One Time Harvest

"The coal industry has come west in search of four basic resources: cheap clean air, cheap coal, cheap water and cheap politicians. They’ve found each of these in North Dakota."

Those words come from a man who is, today, arguably, one of North Dakota’s most important people. He’d shun that title, but he saw something in 1974 that troubled him and set out to do something about it. Paired with former Governor Art Link, Mike Jacobs, in his writing over about a 5-year period through the mid 1970’s, did much to motivate his own generation here in North Dakota to make sure the largest industrial change in our state’s history had what might be today called a happy ending.

In words that could easily describe the change taking place in the oil country of western North Dakota today, Jacobs wrote, in 1974:

“So the Northern Plains states face the last quarter of the twentieth century standing on an industrial frontier which will crowd their wide open spaces with people seeking release from their mining camps and boom town homes, which will bring new pressure groups, including industrialists and industrial unions, to transform their politics. Farmers and ranchers and the independence they value will be of less consequence.

“This book examines the industrial impetus in one state, North Dakota, and finds it frightening. The industrial frontier promises to leave the plains depleted, without a resource they once held. The coal men propose to disrupt a land and life which is unique in the United States. The industrial frontier will change the plains. To a large measure, noise will replace the quiet; rush will replace the easy pace of living; strangers will replace neighbors; smog will replace the big, clean sky; spoil piles will replace the verdant prairies and the peace and pleasure we take in our land and our people will be diminished. The nation will be less for the changes.

“The coal men who come to this frontier are like the buffalo hunters who came to the frontier in another time. They killed the bison and left the stench of rotting carcasses and mounds of bleached bones. They made survival of a civilization impossible.

“Unlike the buffalo, though, coal can’t be replaced. Coal beds can’t be rebuilt by man. Coal is a one time harvest.”

That is from the introduction of “One Time Harvest: Reflections on coal and our future,” written by Mike Jacobs and published by the North Dakota Farmers Union in 1975, in the very early days of the coal boom in North Dakota.

Looking back, now, over those 35 years, it is clear that North Dakota did some things right. The pressure from Governor Link, from mostly Democrats and a few Republicans in the North Dakota Legislature, and the first real environmental stirrings in North Dakota, often led by the passion found in Mike Jacobs’ writing in his somewhat shabby little newspaper, The Onlooker, did not stop coal development in North Dakota, but insured that it was done right. As we face much the same kind of massive disruption in today’s North Dakota Oil Patch, we’d do well to learn from those lessons of the 1970’s. Here’s the personal note Jacobs penned at the beginning of his book.

Dear reader, my friend:

Today is Thursday, August 28, in the year of our Lord 1974; in the year of our nation, 198; in the year of our state, 85; and in the year of my life, 26, nearing 27.

The wheat harvest is all but done across the state and the sour ornamental apples on the tree in our back yard are ripe. The squirrels will be moving in on them any day. The few they leave will fall onto my unkempt yard, the bane of my neighborhood, and rot in the grass. I never rake them up.

On this day, between the harvest and the apple-falling, I am going to write you a book. All summer long I have put off writing this book. Instead, I have occupied myself with a good dose of that desperation which Henry David Thoreau found was the lot of the mass of men.

For those of us who live in and love the land called North Dakota, that desperation has been a little heavier this long, long summer. First came heat and drought, then the awful mess called Watergate, then the heavies, energy conglomerates who have monstrous plans for our land and sky and water, advanced their cause before the state government. Moreover, we learned of the starvation the world faces while we Americans accumulate opulence. While we seek ways to take our pleasure, the world seeks its next breath of good air and its next bite of food.

Indeed, these six months of living in North Dakota, U.S.A., on the planet Earth have convinced me that the only issue worthy of our attention in the last half of the twentieth century is human survival. All other issues relate to this one in one of two ways: in the guts or in the spirit. The guts issue is sustenance. Can we live at all? And the spirit issue is dignity. Can our lives be worthy?

These are issues of ultimate concern. They cannot be escaped no matter how we wish to elude them. They must haunt us, dare us to go on, challenge us to find ways to continue. These are the issues which the book addresses. Although I have despaired, I have always known it would be written. You’ll get your book. It is important to my sense of self that it get done for I believe there is affirmation in action. More important, it is vital to the future of this state that some things be said clearly.

I want to communicate to you my understanding of this place and the threat that faces it and its role as the human predicament worsens. That’s going to take discipline on my part—a discipline I’ve never practiced—and patience on yours. The book is going to digress into physics and metaphysics, ethics, ecology, anthropology, history, even etymology. That last learning is the study of the origin of words.

I’m no expert on any of these things, or on any thing at all, for that matter. I’m a journalist. So you’re going to be wondering why you should be listening to me drooling over my Smith Corona and chomping on a toothpick. The man who’s addressing you is a 27-year-old malcontent who’s raised more trouble than wheat, after all.

OK, OK. But I care about this place. I am a native. I was born and raised in northwestern North Dakota, in the hills that roll away toward the Missouri River and the Gulf of Mexico, where the snowmelt we drained from our farm yard eventually ended up (unless it ran into our well first, as the State Health Department always warned us).

The Jacobs’ spread is on top of the highest hill in Mountrail County. From the front steps of our old green farm house you can see 20 miles in every direction except north—and that’s only because that old green farm house is behind you. I was very young when I learned the beauty of the wide and handsome sky and the solace of the wrinkled prairie hills. By the time I was eight I knew where every crocus and buttercup would blossom in the spring and where every wild rose would appear as June ended. The hills all have names which I gave them, and the valleys also. I remember the names, though I have never shared them. I feel as close to that earth as ever I have to anything that could not answer my mumblings.

I have a lapel button, left over from the sixties when such things were popular, that says “Celebrate Life.” The hills of home taught me the truth of that motto and convinced me that working for a life all men might celebrate is a high calling.

The hills of home—how I missed them when I went away. My wife still has the troubled letters of a lonely, messed up kid who went off to St. Louis, a great, hot and stinking city, to be a radical and change the world; then to Seattle to stare at mountains which he could never see because the smoke of the city hid their loveliness. That lonely kid came running home and married the rancher’s daughter.

My first real job out of college was at Dickinson and I hadn’t been in that friendly town a week when I began hearing about coal. Within a month, I knew what was in store for this glorious country I came home to and have no wish to be driven from. I began writing about coal and our future. I am still writing about coal and I suspect I will be for a long, long time.

This book is the result of four years of fact gathering and idea sifting. There is much that is personal in it, delivered out of a passionate attachment to this country. There is much that is technical and uninteresting. I hope that all of it can help as we struggle to make decisions about the kingdom we inherit.

Surely those words of introduction, and the content of "One Time Harvest" by Mike Jacobs are some of the most important words ever written about North Dakota. There are not a lot of copies of “One Time Harvest” around, although I’d bet many North Dakota libraries have one. It was poorly bound, and I have two copies that are in pieces, as well as a pretty good one I found at a rummage sale a few years ago. It is pleasantly designed, and illustrated with drawings and photos by a couple of young North Dakotans Jacobs encountered along the way, Kari Armstrong and Clay Jenkinson. As we’ve moved from the last quarter of the 20th century to the first quarter of the 21st century, and from coal development to oil development, I think we have to be constantly vigilant, and learn from development mistakes of the past. Unfortunately, I don’t see another North Dakotan out there as articulate as young Mike Jacobs, to caution us along the way. But many of the lessons learned and the laws passed in the 1970’s are serving us well today. I ran into an oil patch county commissioner last weekend, and during our visit about what’s going on out there, he said “This is going to be one wild summer.” More about that later.