Ever so slowly, North Dakotans are beginning to grasp the irony that the state's sprawling, thinly populated landscape is an asset that has yet to be appreciated.
We've done a lot of hand-wringing and finger-pointing the last few years over the loss of population. We've bemoaned the closing of schools, the deterioration and disappearance of small towns, the willy-nilly flight of young people from small towns to cities to other states, the slow-motion collapse of agriculture-based rural economies.
So what's left outside of a handful of larger cities? Not much, most people would say. But in fact, what remains holds the promise of being much more than it was when towns were carelessly planted every few miles along now-abandoned rails.
A landscape empty of people is not an empty landscape. Indeed, North Dakota's unique features are more valuable today than they ever have been. Less intense human activity on the land has returned parts of the state to natural paradises. Farm program set-asides (the Conservation Reserve Program, for example) have not only protected marginal lands, but also have restored wildlife habitat to productivity not seen in generations.
The state has more wildlife refuges than any other. Additional wildlife lands, including federal and state waterfowl production areas, add tens of thousands of acres that are protected from farming or urban sprawl, and are accessible to anyone.
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Those of us who live here tend to take for granted the open spaces, wetlands, forested river bottoms, abundance of wildlife and the movie-set vistas of the Badlands. Not so in most of urban America.
There is a hunger in much of the nation for eco-tourism. For birding. For nature hiking and photography. For dinosaur digs. For archeology vacations. For so-called low-impact visits to unspoiled, untrammeled natural places.
North Dakota has 'em in abundance.
To their credit, the people at North Dakota Tourism understand the possibilities. There has been a subtle but significant shift in the way the state's being marketed. Oh sure, the Lewis & Clark bicentennial must be the centerpiece for a couple of years, but in the long term, the state's diverse and mostly unspoiled natural environment will sustain the tourism economy. And because so many visitors are expected for the bicentennial of the Corps of Discovery, it can serve as an introduction to the state's natural attractions.
And they are many.
From the Badlands and Roosevelt National Park in the west, to the Cross Ranch's giant cottonwoods on the Missouri River, to the remote bays and flooded woodlands of Devils Lake, to the tall grass prairie and sandhills in the Fort Ransom area, the opportunities for nature tourism are boundless.
We live in a state where finding solitude in quiet places is so routine we've forgotten that most of the nation's people live in noisy, crowded cities. They want to come to where they can enjoy the wonders of a natural environment. North Dakota can accommodate them, in part because there are fewer people on the land, which means there are more isolated pristine and wild areas.
Looked at in that context, depopulation of rural areas represents change that should be embraced.
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Zaleski can be reached at jzaleski@forumcomm.com or (701) 241-5521.
