One More Time: When The Landscape Is Quiet Again

Listen up, Senator Dorgan, Senator Conrad, Congressman Pomeroy and Governor Hoeven.

We are all grateful for your kind words about Art Link, your kindness to his widow and family, and your presence here as we laid him to rest. But if you’re going to sit in the front pews at his funeral, you have a responsibility to leave that funeral and practice what Art Link preached.

Art Link preached “cautious, orderly development.” To be sure, development was the operative word in that phrase, but development under control, with safeguards and reasonable assurances that “when the landscape is quiet again,” that we will not have ruined our most precious natural resource, our land. And our state’s heritage. That we would not have sacrificed our state’s future for a “one time harvest.”

Well, take a look out in western North Dakota, right now, today. There’s a free-for-all going on out there. Cautious and orderly? I don’t think so.

Senator Conrad, you told me Thursday you had just been out there, and were amazed at what you saw. I expect you will do something to try to help with roads that not long ago were used by just farmers and small town residents and friends who came to see them, but now are being destroyed by oil field trucks. I expect you other three have been there too, and will help, with roads and other impacts of rapid, disorderly development.

Today’s oil industry in North Dakota, because of the newly adopted methods of getting that oil from deep in the ground, depends on water. Much as the coal industry did in Art Link’s day. Then, and still, water heated by our coal to produces steam to turn the turbines that generate electricity for an entire northern tier of cities and states. Today, water is needed to fracture the rock that contains the oil to free it for its release into a pipeline to feed refineries throughout the Midwest.

Then, and still, that need for water threatens our groundwater resources, and leads us to the Missouri River and giant Lake Sakakawea as a more reliable source. But oil has brought a greater threat—a threat that has become a reality: the desecration of our Bad Lands. Because, unlike the mining of our rich coal deposits, this second "one-time harvest" is taking place in the most fragile environment in the state.

I’m not going to suggest to you what you should be doing about this right now. I did that in an earlier blog when I asked you to consider saving a few small scraps of roadless areas of the Bad Lands by supporting the Prairie Legacy Wilderness Proposal. (I could, I suppose, ask Byron and Kent to oppose the Murkowski amendment this week, and ask Earl to oppose it when, and if, similar legislation comes to the House.) But I would say this: Ask yourself what Art Link would do. And read, once more, what he said 37 years ago:

We do not want to halt progress We do not plan to be selfish and say “North Dakota will not share its energy resources.”

No . . . we simply want to insure the most efficient and environmentally sound method of utilizing our precious coal and water resources for the benefit of the broadest number of people possible.

And when we are through with that, and the landscape is quiet again,
when the draglines, the blasting rigs, the power shovels and the huge gondolas
cease to rip and roar

And when the last bulldozer has pushed the last spoil pile into place
and the last patch of barren earth has been seeded to grass or grain

Let those who follow and repopulate the land be able to say,
“Our grandparents did their job well. This land is as good as, and, in some cases, better than, before.”

Only if they can say this will we be worthy of the rich heritage of our land and its resources.

Surely those are some of the best words ever written – or spoken – in North Dakota.