[This draft has been sitting unfinished for almost a year, and on this lazy Sunday afternoon, I’ve finally gotten around to polishing it off and publishing it.]
A year ago, I spent a week in the Dakotas and Nebraska, marking my first visit to all of those places. During my many hours spent driving on the highway in my rental car and surveying the landscape, several (odd) things crossed my mind, which surprisingly enough, merit posting on this sci-tech blog.
First, let me say that for people like myself who live in urban or suburban environments, the emptiness of rural Dakota and Nebraska is profound and has to be experienced to be fully appreciated. Agricultural areas that are close enough to DC region that I’ve taken road trips through them–such as rural Ohio and Indiana–are on an entirely higher plane of density (in terms of human population and infrastructure). The Great Plains and the Midwest definitely ain’t the same thing. My trip last year thus reset my baseline about what counts as “empty” or “rural” (and I suspect trekking across Alaska would cause yet another redefinition).
The emptiness of the Dakotas is also understandable after you spend time there: there’s just nothing there to keep your interest. The terrain is monotonous (mostly flat or with low, undulating hills going out to every horizon), there’s little wildlife and few trees, and extreme weather is common. It reminded me that not every place dominated by nature is equally interesting or aesthetically pleasing. If I had to choose a “wild” place to live as hermit or nature-loving hippie, I’d pick a mountainous locale that offered good hikes and a variety of wildlife for watching, fishing and hunting, or a spot along a coastline. Being in the middle of a literal sea of grass gets old very fast.
This is something to bear in mind when contemplating how the population will redistribute in the future if teleworking gets even more common and/or if machines render many people permanently unemployed. Without jobs keeping them tethered to cities and their surrounding suburbs, I think tens of millions of people will move to rural areas known for their natural beauty and to charming small towns (it might be helpful to map where wealthy retired people move to in large numbers). However, there are a limited number of such places, so the same problems we see today in metro areas like congestion, (relative) overpopulation, high real estate prices, and the gentrification-driven transformation of “genuine” towns into “boutique” towns would recur. Given the choice to live anywhere, almost no one would pick a little house in the prairie, but competition would be savage for plots of land in places like Silverthorne, CO or Sedona, AZ. The more verdant and mountainous part of western South Dakota near the Black Hills could also grow.
Once farms are fully automated or can be operated remotely (visualize a guy sitting in an office cubicle, using his computer to control a “drone farm combine” from 1,000 miles away), vast stretches of flat, boring land in places like the Dakotas could become completely devoid of humans. Instead of being a new phenomenon, it would just mark the endpoint of several generations-long trends in America related to agricultural automation, depopulation of rural counties thanks to low birth rates and young people moving to more interesting places like cities, and the dying out of “farm country culture” and “small town culture.”
This transition would be sad in some ways, but probably beneficial on balance. Not a day goes by anymore without an article appearing in a major newspaper about the epidemic of suicide, drug abuse (especially opioids and prescription pills), and despair in rural America. Clearly, something is wrong.
During my trip, I drove through several remote, decaying towns–where half the structures looked abandoned and where old, badly rusted vehicles were scattered everywhere–and some settlements that were mere clusters of trailers near the highway. It made no sense to me for people to live in visible poverty, hours away from the nearest city and its cultural, educational and employment opportunities, beyond commuting range to any jobs, and in the midst of a monotonous landscape. What did the people do with their time? How much did their remoteness undermine their access to police and medical help during emergencies? How much extra money and manpower did the local governments have to spend extending those services, as well as utilities like electricity, to them?
It made even less sense to me for people to live in such places, when I found that the same countryside vistas, quiet, and feeling of isolation could be had by living 30 minutes outside a small or medium-sized city in Dakota or Nebraska. (If you don’t believe me, set out from Bismarck, ND in a car in any direction, drive for 30 minutes, doing the last ten minutes on a randomly chosen country road, and then stop and see where you are.) I think the government should fund programs to voluntarily relocate people from economically depressed small towns to metro areas (participants would have their moving expenses paid for and would be linked with affordable new homes in metro areas and entry-level jobs, but their old homes would be torn down and the land rezoned for non-residential use and or “re-wilded”) Though this is an admittedly controversial belief, bear in mind that there’s a precedent for it: During the Great Depression, a small federal agency was created called the “Resettlement Administration,” and one of the things it did was use federal money to buy poor farms in the Dust Bowl region so the suffering farmers could move elsewhere. The land was then put under the oversight of experts in forestry and soil erosion, repairing the ecological damage done by inappropriate farming practices.
