Years ago, the TV program Candid Camera set up a road block on a major road into Delaware. They told motorists that they had to stop because Delaware was full and they needed to wait for a car to leave before another could be allowed to enter. Hilarity ensued.
Recently, the state of North Dakota (and its neighbors) have started to pursue policies that will almost certainly have a negative impact on the state’s ability to attract and retain younger workers especially beyond the limited boundaries of the North Dakota oil fields. It seems likely that despite the recent growth in North Dakota’s population (most notably since 2010) that the overall trajectory of the state’s population is level or even slightly declining. The birthrate in ND, despite being among the highest in the US has dropped below the 2.1 replacement level. Moreover, recent attacks on higher education in the state (and education more broadly) make it hard to imagine that the state will continue to retain and attract young people.
Perhaps I’m wrong about this (and with any luck, I will live long enough to see what will happen!).
This trend got me thinking about a collection of short essays (maybe very short?) on what one might do to close down a state. As far as I know, the US has never officially stricken a state from the official record (outside of the Civil War and Reconstruction when states in revolt lost their privileges on the federal level). So in some ways, this is a Constitutional question. Presumably any decision to eliminate a state from the union would involve a Constitutional amendment.
I’m more interested in what the state itself could do to wrap up its affairs and to make a case for its own abolition. There’s been a tendency to see recent socially regressive (or conservative) legislation as a way to restore “good governance” to the state. This form of governance, however, almost certainly ensures a return to demographic decline accompanied by the reduction of social services, educational investment, and policies designed to ensure quality of life. While optimists might claim that the private sector will step in to fill gaps left by a retreat of government funding (and in some cases this is almost certainly the case; in fact, the growth of states like North Dakota reflect in some ways the expansion of capital into western territories), this also means that capital in the state is subjected to larger market pressures that hardly respect national boundaries, much less regional ones.
I’m hardly the first to consider what could happen if the state of North Dakota starts to wrap up its affairs. The idea of a Buffalo Commons, for example, recognized that challenges facing any long term settlement in most of the Northern and Great Plains. Kim Stanley Robinson, in his most recent novel Ministry for the Future, imagines the re-wilding of the region as part of a broader effort to mitigate climate change.
Even if one doesn’t find the argument that depopulating the state of North Dakota has environmental benefits, it is hard to deny that it might have certain economic benefits. Right now, of course, residents of the state of North Dakota benefit substantially from federal support, even if the state isn’t quite as dependent as its neighbors in Montana, Wyoming, and South Dakota. Per capital federal funding is among the highest in the US. Of course, these are complicated numbers to unpack and federal funding is only one side of an equation that has to also include state and federal revenue per resident. Despite the complexity of this exercise, it is easy enough to imagine a time where efforts to discourage younger, more progressive residents from living in the state leads to an increase in the age of the population, an increase in federal spending, and a decrease in federal revenues per resident. If this trend reached a particular point, it might even be economically advisable to depopulate the state as a cost saving measure. It would be simply a matter of fiscal responsibility and good governance.
The book, as I envision it, would feature essays that consider a depopulated state in both utopian and dystopian terms. I could imagine archaeological, political, social, ecological, and even theological comments on both the process of creating deserted places and the after lives of abandoned zones. Of course, one would also have to imagine that the depopulation of North Dakota isn’t just about white European settlers, but also intersects with the interests and rights Native American tribes, communities, and treaty lands. How authors understand the impact on these groups would, of course, be part of the thought experiment.
One option would be to produce a little book and publish it with my press (working title: After North Dakota).
Another option would be to put it together as a little form in North Dakota Quarterly.