Seeing the Petrochemical Landscapes of the Bakken

Abstract

In the early 2000s, an oil boom in North Dakota’s Bakken, an oil patch contained within tightly formed shale beds underneath 200,000 square miles of the Great Plains, made its mark on the landscape in the form of thousands of new oil wells. The infrastructure to accommodate the wells and thousands of new workers, visible from space at night in the emergent skyglow, has disrupted the region in ways that have largely gone unobserved beyond the reaches of this cold and remote northern location.

This paper asks how evidence-based design involving landscape architects and photographers can improve the visual communication in environmental impact statements to support public understanding of natural resource and infrastructure development approvals and impacts in places like the Bakken. We collected geo-referenced public data sets, conducted synchronous fieldwork, and took photographs to map, quantify, analyze, and juxtapose the work as a tandem display. A historical analysis of synchronous work between landscape architects and photographers from the 1860s onward establishes a framework for how such contemporary collaborations can visually communicate the wants of many public voices. The analysis reveals an unspoken dialog between works by pioneers in the photography and landscape architecture fields. We examine works by photographer Carleton Watkins and landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted in the 1860s; photographer Timothy O’Sullivan and landscape architects H. W. S Cleveland and Charles Eliot in the 1890s; environmental planners Warren Manning and Arthur G. Eldredge in the 1900s; and landscape architect Ian McHarg in the 1960s. We also look to more recent collaborations, like the one between landscape architect James Corner and photographer Alex MacLean in the 1990s and the contemporary practices of photographer Richard Misrach and landscape architect Kate Orff in the 2010s.

We discuss our cross-disciplinary inquiry, begun in 2014, and the empirical case study evidence we accumulated throughmapping, photographing, and interpreting the large-scale social and environmental impacts of natural resource extraction, accelerated by high volume hydraulic fracking. The visual methods employed in this study are posited as a means of improving the affected environment and potential consequences sections of environmental impact statements. If updated public policies required these methods, stakeholders would be allowed to see and understand the full scope of short- and long-term impacts hidden in long written reports.