The Strange Career of Pithole City (reprise)

It's week 13, which means that the Autumn 2012 edition of the Washington Academic Internship Program is starting to wind down. I like to wrap things up by reading several public policy classics, including Garrett Hardin's "The Tragedy of the Commons," which tries to explain why fouling one's own nest is both unnatural and widespread.  This semester I'm asking the fellows to read a case study that I recently published aout 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 even be called a ghost town.