{"id":5581,"date":"2015-12-04T19:54:06","date_gmt":"2015-12-04T19:54:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/now\/?p=5581"},"modified":"2017-05-25T20:48:49","modified_gmt":"2017-05-25T20:48:49","slug":"boom-or-bust","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/now\/2015\/12\/04\/boom-or-bust\/","title":{"rendered":"Boom or bust"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the summer of 2012, Tim Pippert<\/strong> lifted a couple of duffel bags into the back of his car and headed northwest on Interstate 94, beginning an almost 700-mile journey that drew him out of Minneapolis\u2014beyond the steel and glass towers, the hectic grid of side streets and signs, and the flurry of Fortune 500 companies and all those who inhabit their cubicles and corner offices.<\/p>\n

Soon, the fields of western Minnesota and eastern North Dakota lined Pippert\u2019s roadside. He rolled past patches of flax and sunflowers, wheat, alfalfa, and canola to a place where tilled acreage melted into an even more expansive landscape of ranches and natural prairie grasses. For decades\u2014make that centuries\u2014any description of western North Dakota seemed amiss without mentioning this place\u2019s sheer vastness of space, the way gently rolling hills and rugged badlands disappear into broad horizons hugging big, bluish-gray skies.<\/p>\n

But now the story was different. This area was in the midst of a transformation.<\/p>\n

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Pippert was headed to Williston\u2014the North Dakota city viewed as the epicenter of the latest North American oil boom. This isolated community was among a handful of towns and small cities dotting the map in four counties that together emitted a nearly magnetic pull for job seekers of all kinds.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s likely that the route Pippert followed to Williston began in a similar fashion as the path truck drivers, frack hands, pipe fitters, hair stylists, and people working within numerous other industries took to North Dakota. That\u2019s because Pippert\u2019s curiosity with Williston was piqued by news stories describing the remarkable growth happening in this once stagnant community.<\/p>\n

What was unique about Pippert\u2019s desire to work in the Roughrider State, though, was that he didn\u2019t plan to fill a position in the oil industry or to hold a job supporting its employees at all. Instead, he sought to study the societal change underway in Williston and its surrounding areas along with individuals\u2019 perceptions of it. Thus, he became one of the first scholars to explore what local residents perceive to be the costs and benefits of the boom.<\/p>\n

A new research phase<\/strong><\/h3>\n

As an associate professor in the Augsburg College Department of Sociology, Pippert blends teaching, scholarship, and mentorship into his work each year, with an emphasis on each aspect varying in accordance with the academic calendar cycle.<\/p>\n

His interest in North Dakota\u2019s changing cultural and physical landscape stemmed from in-class discussions with his students. Pippert asked his Introduction to Sociology class to bring in newspaper clippings related to current events as an assignment so that, together, the students could practice analyzing information using a sociological perspective. One article on North Dakota oil came in, then another.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s when things were in the very early stages of the boom, and there were sensational stories about folks making money hand over fist and people moving out there with nowhere to live,\u201d Pippert said. \u201cI\u2019m from Nebraska, and there was only one stoplight in my entire county. I\u2019m used to seeing all of these tiny towns decline in population or be relatively stable, certainly not growing. As a sociologist, I was just fascinated by what happens when a small town explodes in population overnight.\u201d<\/p>\n

For years, North Dakotans were concerned about their state\u2019s population decline, but the oil boom in the late 2000s dramatically changed the socioeconomic landscape in the region.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>
As one of the first sociologists to study the effects of the most recent oil boom in North Dakota, Tim Pippert<\/strong> has been sought out by organizations looking to add context to their coverage of the changes occurring in the city of Williston and its surrounding communities. Pippert appeared in the documentary \u201cBOOM,\u201d which depicted human and sex trafficking issues haunting communities. Read “A Dark Side to a Boom”<\/a><\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In 2013, journalist Chip Brown wrote a New York Times Magazine article that said, \u201cIt\u2019s hard to think of what oil hasn\u2019t done to life in small communities of western North Dakota, good and bad. It has minted millionaires, paid off mortgages, created businesses; it has raised rents, stressed roads, vexed planners and overwhelmed schools; it has polluted streams, spoiled fields and boosted crime.\u201d<\/p>\n

This article is among thousands penned since the start of the boom, but Pippert\u2019s research takes an approach that\u2019s different than the one most popular news media follow.<\/p>\n

Using a combination of quantitative and qualitative research methods over the course of his career, Pippert has examined subject areas such as the family ties of homelessness, the transition to parenthood, and the accuracy of photographic representation of diversity within university recruitment materials. As the next phase of his research, Pippert recognized that there\u2019s certainly a story related to the development in North Dakota, but it\u2019s not one that can\u2014or necessarily should\u2014be summarized in a 500-word, front-page expos\u00e9 or in a 2-minute piece on the 6 o\u2019clock news. Pippert is working to construct a longer narrative that is grounded in a sociological understanding of rapid population growth, allowing for an analysis of how the perceptions of local residents change over time. Of course history shows that people\u2019s opinions shift as the state of the oil industry fluctuates, which it typically does.<\/p>\n

North Dakota has boomed before<\/h3>\n

\u201cNorth Dakota has had oil booms before but never one so big, never one that rivaled the land rush precipitated more than a century ago by the transcontinental railroads, never one that so radically changed the subtext of the Dakota frontier from the Bitter Past That Was to the Better Future That May Yet Be,\u201d Brown wrote.<\/p>\n

Since the beginning, the American oil industry\u2019s history in north central states has followed a cyclical narrative of starts and stops, booms and busts. The subterranean shale that contains the much talked-about oil covers western North Dakota and northeastern Montana, and stretches into two Canadian provinces: Saskatchewan and Manitoba. The Bakken shale was discovered in the early 1950s and named after Henry Bakken, a farmer who leased his land in North Dakota for an early well. At 14,700 square miles, it is the largest continuous crude oil accumulation in the United States. The shale has been in development since 1953 with periods of significant growth punctuating its more than 50-year timeline. For instance, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, activity picked up in the upper Bakken when improved extraction technology married political and economic conditions that left the U.S. thirsty for domestic production.<\/p>\n

\"2015<\/a>