Quote of the Hour: Tragedy of the Commons

Here in the oil country you see quite a few places like the old Branch house. They were ranch houses or homesteads at one time; but wells were drilled around 'em, right up to their doorsteps sometimes, and everything nearby because a mess of oil and sulphur water and red sun-baked drilling mud. The grease-black grass dies. The creeks and springs disappear. And then the oil is gone and the houses stand black and abandoned, lost and lonely-looking behind the pest growths of sunflowers and sage and Johnson grass.

 - Jim Thompson, The Killer Inside Me, p.30 in Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s