This is a plea for help. Even though I am keenly interested in the future of North Dakota, I don't really know how to read the signs. Does the future of North Dakota look bright to you, or bleak, or somewhere in between? What do you think North Dakota will look like in 2025? How would you wish it to look?

With more than $500 million in surplus, booming cities, centers of excellence springing up across the landscape, more and more research initiatives taking root along the Red River, a gigantic energy boom looming in the heart of the state, and even a modest influx of new people, it seems as if North Dakota may be entering a period of economic opportunity and growth. Good news, right?

On the other hand, I have driven through Hebron, Hettinger, Towner, Lakota and Velva in the past month, and they all look desperate and minimalist. If the state's population is barely increasing, and yet Bismarck, Fargo, Grand Forks and Minot are growing dramatically, then most of this city-boom is from internal migration. Can we be a viable state with an essentially empty countryside, but with a series of five to nine prosperous "city-states"?

Another marginal western state that I know, Nevada, long ago decided that it could only survive if it embraced some odd economic engines: divorce, gambling, legal prostitution and a blank check for the mining industry. It worked. All those things that seemed so sinful or uncivil 70 years ago have ceased to offend most Americans. Nevada is booming.

So, as cold, isolated, semi-arid North Dakota contemplates its 21st century economic options, which of them can we embrace and still be ourselves? Where do we draw the line? Who decides questions of this magnitude?

Are we, like Nevada, prepared to do whatever it takes, no matter how much that may violate the heritage values of North Dakota?

Do those values still really exist?

It seems unmistakable that we are moving toward a post-agrarian future. There probably always will be farms in North Dakota, but they are going to grow ever larger and more mechanized. Thomas Jefferson might argue that a 5,000- to 10,000-acre farm without livestock or even a vegetable garden is "agrarian" only in the narrowest sense of the term, but at this point there is not much room for quaint thoughts about what my old friend calls "farmy farms."

Agriculture, like all else, is headed toward an increasing concentration of capital and energy: hog confinement facilities (hard to see the 4-H pig in this phrase, isn't it?), giant feed lots and dairies with hundreds of cows milked three times a day. North Dakota's surviving 15,000 to 20,000 mega-farms are not going to support many towns. And farm families who have that kind of capital are not exactly what Jefferson or Lincoln or William Jennings Bryan would regard as a sturdy and independent yeomanry.

Is this OK with you? When a farm state loses its farm base, what does it become?

In the coming permanent world energy crisis, North Dakota is going to be one North American locus of intense industrial activity. We have abundant lignite coal reserves, and what is regarded as plenty of water to process that coal. That means liquefaction and gasification, and more coal-fired power generation plants.

We have oodles of wind. There may be a lot more oil in the Williston Basin than anyone knew. How do you extract it? You thrust new roads into remote places, drill deep and at a slant, and then pipe or truck the thick crude somewhere else.

Ethanol, biodiesel, hydrogen and other emerging energy technologies will dot the landscape.

In the 1970s, led by agrarian Gov. Art Link, North Dakotans decided they preferred to engage in moderate and restrained energy development rather than the more enthusiastic variety in Montana and Wyoming. In other words, we decided that we wished to remain primarily a farm state with a subordinate energy industry. Do we have that option this time around? How about the political will?

On the one hand, it's exciting to think that we might be at the center of the next great wave of world energy development. If ever the United States is going to achieve energy independence, North Dakota is going to play a significant role in that drama.

That means billions of dollars of economic activity - much of it involving highly paid high-tech jobs in emerging technologies. If we can retain a fraction of a fraction of that gross economic product, we can fund all the remaining schools in North Dakota for the foreseeable future.

On the other hand, a big energy boom means new and larger strip mines, some in parts of the state so far left alone, gigantic consumptions of water, huge processing plants that will make the Mandan oil refinery look like the monkey bars at a schoolyard playground, and of course "effluents" - in our water, in our air, in our soil. And where, from Sutter's Mill to the Alberta tar sands, has a gold or energy rush ever been harmonious, civil and enlightened?

So far as I know, no North Dakotan now regards the "energy crescent" between Washburn and Beulah, the coal mine and power plant corridor, as the most beautiful landscape in the state. The landscapes we do prize are those in which the human industrial imprint is largely absent or essentially benign.

For many, it's the patchwork quilt of family farms, the villages that serve them, the vast, treeless, open spaces, the giant skies and the abundance of game that constitute the idea of North Dakota.

How much does it really matter that half of our population clings to Minnesota and the rest of the population is gravitating steadily toward cities and big towns? How much does it trouble you that most of North Dakota's villages are dying, that most of the towns are straining to hang on, that even the big towns (Jamestown, Dickinson, Williston) are merely holding their own? Cataclysm or shrug your shoulders?

The percentage of the North Dakota population that lives east of Valley City is surprisingly large. The percentage that lives east of I-29 is staggering. Meanwhile, Slope County, 709 people; Divide County, 2,149 people.

The state is tilting toward Minnesota.

That sounds bad, but maybe it just is what it is. Most of the population of Canada is concentrated on a 100-mile strip along the U.S. border, after all. You can wring your hands about rural outmigration, but what good will that do? Maybe Montana east of Billings and Great Falls, and North Dakota west of Minot and Bismarck is just going to be a vast empty quarter dotted here and there with crossroads service centers and beleaguered towns like Glendive and Watford City.

The people I know in the Red River Valley don't regard this phenomenon as alarming.

Like the rest of us, they feel a certain nostalgia for the North Dakota that is passing away forever, but they have managed to come to terms with it.

Though they may feel an occasional pang of regret for the decline of rural North Dakota, they are thoroughly wedded to urban life and they frankly wonder why any rational being would live west of the ancient shoreline of Lake Agassiz.

Most of the valley people I know regard Bismarck as a long journey for … well, nothing, and if they could get away with it, they would undoubtedly move the state capital as well as the waters of the Missouri River closer to their doorsteps.

They see Fargo and Grand Forks as progressive, diverse and culturally tolerable. They regard Bismarck as a cultural and gastronomic backwater, and the rest - well, as the land of dearth and deterioration.

Maybe what I feel is just a self-indulgent nostalgia for a North Dakota past that is gone and never coming back. Perhaps I remember a past that never really was, a past that I have idealized because of the occasional farm experiences of my youth.

Call me a hopeless romantic, call me unrealistic, call me alarmist, but I freely confess that when I think about the future "character" of North Dakota, I ache. No part of me says, "hurray for our post-agrarian future!"

(Clay Jenkinson is the Theodore Roosevelt scholar-in-residence at Dickinson State University. He lives in Bismarck. Contact Jenkinson at Jeffysage@;aol.com.)