is horrible for the planet and humans.

All our business was on the north side with a dentist in a palatial new building. The absurdity of American healthcare extends to dentists who need to charge exorbitantly to afford fancy new offices where one can barely get an appointment. I still remember the father of a Russian friend who was a dentist in Russia scoffing at the overpaid profligacy of American dentistry. I don't know how we fix American healthcare to make it so a trip to the dentist doesn't require a home equity loan, but something needs to be done.

We followed the dentist by following the scramble of roads to Costco for an irony filled visit to purchase the type of bulk things people who live in far flung places need to buy in quantity. Despite my disdain for big box stores and big parking lots, the cruel irony is there are really no options to them without better urban design. I do like some of the big containers from Costco that are large enough to repurpose for storage uses, but it would be better if we could have biodegradable or truly recyclable packaging (plastic recycling is a farce) options or to bring our own container. As I've written many times before, the future needs to be more like the past when we had truly reusable packaging. All stores should be like the so called "zero waste" stores that are like too many ecological and "sustainable" things: the enclaves of a privileged minority where it is often an expensive luxury to (irony again) buy something without a package. 

Speaking of waste, we continued our irony tour by a stop at the adjacent Panda Express, since our dislike of navigating the roads of suburban Bismarck is so great that something that didn't involve us risking life and limb to drive busy "stroads", overrode the desire for a better restaurant. "The Panda" as I like to call it, has decent Americanized Asian food, but like most fast food, the amount of packaging waste ends every meal with a pile. I never get a drink, so the waste of a cup or straw is avoided, and I always keep my used chopsticks to use as garden bed markers, but the Styrofoam plate was unavoidable. Travel is statistically heavy on the planet, in part because of the waste such as this that is produced. 

 

 After a few hours of inanely spending as much time on the street just getting around as doing our business, we tire of the loud, smelly spaghetti of roads and parking of north Bismarck and want to leave and drive home.

 

It should be illegal to put organic food wastes in the trash can. Way to go Starbucks! But you need to offer them year-round. My photo

 

Before we left, I stopped at Starbucks, not to get coffee, but to pick up some of their "grounds for your garden" and grabbed two big bags. I love that they offer this; my only wish is that they would do it all year round. In the past, when I have asked for grounds in the winter, I got weird looks, but I compost all year round. It should be illegal to put organic food waste in landfills because they produce methane and also because they waste a resource that makes great soil and could be composted year-round. Since I just filled my raised beds with two years of compost, I need to rebuild my pile with organic matter and coffee grounds are one great ingredient. We need to teach ethical waste management in schools (I do when I can) and get away from the "out of sight out of mind" mentality of just throwing things in a bin. Things like composting, often relegated as a fringe thing for gardeners and the ecological minded, should be mainstream in every community. It is in some, but it needs to be all.

In short, our drive was a microcosm of the daily unsustainable problems of our civilization in the landscape and in our daily lives. Even very "eco-aware" people like my wife and I are compelled, like flies stuck in a spiderweb, to live within a Kafkaesque matrix that is driving the future over the edge.