Conway’s At Home in the Petromodern Paradox, Part 2

Over the weekend, I finished 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 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. You can read the first post from last week here. The second part of the book is where Conway gets some momentum. If the “petromodern paradox” is that the boom creates the cure for the problems that it creates, the bust is not a relief largely because the advantages of the boom dissipate faster than the problems. Conway uses housing as a compelling example and shows how even after the boom began to recede, housing problems including high rents, higher than average evictions, and homeless continued even as the urgency and resources to address these problems declined. He drew on our work with the North Dakota Man Camp Project to traces these trends. He demonstrated that they supported…