Future hopes and headaches

Welcome to the new year of 2016. We’re sure it will be as full of news as all the recent years have been, if not more so. This new year will include a pivotal national election and many continuing discussions over local land use, winery expansions, housing costs, local health care changes, county supervisorial and city hall elections and more.
We tend to live our lives from day to day and most of the time we only look far enough ahead to calculate our monthly paychecks and household bills. But we also face long range planning for our children’s education, our own retirement and how to stay involved in our community. Most of us make New Year’s resolutions and a few of us venture predictions about what the next 12 months might bring.
Here’s a challenge — let’s look even farther.
What will be the big news in 2026, 10 years from now? As a test, who can remember the big news of 10 years ago, in 2006? We’re living on this timeline that keeps stretching farther and farther across the horizon. Wouldn’t we like to know where we’re headed and what we can do about it, if anything?
Ten years ago, the year 2006 started with a flood of rains. The Russian River peaked at 46 feet, not exactly a drought. Fast-rising housing values were being cheered, but by year’s end local mortage foreclosures started to become alarming. (The Great Recession was still 18 months away.)
Apple’s iPhone hadn’t been invented yet. Twitter would be launched mid-year and Amazon’s Kindle wouldn’t debut until the following year. The Iraq War was only half over and Saddam Hussein was executed. The Democrats had majorities in both the House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate. The black rhinoceros became extinct and NASA showed photos proving that half of Greenland’s glaciers had melted away.
Any predictions for 2026? What kind of plans should we start making? A study of our timeline shows obvious trends and changes that will continue to impact our lives. Climate  change will be easier to predict than political changes, but local population, demographic and economic trends are much easier to record.
Here in Sonoma County, our population will continue to grow at a modest, but increasing pace. Our average age will begin to lower as Baby Boomers pass on and young Latinos grow to become our new majority by mid-century. The faces of our local government leadership will no doubt change in the coming decade, perhaps more noticeably than in any time past. More women and more minorities are poised to claim their equal (or majority) share of elected offices.
We cannot foresee any time in the future when the people of Sonoma County will no longer cherish and protect our open spaces, rural landscape and natural beauty. But we can definitely predict pressure to take land to build more housing and industries. Given 10 more years, will the SMART train finally arrive to Cloverdale?
We predict that Internet-based technologies will continue to wreak havoc on how we communicate, do banking, watch TV, shop, travel, go to school and stay entertained. Brain chips, anyone?
Ten years ago we did not have smartphones. Now we can’t breathe or navigate without them. Ten years from now we probably won’t need keyboards because we will talk to our computers and they will tell us what we really think. In the year 2026 we might not be driving our own cars and who knows what kinds of drugs, genetic therapies or new foods we might be ingesting?
Will we still be at war somewhere? Will there still be homeless people on our local streets? Will wine and marijuana still be dominant contributors to our local economy? What will become of the “shared economy” of Uber, Airbnb and Bitcoin?
All this thinking too far ahead gives us a headache. Can’t we just Google our way out of all this?
— Rollie Atkinson