City staff took part of city council's meeting this week to look ahead in time much as half a century to figure out what impact climate change could have on city services. How will higher average temperatures affect snow clearance, road maintenance, water supply, city parks, sports facilities and municipal buildings?
Prince George is certainly not the only community examining these issues. Most levels of government around the planet are studying various scenarios of what the world will look like in the years and decades ahead.
Sadly, none of those scenarios will come even close to getting it right - some of them will be completely, laughably wrong and the rest will have a few small details correct but not enough to make any difference.
Planners and futurists in 1963 looking ahead 50 years saw nothing like the world we live in now. Few of them saw the end of the Soviet Union and the Cold War; most of them predicted a Third World War by now. Never mind 50 years, they couldn't even see five to 10 years ahead. By the late 1960s, Norman Borlaug's Green Revolution was sweeping the globe, increasing crop yields dramatically and making starvation a thing of the past in most of the world. By the mid-1970s, microprocessors were the latest advancement in computing and were on the verge of transforming every aspect of modern life and science.
In 1963, they didn't even see The Beatles coming the following year and the massive change baby boomers would introduce to society.
Paradigm changes can't be planned for because we can't help but look at the future through the lens of the present paradigm. In 1963, the Soviet Union was a threatening monolith, war, drought and starvation were clear and present dangers and those young kids born after the Second World War were going to see the world just like their moms and dads did. The predictions of the day matched those conditions and were blind to the possibilities outside of that reality.
Closer to present time, remember when Boom, Bust and Echo was the must-read book? Published in 1996, it used the power of demographics to explain how Canadian society was going to change over the coming decades. It said the baby boomers were going to retire and become interested in bird watching and things old people are supposed to do. They didn't predict that baby boomers would keep changing the rules and would refuse to act their age. To hell with the birds, today's seniors either want to go party in warmer climates or they want to keep working. Some of them do both.
While looking off into the distant future can be a fruitful exercise, it shouldn't be a distraction from what needs to be done today. Political leaders at all levels have enough issues on their plate at the moment without trying to solve the problems of 2050, too.
The best gift we can give future generations is not to try to guess what their lives will be like and what we think they'll need. Instead, addressing today's problems today will be a huge help because if there is one thing that is certain for the future is that life and society will be at least as challenging and complex as it is now. Fixing their own problems will be tough enough. They shouldn't have to clean up all of our mess, as well.
