Looking Ahead: UW Experts Envision the Next 90 Years

As Columns looks back over its 90 years, we also look ahead to what the next 90 years might be like for the UW, the U.S. and the world. Using late-20th century technology—e-mail, fax and the even older technology of the telephone—we contacted about 50 faculty and alumni. Many turned us down. (“Too tough,” said one. “I draw a blank,” said another.) Others grabbed at the opportunity to speculate on the world at the end of the 21st century. “I kind of enjoyed it,” one professor told us. “At least no one is going to come up to me on the street in 90 years and say ‘You were wrong!’ ” What follows is not a comprehensive look at the year 2088, but a mosaic of projections, guesses and fables gathered by UW writers and complied by Columns Editor Tom Griffin. This on-line version contains more predictions than the print version due to limits on the number of pages we can print.

Education

Universities Still Belong to Age of Enlightenment

In 90 years, the UW freshman class will still be primarily 18 and 19 year olds. That means universities will still be dealing with people who are a critical developmental stage of life, who are open to learning, experimentation and growth; this will be reflected in the spirit of the university, regardless of any technological changes in the way we teach and learn. The way we parcel out knowledge could be quite different, but the central role of faculty as providers of information, who open doorways to students, will be much the same. Universities of the future will still carry on the traditions of the Enlightenment: that learning per se is valuable, and that it is important for the social good that it brings. The university will continue to be a place of inquiry an important force in the social and economic life of the state, as it is now.

—Dean of Undergraduate Education Fred Campbell and Associate Vice Provost Louis Fox

Please Don’t Call It High School

Restructuring of the formal educational delivery system will take place over the first quarter of the 21 century. Focused on family well-being and beginning with the pre-natal period, the first phase will provide guidance in child-rearing, nutrition, finance and the like through the nursery school years, concluding at age three or four. At this age, children will enter a phase that carries them in multi-age groups through what had been called kindergarten and the first two grades of school. Twenty children will be with the same teachers for four years—a team of interns, career teachers and specialists in the teaching of reading and mathematics, who also teach university courses in these fields to future teachers, thanks to school-university partnerships.

The next two phases—four years each—bring students to the end of their elementary and secondary school years at the age of 16. By beginning earlier, smoothing out the transitions from nursery schools to kindergarten to more formal schooling, ensuring a full and comprehensive curriculum in the major domains of knowledge, connecting to the array of information networks, and leaving teachers more time for individual tutoring, most students will graduate at 16 with an education comparable to 18-year-olds of an earlier era.

They then will go on to a four-year phase (conducted under what had once been community colleges) that combine community service, career education, training in a variety of hands-on technical skills, and approximately two years of general education. This is where schooling will end for most young people—at an average age of 20 and with a college degree.

—Education Professor Emeritus John Goodlad

Academia and Private Industry Will Become Much Closer

For one, the community will have a different perspective on us. Right now, they see us mostly as teachers, but the community will begin to see us more as an engine for technological advancement. The business world is looking at us earlier and earlier and they are increasingly willing to take risks on early research. We’re going to see a lot more researchers becoming entrepreneurs. Academia and private industry will never become the same, but we will be working much closer together.

— Director of Industry Relations John DesRosier, UW School of Medicine

Trading a Book for a Personal Display Device

The world of libraries and information 90 years hence will be more of what we have now—more libraries and more information—with highly sophisticated tools to organize and retrieve information. Libraries still will exist and will be more numerous but perhaps smaller. They will serve as community and university intellectual centers with instruction and assistance in information retrieval, advisory and reference services, and will contain collections of unique, original. physical objects—such as books and manuscripts—and digital archives to preserve and authenticate information objects. Each person will have a computerized information agent to scan the global databases for information relevant to his/her interests. Highly selected information may be downloaded directly to the brain through neurolinks. Books will have been replaced by the latest work downloaded from the network to your hand-held personal display device which will feature very high resolution display and be even more readable than a book. It will be possible to curl up with your digital book for a cozy read on a rainy day, latte in hand!

UW Libraries Director Betty Bengtson

Environment

Volcanoes, Earthquakes Shatter the Northwest

At least two Cascade volcanoes will erupt, with at least one of them producing significant destruction in its vicinity with significant economic impact. Because of improved monitoring and understanding of volcanic processes and a pro-active emergency management community, loss of life will be minimal. On the other hand, land-use planning efforts will have mostly failed and there will be very large losses of homes and businesses due to the pressure of development to expand into dangerous areas.

During the same period, there will be three damaging earthquakes, one of which will be quite significant, causing many deaths and widespread destruction. Because earthquake prediction science will have made some progress, the later of these earthquakes will have some warning ahead of time. Earthquake prediction capabilities will still lag significantly behind the equivalent capabilities of weather prediction.

An earthquake warning system will be built and connected to critical facilities, such that as soon as an earthquake starts, warnings will be sent out allowing anywhere from a few seconds to more than a minute to prepare for the arrival of strong shaking. This system will work well in the expected earthquakes for systems which can respond quickly (power plants, high-speed trains, other mechanical systems), but there will continue to be a problem with educating the public to respond quickly and properly to such warnings because they only occur every few decades.

