What's Next?

The Armored Cocoon

AS THE WORLD GROWS MORE COMPLICATED, STRESSFUL, and dangerous, we are turning our homes into bunkers, cozy sanctuaries in which we can set up alarm systems, pull down the blinds, and imagine ourselves safe from the threats outside. A man's home was once his castle; today it has become an armored cocoon.

Technology has made this retreat from reality possible. A telephone call brings nearly all the essentials of life--from footwear to pizza--right to our doorstep. Computer games and home video supply entertainment on demand. Now a new technology, virtual reality, could send us ever deeper into our cocoons--or inspire us to emerge, like butterflies, and explore the world.

Virtual reality's power lies in its ability to simulate an alternate universe. The tiny monitors inside a virtual reality helmet depict three-dimensional computer graphics of a landscape that shifts as you turn your head. Sophisticated hand controls let you move about and manipulate objects in this artificial world. Virtual reality allows users to immerse themselves in environs they might never otherwise visit--or which exist only in the mind of a software designer. Armchair adventurers can explore the ocean bottom or visit an imaginary planet, and risk nothing more than eye strain.

The danger is that, as conditions outside our windows worsen, virtual reality may seem more appealing than reality itself. Why spend hundreds of dollars per family member to visit the Grand Canyon--fighting crowds of pushy tourists and spending the night in a grungy motel--when a computer will create a clean, quiet Virtual Canyon in the comfort of your humble abode? Especially when the computerized version lets you adjust the canyon's color scheme to suit your personal tastes? Virtual reality gives us another excuse to stay home, thereby depriving us of the social interactions that are so vital to our humanity.

Even if virtual reality doesn't supplant the physical world, it may well divert us from solving real world problems. Many of us have become addicted to video games; virtual reality's realism could make it the technological equivalent of a narcotic. We can't save the environment or fight crime if we're constantly donning a helmet and escaping to another universe.

Of course, any technological development has both positive and negative impacts. Nuclear weapons threatened us with unprecedented annihilation, but fear of their use has probably prevented several bloody conventional wars from occurring. Millions of us let our minds atrophy in front of the boob tube each night--but television also brings us valuable news shows and documentaries.

Perhaps instead of isolating us from the outside world, virtual reality will stimulate our imaginations. It is easy to think of intriguing educational applications for this technology. Instead of describing the French Revolution to school kids, we will be able to take them to 18th century Paris and let them experience it "firsthand." In college physics classes, a virtual Albert Einstein might teach relativity. Used as a mental launching pad, virtual reality might inspire us to climb off our couch and see the world--to break out of our armored cocoon.

--Faith Popcorn

Previewing

THE AMERICAN HEALTH CRAZE OF THE 1980s NEVER HAPPENED--it was merely a fashion craze. More than 90 percent of the athletic footwear sold during the decade wasn't used for exercise, but to wear to the mall. Stationary exercise bikes flew off store shelves, but their odometers accumulated more dust than mileage. The childhood obesity rate has reached a 30-year high.

Many Americans, however, are ready to stop just paying lip service to fitness. Baby boomers are on the verge of a real, long-term health movement--their lives depend on it.

Why now? Baby boomers are getting a preview of their own mortality in the illness and death of their parents--and what they see frightens them. As their parents become unable to look after themselves, baby boomers must either assume the burden of care or consign Mom and Dad to a nursing facility. This dilemma raises the question: "Who's going to take care of me when I get old and ill?" Nobody wants to die as an inmate in a nursing home.

Fueled by that fear, the new health movement will transcend trendiness. The goal won't be beach-ready muscle tone. Instead, boomers will strive for lifelong fitness, the ability to remain active, alert, and independent in spite of advancing age.

Achieving this goal, of course, will demand lifestyle changes. Baby boomers will eat more organic food and seek cleaner air. Antioxidant sales will increase as they try to prevent degenerative diseases. Most important, they will exercise more, choosing gentle but healthful activities--swimming, walking, golf--they can pursue throughout their lifetime.

As scientists gain further insights into how stress shortens our lives, a spiritual component to the health trend will emerge. People will turn to longevity spas, holistic centers where the spiritually impaired can consult teachers to address metaphysical concerns. These spas will be located in deserts or woodlands, far removed from the pressures of daily life.

