The Strange Career of Pithole City

This is week nine for the Spring 2012 edition of the Washington Academic Internship Program, which under the quarter system spells The Beginning of the End. By way of conclusion, I like to consider several public policy classics, including Garrett Hardin's "The Tragedy of the Commons." The essence of the tragedy of the commons is fouling one's own nest, and this quarter I'm asking the fellows to read a case study that I recently published. It's about the environmental degradation accompanying the world's first oil boom, which occurred in the 1860s not far from where I grew up--though it antedated me by a few years--in western Pennsylvania. There is a link to my essay, "Pithole City: Epitaph for a Boom Town," over on the right-hand side of this blog. And here is a link to a 7-minute summary of the astonishingly brief but intense history of Pithole City. The photo above is the view down Second Street today. Obviously, Pithole exists today mainly as an archaeological site; it could scarcely be called a ghost town.