North Dakota: Dateline 2139

BY DELORE ZIMMERMAN

North Dakota is celebrating its quasquicentennial of statehood this year

Looking ahead, 125 years from now, North Dakotans will celebrate the quarter-millennial, meaning one-fourth of 1,000 years

A special report by World Futurist Society on life in the year 2100 describes the 22nd century as being one where changes come exponentially faster than in the 21st century, a century that starts full of expected wonders and a rich harvest of utterly unexpected surprises and the stubborn persistence of some things we hoped to leave behind in the 20th century

So what will North Dakota look like 125 years from now what will we be celebrating in 2139? That’s hard to say and since I don't have a crystal ball I’m going to let history and some fairly predictable trends be my guide.

In his “History of North Dakota,” Elwyn B Robinson posed six themes of North Dakota’s history: remoteness, dependence, radicalism, a position of economic disadvantage, the Too-Much Mistake and adjustment From Robinson’s viewpoint in the 1960s, he called these the “hard, disagreeable truths.” From these, Robinson encapsulated the North Dakota character comprised of friendliness, courage, energy, loyalty and radicalism These character traits, if they endure, can serve us well as North Dakota’s future begins with a newly advantaged and connected point of departure I think about my hometown of Wishek, located in the rolling hills of south-central North Dakota, which drew immigrants from the steppes near the Black Sea They arrived in the 1880s to homestead the deep sod prairie, lured by the romantic thrill of developing a “Territorial Empire” that became the states of North and South Dakota

That spirit of Dakota lives on in Wishek as it makes strides to reinvent and revitalize its role as an agricultural, commercial and service center featuring all the qualities that make small town life so appealing. Wishek, like the rest of North Dakota, has changed and it will continue to do so, oftentimes in unexpected ways. As Clay Jenkinson so aptly points out, “You can say goodbye to the sleepy old family farm homeland we once were ”

By 2139 North Dakota’s oil boom instead of waning has continued due to improved extraction technologies that keep the crude pumping Although new energy and chemical technologies have replaced oil for some applications many of its harder-to-replace uses will continue to persist. A distributed, hub and node energy system of large and smaller-scale energy systems power virtually everything in the 22nd century reflecting the relocalization of all aspects of living and life

The world’s contentious, sometimes shifting political borders persist but commerce and common interests are based on networks not geography, where everything is simultaneously available globally but shaped to meet local needs In this era of hyper-globalization, Fargo, Bismarck, Grand Forks and other regional centers are connected to and compete on an even playing field with New York City, Lagos and Beijing Wishek and dozens of its small town counterparts endure as farming and service communities that feed a world population of 11 billion people PB

Delore Zimmerman President, Praxis Strategy Group Executive Director, Red River Valley Research Corridor delore@praxissg.com

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