—Geophysics Research Professor Steve Malone

Humans: The Most Serious Threat to Life on Earth

Two trends make the future less rosy than the past: more consumption of resources and more people. … The question is whether people, societies, and government can move toward sustainability. This will require adopting two principles. The first is the “responsibility principle” which is that the rights to use environmental resources carry attendant responsibilities to use them sustainably. The second, the “precautionary principle” states that in the face of uncertainty concerning environmental resources and impacts—err on the side of caution.

Knowing the principles is the first step, but implementing them through education is what must be done. Education can modify our biological behaviors and control greed but the question is whether social evolution can move the human race to live within biological as well as social limits. For example, parenting is still the only job that does not require any qualifications or any test of ability or means. How un-thinking can we be? We need to evolve socially so that all children are wanted and all parents are adequate providers and educators. Without social evolution, disease, war, and famine will continue to control human destiny in much of the world. My hope is that social evolution may have progressed enough in the next 90 years that humans do not breed too much, use too much, degrade earth’s life support system or kill other species.

—Zoology Professor P. Dee Boersma

Not Enough Fish to Go Around

In 90 years, the non-Indian commercial salmon fisheries in Washington and Oregon will be gone. The political power of recreational fishers and the treaty rights of the Indians spell the inevitable end of the traditional commercial salmon industry. Recreational salmon fishers will be fishing almost exclusively hook-and-release—there simply won’t be enough fish to go around. The tribal fisheries will have abandoned gill netting and replaced it by much more selective fishing methods such as lift nets, fish wheels or modified purse-seining. Most of the hatcheries around the state will be abandoned, victims of their economic inefficiency, continued budget cuts, and concern about wild fish.

The commercial marine fisheries will be almost unrecognizable. In order to obtain the approval of powerful Alaskan politicians, much of the ownership of the right to catch fish will be granted to coastal communities, who will, in turn, lease their catching rights to large corporations. The owner-operator will be almost extinct as a fishing institution, replaced by vessels owned by large companies. The traditional, small-scale fishers will survive primarily in the invertebrate fisheries such as clams and abalone.

Biologically stocks will continue to rise and fall with environmental conditions, but the marine fisheries will generally be healthy, with numerous small and a few large marine reserves set aside as parks and spawning refuges. Despite considerable political effort, the habitat base for salmon will continue to decline as the growing human population competes with fish for water, stream frontage and land use. Efforts to save habitat will be reasonably successful in forest watersheds, where changes in forest practice will improve conditions for salmon, but in suburban and urban areas these attempts will be much less successful.

—Fisheries Professor Ray Hilborn

Genetic Research Results in ‘Designer’ Trees

Three dedicated categories of forest land will emerge:

Lands reserved primarily for the intensive production of wood products; forest farming if you will.
Lands that will provide both forest products and environmental and amenity benefits in some combination.
Lands that are reserved and managed only for their environmental and amenity benefits.

Whatever the ultimate balance in these categories of forest lands, the following will occur:

Fast growth, short rotation, disease- and insect-resistant forests with desired wood properties will be developed through molecular genetics research. The environmental community will have reservations and appropriate worries about these “designer” trees and forests, but the perceived benefits will be judged to outweigh the risks.
We will build housing of equal or greater strength than now but with less wood and wood of lower quality. For example, new products will be available that combine wood with other materials such as plastics. The recycling and reuse ethic will be commonplace with an almost instinctive acceptance.
Advanced technology and research will also help forest stewards manage and protect environmental and amenity values of forests in a more informed and effective way. The dynamics of all biota will be better understood including, for example, soil insects and arthropods, migratory birds, the needs of anadromous fish and threatened plants even of the most insignificant stature. All will be much easier to monitor and provide for.

—Forest Resources Dean David Thorud

Forestry: Increased Demand Met with Increased Productivity

Progress in the field of forestry over the next 90 years will be dominated by two themes; an increasing reliance on renewable resources by a growing world population and an unlimited, universal access to information. Advances in molecular biology will vastly expand our capability to “grow” fiber and forests, increasing productivity within a shrinking resource base allocated to production for human consumption. Plant life in general and the animals that depend upon them will flourish as global warming increased over the next 90 years, augmenting the man-made increases in productivity.

The simultaneous growing demand and responding productivity will allow a multitude of choices to be made by societies and communities around the world. Universal access to information and a diverse, democratic opinion-sharing capability will create access to forest management policies at global and community scales. Communities of interests and communities of place will interact to create an infinite variety of policies, reflecting diverse values regarding forest management. This may manifest itself in a variety of forms. There will be the capability to globally centralize forest policy with human use of forests controlled by a mega-policy network, literally defining the relationship between mankind and our forest environment. Alternately, decentralization of forest use decisions might allow people’s relationship with forest to be individual in nature. Perhaps a combination of the two models will evolve.

Progress in the field of forestry over the next 90 years will be more social, political and cultural than technical. Increasing human demand for renewable resources will be met by increasing productivity and availability.

—Olympic Natural Resources Center Director John M. Calhoun.

Health

Charting New Plagues Like Predicting the Weather

The emergence of new infectious agents is closely related to human activities such as travel, trade, antibiotic usage and ecological degradation. The human-related factors of emergence will increase over the next 90 years. Human population growth on the planet will exacerbate epidemic activity. The breadth of transmission will continue to increase. The food and water supply of the world will become increasingly precious.