If you have seen how hard Oklahoma has bit the dust in recent decades from local and macroeconomic changes, the place doesn't need anything more working against it --- least of all more "make a buck today at the expense of tomorrow." Allowing itself to incur damage to low-value buildings whose owners can barely afford to maintain them sounds like a self-inflicted wound. Even in spite of this recent extraction boom, schools are operating four days a week instead of five. What's going on is resource extraction exploitation with the costs externalized --- plain and simple.

It's incomprehensible. That place needs to modernize and adapt but without petroleum and its trappings. It's had 35-50 years to adapt from these changes; why should I believe that petroleum will be this place's saviour again?

I grew up with pumpjacks operating down the street (their ambient background sound as natural as the crickets and katydids and cicadas). The smell of petroleum, too. It wasn't until I moved away and returned to see how unnatural this was.