Operational Culture General and "Reading the Cultural Landscape" Assessment

News coming out of the Permian Basin of West Texas during the by few months is marked by fear and anxiety. Optimistic headlines from the early 2010s have been replaced with more ominous ones, including an LA Times 'southward headline forecasting "The End is Nigh" and the New York Times's suggesting that information technology was time to motility "On to Programme B." After several years of " boom," which saw oil and gas product attain record highs due to hydraulic fracturing (or "fracking"), the West Texas economy now appears headed toward "bust." Drillers in the Permian accept begun to drastically calibration back operations. Oil companies are shutting down rigs and laying off workers; the Jan commodity in the New York Times estimates that the number of operational rigs to be halved from last summer.

The consequences of the latest West Texas bosom achieve far beyond the oil industry. The growth of shale fracking has led to unprecedented population growth in the Permian concomitant with a building boom. Pecos, Texas, in Reeves Canton, was named one of America's fastest growing towns by Forbes magazine in 2012. Pecos'southward hotels also have been experiencing 100% occupancy rates, every bit workers on Reeves County's 39 rigs sought the only form of lodging available. Co-ordinate to the New York Times, Midland, the economical eye of the Permian'southward oil industry, has seen its population not bad from 108,000 in 2010 to almost 140,000 today. All the same as goes the oil manufacture, so goes the residuum of the economy; the smash in the region now appears as fragile as the dreams of striking it rich—something west Texans have sought continuously for over 100 years.

Looking to the cultural mural—the built evidence of human being interaction with the land—helps us empathise the latest crisis as function of a longer wheel of "boom and bust" in this mineral rich, if sparsely populated, region. Layers of materialized dreams survive throughout the region as evidence of west Texans' aspirations in this relatively inhospitable place where temperatures regularly top 100 degrees and h2o is deficient. Sizable reminders of these dreams—in the form of pump jacks and oil storage facilities, sometimes of different generations—materially narrate the story of frontier ambitions in the Permian (Fig. 1). Beyond helping us identify the latest forecasted crunch within the region'due south longer history, reading the cultural landscape also helps us sympathise the intimate relationship between human-made and natural landscapes. In the Permian, because one without the other makes piddling sense.

Fig. ane Oil landscape with pump jack just e of Midland, Texas, along I-20. Photo by author, March, 2013.

Borderland Dreams

The Permian has been the site of dreams for centuries, even if information technology seems an unlikely place to settle given its arid climate and relatively flat terrain. When John Russell Bartlett, head of the American section of the U.Due south.-Mexican Border Committee, explored w Texas in 1850, he characterized the "great table-land" in harsh terms:

[Here] there is trivial rain and poor soil. Several modest streams emptying into the Colorado or the Concho here intersect the road, on the immediate banks of which there area few trees. Only the intermediate country is destitute of timber, salve a very few minor oaks or mezquit (sic.). The grass also is poor, except nigh the water courses. . . . Information technology is a desolate arid waste product, which can never be rendered useful for human being or beast, relieve for a public highway.¹

Despite Bartlett's and others' scathing assessments of the inhospitality of the landscape, pioneers have seen the Permian as the country of opportunity—a history that cuts across centuries. Comanche Indians and waves of settlers from United mexican states practiced agriculture on the barren grasslands until the U.S. Ground forces took concord of the region and opened it to U.S. settlers during the 1870s.

Since the 1880s, ranchers and farmers have optimistically seen the barren terrain and potassium rich soils every bit having potential for agronomics. Everything from corn to cotton to cantaloupes has been tried, all of which necessitated massive irrigation projects ranging from deep wells to dammed (if ofttimes seasonal) creeks and rivers. There is also the long history of petroleum extraction here, which dates back to early extractive attempts—steam-powered wells—including 1 at Tomah, Texas (Reeves County), where J.D. Leatherman discovered oil while digging for water.² Other oil "booms" occurred in the Permian during the late 1920s and 1930s likewise as the during the 1970s energy crunch.

