New Book on The Bakken Brings Home Burden of Oil Booms

(UND Today photo)

(UND Today) – The Bakken oil boom may well be a fading memory to the national media, but it continues to impact residents of western North Dakota. Sebastian Felix Braun’s new book, “Bearing the Burden of Booms: Energy, Extraction, Communities and Landscapes on the Plains,” reflects years of field work in the Bakken oil patch and extracts crucial lessons from those who experienced the boom.

Braun is director of American Indian Studies and professor of Political Science at Iowa State University.

Based on 15 years of fieldwork and archival research and published by The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota, “Bearing the Burden of Booms” takes a comprehensive and multidisciplinary look at resource extraction and its impacts on landscapes and communities. Taking the Bakken oil boom as its prime example, this book describes the cultural, social, and environmental disruptions, analyzes the political messaging that supports natural resource extraction, puts the Bakken boom in a historical and contemporary comparative context, and examines water usage and pollution.

Combining this research with the economics of hydraulic fracturing allowed Braun to ask the question of whether the cultural, social and ecological disruptions of the boom were and are worth it.