In a world beset by climate change, a journalist who covers climate change learns about a family inheritance tied to natural resource extraction, a key driver of climate change.
That’s the movie teaser-like premise of the book “Windfall: The Prairie Woman Who Lost Her Way and the Great-Granddaughter Who Found Her,” a nonfiction narrative set at the convergence of Portland journalist Erika Bolstad’s professional and personal lives. A political and environmental reporter whose byline has appeared in newspapers such as the Idaho Statesman and the Anchorage Daily News, she spent eight years pursuing the thread that connected an all-but-forgotten ancestor to climate change a hundred years later.
Bolstad enters the story in 2009, when her mother gets an unexpected check in the mail. The check is for mineral rights that have come down to her from a grandmother she never knew, a woman named Anna Sletvold who once held a 160-acre Homestead Act land claim in North Dakota.
Several generations later, those 160 acres are long sold. But North Dakota law allows land and mineral rights to be severed, meaning you can sell a piece of property but keep the right to exploit any minerals, like gold or oil, beneath its surface. That, Bolstad learns, is what happened in her family. When technological advances in an oil drilling method called hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, trigger an oil boom at North Dakota’s Bakken Shale, an oil company traces one set of mineral rights there to Bolstad’s mother in Oregon and sends her $2,400 to lease them.
“When my mother inherited those mineral rights,” Bolstad said in a recent interview, “it was like my Spidey-sense went off.”
As a journalist, Bolstad had been following fracking, which had grabbed headlines for making North Dakota a place of economic opportunity amid the Great Recession, but at a high environmental cost. Now she had a personal angle: “I was the only person who could write a story that connected this ancestor of mine to modern-day climate change.”
The result was “Windfall,” published in January. In it, Bolstad explores several themes:
- How oil companies deployed fracking on a new scale in North Dakota to make the United States one of the world’s biggest oil producers.
Bolstad’s first sight of the giant flares that occur during fracking, as workers burn off the natural gas extracted with oil, hit home.
“Greenhouse gases are invisible, and so we don’t really see the thing that is causing sea levels to rise or glaciers to melt or, you know, storms to intensify, wildfires to get stronger and hotter,” she said. “When you see flares, you actually see climate change happening right in front of you.”
- The link between economic well-being and resource extraction, especially in the West.
When it comes to climate change, “we all have a form of complicity, and some of it we willfully choose to close our eyes to or ignore,” Bolstad said. Visiting North Dakota helped her understand how connected people are to the places they’re from “and how that can blind them sometimes to the greater harm, maybe, of the resource extraction that’s happening in those places.”
Take the fracking she saw in her great-grandmother’s land claim. “I felt really uncomfortable about the stake I had in it. I also wanted to know why I also felt so drawn to the potential fortune.”
Bolstad sees parallels between the story of her great-grandmother, whose motherhood was cut off with her placement in a mental asylum, and Bolstad’s quest to become pregnant, which she wove into the book.
“I saw that part of the story as sort of this extended metaphor about what extraction economies do to the women of the West,” Bolstad said. “I was not that far away from Anna in some ways. I had so much agency and choice and freedom, and yet it didn’t quite work out the way I wanted it to, either.”
In “Windfall,” Bolstad links the pursuit of wealth endorsed by the Homestead Act of 1862, which the National Park Service estimates ultimately redistributed ownership of 270 million acres in 30 states, to our current environmental situation.
“I really want people to see how they, too, are connected to some of the bigger forces of extractive industries and climate change,” she said. “And I want them to see how that starts not just with this generation, but with the Homestead Act and with the way that the West was settled.”
A paperback edition of “Windfall” is scheduled to come out in November. Meanwhile, Bolstad is working on a related short film that she plans to show in North Dakota this summer with the help of a grant from the Anonymous was a Woman Foundation. She continues to work as a journalist.