Yet each of these frontier dreams was curt-lived. The drought of 1916-17 brought ranching and farming to a virtually standstill. Repeated attempts to gargle the Permian'south farms were fraught with conflict and compromise. The story of oil has been consistently written and rewritten over the final century. "Booms" occurred when demand necessitated it and "busts" when this demand waned—virtually recently during the 1980s, when a worldwide oil glut brought the petroleum-based economic system of the Permian to a near standstill.

Materialized Dreams in the Due west Texas Landscape

Traveling through West Texas offers a rich palimpsest of the dreams of Permian residents over the past 150 years. Cloth Civilization reminds us that the natural resource history hither on which the frontier dreams were based had social and cultural consequences. Economic booms and busts had effects that reached far beyond the dreams of a few aggressive men seeking their fortune in agriculture or extractive industry. Whole towns grew up around economic possibilities, and nearly survive today, in contradistinct class, every bit tangible bear witness of the boom and bust cycle.

Monahans, Texas, in Ward County, is located at the heart of the Permian bowl. It was settled originally as the site of a deep well on the edge of the Monahans Sandhills (now a State Park). Named afterwards surveyor John Thomas Monahans, the well was located strategically between the Pecos River and Big Spring (approximately 140 miles to the east). Equally such, it proved disquisitional for the success of late nineteenth-century ranching in the region. The well as well supplied h2o for workers building Texas and Pacific Railroad in the region during the 1880s. Yet despite its fortuitous beginnings, Monahans grew modestly until the 2nd quarter of the twentieth century, when an oil boom led to a population explosion; the town grew by 383% between 1930 (816) and 1940 (three,944).

Monahan's cultural landscape visually narrates its complicated history. Monahans Sandhills State Park remains the "oasis" in the region despite no longer having much water. The park besides conveys the region's long dependence on oil and tourism to sustain its economic system. The park is privately owned and leased to the Land Park System on a 99-year charter. Private industry flourishes in the park as a result. Pump jacks—both historic and recent—serve as reminders of the long history of oil extraction in the Permian (Fig. 2). Meanwhile, tourists have flocked to the Park since it opened in 1957. They come to experience the mineral history of the area and relish the sand dunes—some of which rise upwards seventy anxiety in height, offering commanding views of the petroleum landscape. But like everything else in the Permian, when the lease expires, the park will convert to yet another use, and thus once again be open to opportunity and subject to materialized changes.

Fig. two Celebrated pump jack display in Monahans Sandhills Country Park, Monahans, Texas. Photo by author, March, 2013.

Virtually Monahans Sandhills stands some other remnant of "blast and bust:" the Million Butt Tank. The tank survives equally peradventure the largest materialized dream in the region, or, more accurately, materialized dreams, for the tank has had many lives. Constructed by the Crush Corporation in 1928, it was intended to hold crude oil before shipment. The tank is actually an eight-acre hole—a huge, earthen-walled storage vat lined with concrete—and was congenital in xc days largely with horses and mitt tools. Originally it had wooden poles supporting a wooden roof, designed to keep the oil from evaporating in the hot Texas sun. Only filled to capacity once, the tank was abandoned by the early 1950s, at which point its afterlives began. Information technology was initially redesigned as a recreational lake, stocked with fish and intended also for swimming—another dream that failed to materialize (just as the tank leaked oil information technology also turned out to leak h2o). In 1986, afterwards decades of employ for impromptu and clandestine tailgating and festivals, it became the One thousand thousand Barrel Museum. Visitors can now view collections of local memorabilia and also learn about the oil history of the Permian.

Virtually 30 miles west of Monahans is the small town of Pecos, with its ain history of boom and bust, narrated materially on the landscape. As with Monahans, Pecos's "main street" reflects its boom and bosom phases. Even while some buildings take been abased and others take been redesigned around new uses, they remain standing to reflect a town that was thriving during the early on 1900s. Like Monahans, the boondocks of Pecos depended on water for success; the Pecos River proved vital for ranching in the region and led Pecos to likewise exist a crossroads for agronomics more more often than not. Yet ranching savage off in the region during the drought of the mid 1910s, which killed nigh all of the cattle.