--Gerald Celente

Technotribalism

TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCES LIKE COMPUTERS, MODEMS, and fax machines have transformed thousands of spare bedrooms into home offices, thereby allowing us to telecommute rather than do daily battle with rush hour traffic. But the advent of the home workstation is revolutionizing more than just our jobs. By shifting the focus of our daily lives from the workplace to the home, these technologies are spawning a new emphasis on local community-- technotribalism--that will strengthen family ties and revitalize local government.

There's nothing mystical about how this will happen. Since parents won't be rushing off to work at seven in the morning, they will have more time to spend with their family. When a child has a last-minute question about a homework assignment, or has to leave school early because of a fever, someone will be there to help. Families will have more flexibility in arranging family gatherings, whether Monday night dinner or a midweek birthday party. Even when project deadlines force Mom or Dad to barricade themselves in their home office until late at night, the family will benefit from their proximity: Their spouse won't worry about their safety, and the kids will be less likely to view them as parental apparitions who appear only on weekends.

The work a parent does at home will itself become a focus of family bonding. Just as in past eras a blacksmith taught his son how to use a hammer and anvil, a present-day corporate financial officer can boot up his computer and introduce his children to the tools of his trade. Not only will children better grasp what their parents do for a living, but seeing first-hand the concentration and effort with which Mom and Dad approach their job will help instill the work ethic.

Working at home will also increase awareness of community affairs. Instead of trading gossip around the office watercooler or chatting by the copy machine, we might meet a neighbor at a nearby luncheonette. Instead of gazing out the office window at a landscape all but irrelevant to our own lives, we will be looking out at our neighbors' lawns.

These frequent reminders of our local surroundings will help forge a greater sense of community spirit. Suburbia will seem less a collection of familial islands, where each house is its own private universe, and become more of a close-knit tribe in which members work for the collective good. We may be more inspired to do volunteer work in our neighborhood. We will be more aware of community issues and what, if anything, government is doing to solve them. Local officials will be more responsive to our needs--because we will be there to ensure that they are.

The switch from office cubicle to home workstation will deprive us of the social benefits of a central workplace. Employees with few relatives or friends nearby may particularly lament the change. But for many, the benefits to family and community life will be ample compensation for the loss of office camaraderie.

--Gerald Celente

SystemThink

A NEW TYPE OF THINKING WILL EMERGE IN THE 21ST CENTURY: I call it globalnomic thinking. Rather than looking at life as a series of rigid categories--economics, politics, the environment-- globalnomic thinking views everything as an interconnected whole, a single system.

For example, in deciding allowable emissions from power plants, we won't polarize the debate into "environmental needs" versus "industrial needs." It will simply be "needs."

This point of view sits in stark contrast to the industrial age paradigm that values machinery and technology over all else, and that pursues economic goals at the expense of humanity. Those misguided priorities may lead future historians to view the last 200 years as a dark age.

Globalnomic thinking will arise because the current system is broken at virtually every level. Americans have lost faith in traditional institutions. The most obvious example is the federal government. Ninety percent of us have lost faith in the government, because the two-party system has become a one-party system. In the past, this level of political distrust led to revolution. While the political upheaval in the United States will not be violent, it will alter the political landscape, beginning with the establishment of a third party by the year 2000.

Other long-treasured institutions are also in disarray. The traditional family has become a myth. Even where the two-parent household remains intact, the dynamics of the family unit have changed. Children no longer view parents as wise, respected authority figures. Movies and television shows reflect this: The kids are little geniuses, but the parents are almost inevitably morons.

A similar transformation has occurred in health care. In the 1950s, the medical profession tackled many of the most debilitating ailments and won. Doctors weren't people, they were gods: Ben Casey always found a cure. But today we view the medical establishment with the same disdain as we do lawyers and politicians.

--Gerald Celente

Self Responsibility

GOVERNMENT BUDGET DEFICITS HAVE SOARED IN PART BECAUSE voters want to pay fewer taxes without a reduction in services. But as our trust in government erodes, Americans will look to government less as a means to solve problems and more as a source of them. Increasingly, we will value self-reliance and personal responsibility. In this political climate, even long-standing government programs will come under scrutiny--and could be eliminated.

Our education system may be particularly vulnerable to tax revolts. Most public schools are funded by property taxes. But this system has its inequities. Elderly folks who have spent decades paying off a mortgage may risk losing their home because they can't afford rising property taxes. Some childless couples also consider the system unfair. By the end of the century, a third of all marriages will be childless. This potentially powerful voting block may resent paying for the education of other people's kids.

