Some Summertime Thoughts

A couple of thoughts inspired by some summer reading and viewing:

Joel Kotkin, a California-based writer on urban affairs, has an article in a recent Newsweek called "The Great Great Plains." His point is that the Great Plains region, from the Dakotas down toTexas, are reviving, even  blossoming, economically. This is an area that once was losing population so fast that serious sociologists suggested turning it back to the buffalo. Now, says Kotkin, it's booming again.

Well, maybe. But don't count out the buffalo just yet.

Kotkin, an optimist to the core, is the author of a new book called "The Next Hundred Million," which foresees vast new waves of immigration into the United States and predicts almost unalloyed benefits from this influx. I'm as pro-immigration as Kotkin is, but anyone who's paying attention knows the political battles ahead over this issue, not to mention its challenges to our schools, housing, health care and other services.

Ditto with the Great Plains. A number of Great Plains cities are indisputably thriving. But the Great Plains states themselves aren't doing so hot. 

Kotkin, like others before him, reports from cities like Fargo and Omaha. He could have thrown in Lincoln, Lawrence and Sioux Falls. Fargo is gaining jobs, people, nightlife, pizzazz, largely on high-tech jobs spinning off the region's comparative advantages in energy and agriculture. Omaha looks great, with big-city jobs and small-city commuting.

There definitely is something good going on up and down the Missouri and Red Rivers. A combination of low costs, high educational standards, good local universities and abundant energy have combined to reach critical mass in a few cities, which are taking off in ways that older industrial cities further east can only envy.

But before you load up the Conestoga and head west, you need to realize that these cities aren't the generators of regional growth. Instead, they seem to be lonely outposts of prosperity in a landscape that is becoming drearier by the day.

If Fargo, Bismarck, Sioux Falls, Omaha and Lincoln are doing well, most of the Dakotas, Nebraska and Kansas are literally emptying out. Out on the plains, decades of decline and depopulation continue. Small towns wither and die. Many counties have lost so many people that they no longer can be considered "populated," in the technical term: this is what the academics, Frank and Deborah Popper, meant when they christened the area "Buffalo Commons" and suggested that it be abandoned altogether by people.

Yet the rest of these states also have low costs, hard-working (if scarce) people, high education levels and plenty of energy resources. So why aren't they booming, like Fargo?

The fact is that there might not be enough economic vitality in this vast empty quarter of America to go around. What vitality exists is concentrated into the Fargos and Omahas, which pretty much suck the life -- the young people, the ideas, the money -- out of the rest of the region.

Bright and ambitious young people who like life on the Great Plains aren't going to stay in the old home town, because there are no jobs there. Instead, they head for Fargo, enriching that city while impoverishing the town left behind.

-0-

Last year, the best-picture Oscar went to "The Hurt Locker," an indie movie, made on a shoestring with unknown actors, that slowly worked its way onto the public radar, mostly through sheer quality and drama. This year's equivalent is a stark, intense film called "Winter's Bone." It is set in the hard, beautiful hills of the Ozarks, around a little town near Branson named Forsyth. Like "The Hurt Locker," it was directed by a woman, Debra Granik. Its star is an amazing young actress, Jennifer Lawrence.

This is not a movie review, so I'll just say that "Winter's Bone" is mesmerizing. Go see it. Basically, it involves the attempt by the young heroine, played by Lawrence, to save her ramshackle family home, which her absent father, who cooks methamphetamine for a living, has pledged as bail after a meth bust. This is meth culture, a rural slum inhabited by the sort of people who used to make moonshine and now cook meth, sometimes one step ahead of the law, sometimes not.

Geographically and culturally, this neck of the Ozarks lies outside the Midwest, more West Virginia or Arkansas than the rest of Missouri further north. But so far as I know, it's the best film depiction of the meth culture in the raw -- a no-hope world where meth, like moonshine, can be cooked out of sight, up hollows where nosy sheriffs can't see or smell it, and then sold for income or used (it can be injected, smoked or snorted) to produce an exhilarating high that, while it lasts, erases the pain of life. Meth users are easy to spot -- gaunt, almost emaciated, with terrible teeth. The drug is cheap to make in the countryside, because so many of its ingredients -- pseudophedrine, hydrochloric acid, drain cleaner, battery acid, lye, antifreeze, denatured alcohol and ether -- are usually near at hand, in a drug store or on a farm. It's appalling to think that anyone would put any of these ingredients expect pseudophedrine in his body. Meth is highly addictive. And it can kill.

My point in raising it here is that meth is the drug of choice in much of the rural Midwest, not just the Ozarks. When Nick Reding wrote his book, Methland, about the near destruction of a small town by meth, he set it in Oelwein, Iowa. A sort of AA for mothers addicted to meth, called Moms Off Meth, was founded in Iowa and has no less than 30 chapters in that state. Some provide baby-sitting during sessions.

A Chicago criminal defense lawyer I know occasionally tries cases in his home town downstate. He says the drug cases he defends in Chicago almost always involve cocaine or heroin: downstate, drug offenses almost always involve meth. Other states tell the same story -- heavy meth use, destruction of families and communities, frequent injuries or deaths when a meth lab explodes. High school teachers and principals tell me one of their biggest problems used to be neglect of their students by parents on meth: now it's the kids themselves who are using it.

Meth, then, is a phenomenon of our time and our place. As Reding pointed out, it is used often by people whose jobs have gone away, who have no future in this new economy, who have to work two or three dead-end jobs just to keep going and who find the meth high a useful source of energy (until the inevitable crash, of course).

It's not all over the Midwest but it's in much of the Midwest, especially the rural areas. We need to know what it is and what it does, and "Winter's Bone" is the best primer I know. Don't let the hillbilly setting fool you. This story is right next door. 

For more information on rural development, visit the In the News section of the Global Midwest Web site.

Comments

[Frank Popper]

Good posts. But I and my wife Deborah Popper, a geographer at the City University of New York and Princeton, are not quite suggesting that the Great Plains be entirely abandoned. Anyone wanting more information about the Buffalo Commons should look at my Rutgers website, policy.rutgers.edu/faculty/popper.

The only national group specifically aimed at creating the Buffalo Commons is the Texas-based Great Plains Restoration Council, gprc.org, whose president is Jarid Manos, greatplains@gprc.org. (Disclosure: I chair its board.)

Another relevant group is the New Mexico-based National Center for Frontier Communities, frontierus.org, whose executive director is Carol Miller, carol@frontierus.org. It does research on and advocates for small remote places throughout the country, not just in the West or the Great Plains. (More disclosure: Deborah and I are on its board.) Best wishes,
Frank Popper
Rutgers and Princeton Universities
fpopper@rci.rutgers, fpopper@princeton.edu
732-932-4009, X689
Chicago native