But government action might not be needed to realize this scenario. I can imagine a future farm in the middle of nowhere, North Dakota, that is still owned by the same family that was granted the land in the 1800s, even though the family’s members no longer live there. The ones that do take an active role in farming live in nice, suburban houses in Bismarck, where they use telepresence virtual reality technology to remotely control machines on their farm. The machines are mostly automated, but occasionally have mechanical problems or face situations their programming leaves them unprepared for, requiring human intervention. They only have to physically visit the farm once every few weeks. Sometimes the men of the family also go there for bird hunting, to fish in the creek, and to hold family reunions in the farmhouse they remember from their childhood. I could imagine similar setups for cattle ranchers, who would entrust the herding of their cattle to different kinds of drones, which would operate autonomously most of the time and, at the flick of a switch, be remotely controllable by a human anywhere on the planet.
Another thing that struck me during my trip was that, even if people were sparse in the countryside, EVIDENCE of people was almost constantly apparent. By that I mean manmade things, like roads, power lines, buildings (farm-related sheds and shelters), radio antennas, planes flying overhead, and fences. There were lots and lots and lots of wire fences, hemming in the roads on both sides to keep cattle from freely wandering.
The presence of so much land-based infrastructure, even in places most people would call “the middle of nowhere,” hit home for me how easy it will be someday to create a national mass surveillance network. Once sensors inevitably get dirt cheap and robots can install and maintain them at low cost, there’s little reason they couldn’t be placed everywhere, even in remote parts of the Great Plains. The easiest way to do it would be to install sensor clusters (cameras, microphones, air pressure sensors, wind sensors) on power line poles. The mounting points are already there, they could be mounted high to provide long-distance views, and they’d have access to electricity. Since power lines usually parallel roads, maintenance bots would have easy access to them, and they’d be able to monitor movements of people and cargo since most everything travels via roads.
Even one sensor on every tenth pole along the highways I traversed would be good enough: the cameras would be within line of sight of each other and could see everything for miles around given the flat topography and lack of obstructions. If they detected anything in the distance they couldn’t identify, they could cue drones to investigate and could plug the surveillance gaps while being even fewer in number and more diffuse than the fixed place sensor network. Americans probably would never agree to install a mass surveillance system like this for the purpose of spying on themselves, but it might get started for innocuous reasons, like improved weather forecasting, air traffic monitoring, or wildlife monitoring.
One beneficial applications for all these technologies would be the safe reintroduction of herds of wild animals to the Great Plains. The sensor network and drones could track and shepherd them across the vast private ranches, keeping them a safe distance from the cattle, and corralling them from one fence gate to another. (Yes, being stuck in a rental car for hours while driving across a plain landscape [pun intended] will lead my mind to conjure such things.)
OK, returning to reality a little, I was surprised and disappointed by the lack of solar panels and wind turbines in the Dakotas and Nebraska. The region is well-known for being windy, and it’s actually slightly sunnier than the Mid-Atlantic, which where I’m from. But strangely, even though land costs more here, solar panels are much more common sights. If anything, I’d imagine people living in the Great Plains would welcome wind turbines as a break from the visual monotony of the natural landscape, and if I’m wrong and they don’t want to look at them, it wouldn’t be hard to find an empty valley just over the horizon for them. The large swaths of open land–including poor-quality land that was clearly unsuited for agriculture–also lend themselves to building utility-scale solar farms, yet I saw none.
Having said so many negative and strange things about my visit to the Dakotas and Nebraska, let me conclude that it was actually a good trip, nothing bad happened to me, and the people of the Great Plains struck me as very decent folk. It’s not my intention to insult anyone with my observations or speculations about how the region could improve in the future, and I hope anyone from rural America can appreciate the insights of a lifelong suburbanite like me.
Links:
http://time.com/4734442/retirement-popular-place-map/