Some people have proposed privatizing the education system on the grounds that competition between private schools will boost the level of teaching. But taxpayers may balk at paying for children to attend a private institution.

Thus we will see a trend toward "responsibility taxes." The premise is simple: individual taxpayers are financially responsible for the services they use. They choose the benefit they want--education for the kids, garbage collection--and their tax bill is adjusted accordingly.

Along similar lines, government will eventually impose higher taxes on large families. Our current system subsidizes big families: more children means more deductions. In the future, families will be free to have as many kids as they wish, but come tax time they will have to pay for the privilege. Large families simply use more government services.

Self-responsibility will also be the watchword in health care. As income levels continue to decline and health care costs rise, people will be less willing to subsidize the bad habits of others.

--Gerald Celente

The Battle Over Women's Bodies

ALTHOUGH FEMINISM HAS BEEN PRONOUNCED DEAD IN SOME CIRCLES, many of the movement's goals have become reality. The Family and Medical Leave Act allows new mothers (or fathers) to spend time with their babies without risking their job. The glass ceiling remains--but it has grown more fragile. And a woman's right to pursue a career and establish an identity separate from her family is now taken for granted.

But two of feminism's key principles--that a woman has the right to control her own body and that women should receive the same education as men--remain controversial and loom as critical issues of the coming century. How we resolve them could be pivotal to solving the population crisis.

For all its technological and cultural sophistication, the United States is still in the dark ages regarding family planning. In 1991, the United States ranked among the least progressive countries in the world, joining such undistinguished company as Saudi Arabia and Haiti.

Under the Bush administration's "gag rule," federally funded clinics were not allowed even to mention the existence of abortion. Another Reagan-Bush policy denied family-planning aid to countries where abortion was legal. Although President Clinton reversed these rules, Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders says the United States does the "sorriest job of any country in the world providing family planning." More than 1,000 birth control clinics closed during the 80s--just as population growth began accelerating.

We need to increase government support of family planning, both at home and abroad. One study found that every dollar spent on family planning in California saved nearly $12 in welfare costs. Internationally, the United States should contribute to the $18 billion increase in worldwide family planning spending that was recommended at the Cairo population conference.

Women around the world must be offered five or more types of contraception, because studies show that women are more likely to use birth control when they are free to choose their own method. Government policies, moreover, must facilitate the use of these options. The technology of contraception is rapidly improving, but these advances are of little use if nations fail to legalize them.

The other essential factor in the population control equation is education. The majority girls on this planet do not have access to education beyond primary school. Extending their education to secondary school is an absolute requirement for convincing girls to exercise restraint in their reproductive habits. In many cultures, men think of women as little more than breeding machines. Women must be taught that their worth is not inextricably bound to their reproductive output.

Education is crucial for another reason. Without education, women simply do not have means to make free choices about where to live and how to support themselves.

--Michael Tobias

The Shadowing of Numbers

OVERPOPULATION IS PERHAPS THE MOST OMINOUS THREAT WE WILL FACE IN THE NEXT CENTURY. Due to our ever-rising numbers, food, shelter, health, and happiness--the essentials of life--are being compromised. Our ability to cooperate, the foundation of democracy itself, is eroding. The problem is not that we have a self-destruct mechanism--it's that there are too many people for the spoils to go around.

The arithmetic is simple. Our oceans can only support a finite number of fish. Farm production is limited by the amount of arable land. Once human demand for food, energy, and raw materials exceeds sustainable levels, further increases in our population mean we each get a smaller piece of the pie.

Humans have developed a technofix mentality: we think that technology can solve every problem that we encounter. But even the most sophisticated machinery must obey the reality of finite resources. The only answer is for us to stop producing more of ourselves.

The United States currently has no population policy, because we assume the issue does not apply to us. But in places like Southern California, the population is growing by four percent a year--faster than in most third-world countries. California's economy and natural resources are already overburdened by the nation's largest population, but state officials estimate that the number of residents will more than double, to 63 million, by the year 2040. The problem cannot be blamed solely on immigration: California's birth rate is nearly three times that of India. The U.S. Census Bureau says that the country's population could reach half a billion by the middle of the next century. Yet some scientists have argued that to sustain our current levels of consumption and affluence, the U.S. population should exceed no more than 100 million people.

