What Led to the Rapid Development of the Great Plains?
This is the introduction to a new report on the future of the American Great Plains released today by Texas Tech University (TTU). The report was authored by Joel Kotkin; Delore Zimmerman, Mark Schill, and Matthew Leiphon of Praxis Strategy Group; and Kevin Mulligan of TTU. Visit TTU's page to download the full written report, read the online version, or to bank check out the interactive online atlas of the region containing economical, demographic, and geographic data.
For much of the past century, the vast surface area known equally the Great Plains has been largely written off as a bit player on the American stage. As the nation has urbanized, and turned increasingly into a service and engineering science-based economy, the semi-arid area betwixt the Mississippi Valley and the Rockies has been described every bit little more than a mistaken misadventure best left undone.
Much of the media portray the Corking Plains as a desiccated, lost world of emptying towns, meth labs, and Native Americans almost to reclaim a identify best left to the forces of nature. "Much of North Dakota has a ghostly feel to it," wrote Tim Egan in the New York Times in 2006. This picture of the region has been a consequent theme in media coverage for much of the past few decades.
In a telephone call for a reversal of national policy that had for ii centuries promoted growth, two New Jersey academics, Frank J. Popper and Deborah Popper, proposed that Washington accelerate the depopulation of the Plains and create "the ultimate national park." They suggested the government return the land and communities to a "buffalo commons," claiming that evolution of The Plains constitutes, "the largest, longest-running agronomical and environmental miscalculation in American history." They predicted the region volition "become almost totally depopulated."
Our research shows that the Great Plains, far from dying, is in the midst of a historic recovery. While the area nosotros have studied encompasses portions of thirteen states, our focus here is on ten core locations: North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana.
Rather than reject, over the past decade the area has surpassed the national norms in everything from population increment to income and job growth. After generations of net out-migration, the unabridged region now enjoys a net in-migration from other states, as well as increased clearing from around the globe. Remarkably, for an surface area long suffering from aging, the bulk of this new migration consists largely of younger families and their offspring.
No less striking has been a rapid improvement in the region's economy. Paced by strong growth in agronomics, manufacturing and energy — too as a growing tech sector — the Great Plains at present boasts the lowest unemployment rate of any region. North Dakota, S Dakota and Nebraska are the only states with a jobless rate of around four percent; Kansas, Montana, Oklahoma and Texas all have unemployment rates beneath the national average.
A map of areas with the about rapid chore growth over the past decade and through the Great Recession would show a swath of prosperity extending across the high plains of Texas to the Canada/North Dakota edge. Rises in wage income during the past ten years follow a similar pattern. The Plains now boasts some of the healthiest economies in terms of job growth and unemployment on the Due north American continent.
Of course, this tide of prosperity has not lifted all boats. Big areas have been left behind — rural modest towns, deserted mining settlements, Native American reservations — and continue to suffer widespread poverty, low wages and, in many cases, demographic decline.
In addition, the region faces formidable environmental and infrastructural challenges. Most prominent is the continuing issue of adequate h2o supplies, particularly in the southern plains. The big-calibration increase in both farming and fossil fuel production, particularly the use of hydraulic fracking, could, if not approached advisedly, exacerbate this situation in the not so distant future.
Inadequate infrastructure, particularly air connections, still leaves much of the area distressingly cut off from the larger urban economic system. The area'south industrial economy and rich resources are field of study to a lack of sufficient road, track and port connections to markets around the earth. All the same despite these challenges, we believe that three critical factors will propel the region's future.
Beginning, with its vast resources, the Swell Plains is in an excellent position to take advantage of worldwide increases in demand for food, fiber and fuel. This growth is driven primarily by markets overseas, specially in the developing countries of eastward and south Asia, and Latin America.
Every bit these countries have added hundreds of millions of center course consumers, the price and value of bolt has continued to rise and seem likely to remain potent, with some short-term market corrections, over fourth dimension.
2nd, the rapid evolution and adoption of new technologies has enhanced the development of resources, notably oil and gas previously considered impractical to tap. At the aforementioned time, the net and avant-garde communications have reduced many of the traditional barriers — economic, cultural and social — that have cut off rural regions from the rest of country and the world.
Tertiary, and perhaps near important, are demographic changes. The late Soichiro Honda one time noted that "more of import than gold or diamonds are people." The reversal of outmigration in the region suggests that it is once once more becoming attractive to people with ambition and talent. This is peculiarly true of the region's leading cities — Omaha, Oklahoma City, Tulsa, Kansas City, Sioux Falls, Greeley, Wichita, Lubbock, and Dallas-Fort Worth — many of which now enjoy positive net migration not only from their own hinterlands, but from leading metropolitan areas such as Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area, New York and Chicago. Of the 40 metropolitan areas in the region, 32 show positive average cyberspace domestic migration since 2008.
Together these factors — resources, information applied science and changing demographics — augur well for the time to come of the Great Plains. In one case forlorn and seemingly presentlyhoped-for abandoned, the Corking Plains enters the 21st century with a prairie wind at its back.
Visit TTU's page to download the full study, read the online version, or to check out the interactive online atlas of the region containing economic, demographic, and geographic information.
Praxis Strategy Group is an economical inquiry, analysis, and strategic planning firm. Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and author of The Adjacent Hundred 1000000: America in 2050. Kevin Mulligan is Associate Professor of Geography at Texas Tech University and Director of TTU'south Center for Geospatial Technology.
Source: https://www.newgeography.com/content/003175-the-rise-great-plains-regional-opportunity-21st-century
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