Conway’s At Home in the Petromodern Paradox, Part 1

Over the weekend, I started Kyle Conway’s latest book on the Bakken: At Home in the Petromodern Paradox: Landscape and Community in the Bakken Boom (2026). It’s a good read so far and since I have a special interest in the Bakken, I thought I’d reflect on it (don’t call it a review) in two posts rather than one. The first part of the book sets up the Bakken’s “petromodern paradox” which for Conway is the tension between our understanding of the environmental, social, and economic pain caused by extracting oil and the role that oil plays in mitigating the damage. Our tendency to see oil as both the problem and the solution embodies the cruel optimism of capitalism as articulated by Lauren Berlant. Bret Weber and I called this “Bakktimism” especially when it came from workers who remained positive about the potential of the region even as the boom slipped into bust. Conway’s book is situated at the intersection of how people talk about the Bakken as both a region and an event and the…