This led Pecos residents to other pursuits, both in agriculture and oil. Agronomics remained perpetually dependent on water, which led to a decades-long pursuit of building a dam on the Pecos River. The Red Barefaced Dam, completed in 1936, created a pool of water in an otherwise arid region. It proved vital to the success, admitting on a small calibration, of the "Pecos cantaloupe." An unlikely product to grow in a region receiving less than x inches of water annually, the potassium and sodium rich soils created a very desirable melon, which grew to great acclaim for a few decades.³ Oil, meanwhile, boomed initially during the tardily 1920s with a discovery at the Yates well north of Pecos. Oil went in fits and starts along with marketplace demand, and has recently experienced a resurgence with the fracking of oil and natural gas and renewed potash mining.

The Westward of the Pecos Museum in downtown Pecos offers a powerful representation of Pecos's history (Fig. 3). Opened in 1963 when the economic system had basis to a halt, the museum itself represents a "frontier dream," hoping to capitalize on its location at the intersection of Interstate xx and Highway 285, which connects I-20 with Carlsbad, New Mexico, virtually an 60 minutes northward. The Museum's exhibits fascinatingly attest to the long and complicated frontier dreams of the region—from oil to agriculture to ranching. Withal the placement of the museum within a onetime hotel is a key aspect of the story. The "Orient" Hotel and Saloon opened in 1896—the beginning of ane of Pecos'due south booms—and the main floor of the museum visually recreates this era, with exhibits on barfights, rodeos, and gun battles. This one building, then, brings together in a palimpsest the nail and bosom cycles of the landscape, of which its ain creation was a key role.

Fig. iii Due west of the Pecos Museum in 1984, Pecos, Texas. Photograph courtesy of Reeves County (TX) survey cards, Texas Historical Commission.

Inextricably bound

Reading the cultural mural shows usa the shut and interdependent relationship of natural and material histories in West Texas. The boom and bosom bicycle has left material traces, often layered on acme of one some other, as the cases of the Million Barrel Tank and the Due west of the Pecos Museum suggest. W Texas is a place where dreams are endlessly written and rewritten on the landscape, ofttimes in brusk spans of time, just equally failures, typically a result of economic downturns or natural disasters, also leave telling cloth traces. And while such layering is present in all cultural landscapes, the sparseness of the West Texas natural landscape juxtaposed with the massive scale of these materialized dreams—whether skyscrapers in Midland, storage reservoirs like the million barrel tank, or parks like that at Monahans Sandhills—makes the Permian bowl a laboratory of sorts for considering the relationship between natural and cultural landscapes.

The latest wheel of boom and bosom has already left its marks on the cultural landscape. Every bit the oil has been fracked from the oil rich basin underlying the region, the appearance of Westward Texas has been profoundly transformed again: by human-made lakes of fracked waste water, by new roads congenital to haul water in and crude out, and by new motels, RV parks, and fast food restaurants erected to support the massive influx of labor in the region. And just equally quickly equally these buildings and landscape elements were realized, they are becoming obsolete, leaving a remnant mural of materialized dreams that will itself become part of the fascinating material culture of smash and bust in the arid mural of the Permian.

Anna Vemer Andrzejewski is Professor of American Art, Architecture, and Fabric Civilisation in the Department of Art History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She also co-directs the Buildings-Landscapes-Cultures Ph.D. Companion Program and serves on CHE's steering commission. Anna currently serves as co-editor of Buildings and Landscapes, the journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum. E-mail.

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1. John Russell Bartlett,Personal Narrative of Explorations and Incidents in Texas, New United mexican states, California, Sonora, and Chihuahua, 1850-1853 [1854] (Chicago: The Rio Grande Printing, 1965), 138. ↩

2. Alton Hughes,Pecos: A History of the Pioneer Westward (Seagraves, TX: Pioneer Volume Publishers, 1978), 156. ↩

3. "Pecos Cantaloupes Contribute to Fame of Texas,"Midwest Crop and Stock (June 1951): 11, 56. ↩

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Source: https://edgeeffects.net/texas-boom-and-bust/