The projections for global population are equally grim. At current birth and death rates, the world is adding a Los Angeles to its population every three weeks. A document prepared at last year's United Nations population conference in Cairo contends that immediate action can stabilize the world's population--currently about 5.7 billion people--at 7.2 billion by the middle of the next century. This is patently absurd. Unless we experience an all-out nuclear war, the earth's population will hit 11 or 12 billion by midcentury.

The primary fallout from this breeding frenzy--widespread famine--is all too predictable. The planet currently produces enough food to feed its entire population-on a vegetarian diet. Raising a pound of beef, however, uses far more land and other resources than growing an equal quantity of vegetables or grain. Thus if all of the world's people ate like Americans--who get a quarter of their calories from animal products--half of the world would starve. Even in the relatively wealthy United States, a tenth of the population relies on food stamps. The threat of famine will only grow as the population increases, and as more of those people favor a meat-heavy diet.

Although agricultural innovations have led to greater food production for most of this century, we are now battling the law of diminishing returns. World grain production is increasing by about one percent a year--but the population is growing nearly twice as fast. Most recent agricultural advances, moreover, have relied on chemical pesticides and fertilizers that damage our already overtaxed environment. New, more restrictive environmental standards will make further increases in farm production still more difficult.

Even in nations where starvation is unlikely, the population explosion will dramatically reduce our quality of life. Water shortages will proliferate. Pollution levels will worsen. Traffic will move ever slower. One study projects that average commuter speed in southern California during rush hour will shrink to 10 miles per hour in the next century.

Overpopulation will also take its toll psychologically. Increasing population density leads to higher levels of depression and other mental illnesses. Humans are designed to function best psychologically in the open, grassy spaces our ancestors inhabited. Stark, stony urban landscapes, replete with an ever-present backdrop of traffic and airplane noise, stress our psyches in subtle but real ways. It is surely no coincidence that Los Angeles, ground zero of the U.S. population explosion, now boasts more psychiatrists than anywhere else in the world--about two thousand per square mile. And that figure doesn't include the numerous legions of psychologists and counselors.

Social relations are another casualty of our bountiful fertility. Because residents of small towns repeatedly interact with the same people, they are motivated to cooperate and strive for social good. But as our numbers increase, more of us live in massive cities, where the rationale for cooperation is diminished. Why cooperate with strangers you will never see again?

The tragic irony of the population explosion is that we are victims of our own success. The same scientific and political revolutions that have alleviated so much misery have also made overpopulation possible. Little more than a century ago, most children died before adolescence until we developed life-saving vaccines and antibiotics.

Or consider that peace has broken out among most of the world's highly populated countries, because democracies are loath to fight one another and because nations fear that conventional war might escalate into nuclear annihilation. War is the planet's primary mechanism for lowering human populations. We have emasculated that capability through nuclear deterrence. It is a perverse twist in the logic of curtailing the impact of population. One might even argue that the misery that would have resulted from these unfought wars is less than the suffering that will ensue from prolonged, worldwide famine.

The first step in preventing a population apocalypse, of course, is recognizing the problem. The first nation to fully grasp the threat of excessive proliferation was China, which began its initial antipopulation campaign in the 1950s. Yet despite the 1971 imposition of a two-child limit for couples, the number of Chinese continued to grow. Finally, in 1979, Deng Xiaoping called for fertility to be reduced to one child per family. Ira woman became pregnant with a second child, she had to get an abortion and undergo sterilization. The goal was to limit China's population to 1.2 billion people.

In practice, the one-child limit quickly became a two-child limit: resistance to the policy was widespread, particularly in rural regions. Still, with the help of its 15 million-strong army of family planners, China's childbirth rate is now only 2.5, down from 6.0 thirty-five years earlier. That translates into 250 million people who have not been added to the world population. China has, in effect, prevented another United States from coming into the world. Even so, China today accounts for nearly a quarter of the world's population.

The American tradition of personal liberty, of course, makes the imposition of legal restrictions on family size unlikely. Are we doomed, then, to reproduce ourselves until our standard of living is a fraction of its current level? Perhaps not. Our society has extraordinary capabilities to mobilize in defense of something we believe in, as was demonstrated during World War II. In fighting a common enemy, we rationed, we sacrificed, we made do.

We can do the same today. There is very little time left, but people can modify their behavior. The sacrifices we have to make won't be deemed sacrifices by our grandchildren if we make them now. On the contrary, they will be deemed logical responses to impending catastrophe.

--Michael Tobias