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Trends That Will Affect Your Future …
SCHWARTZREPORT Trends That Will Affect Your Future . . .
Migration By Stephan A. Schwartz
The SchwartzReport tracks emerging trends that will affect the world, particularly the United States. For EXPLORE it focuses on matters of health in the broadest sense of that term, including medical issues, changes in the biosphere, technology, and policy considerations, all of which will shape our culture and our lives.
igration. The word evokes for me, and perhaps for you, images from the Bible. Charlton Heston’s Moses leading the Jews out of Egypt, across the Red Sea, and into the desert that lies beyond. Masses of people collectively on the move with common purpose, bringing with them all their goods and chattels. Never expecting to return. More than war, more than climate catastrophe, more than pandemics—migrations are a force for change. And this is as true for first world countries like the United States, Europe, or Japan, as it is for developing nations like China or Third World countries such as the nations of Africa. Migrations come in two varieties: glacial and volcanic. The 1994 Tutsi flood that poured out of Rwanda and the several million non-Islamic Sudanese forced from their villages by the progovernment Janjaweed militias are volcanic migrations— violent ejections of populations based on immediate crisis. The volcanic time frame is short term, because just as the Rwandans— both Hutu and Tutsi— came back as soon as it was possible, those ejected by a volcanic migration do not surrender their allegiance to their homeland and always hope to return. Theirs is the commonsense response of simple people caught in the ravenous jaws of some greater political purpose. In contrast, glacial movements represent a general surrender
M
74
of allegiance to the old land and an embracement of the new home, and typically take place over several generations. The Irish diaspora to the New World, resulting from the Corn Laws and the Potato Famine in the 19th century—a migration that profoundly changed America—is an example of this process. The movement of Hispanics into North America is another. Mostly because of their timing cycle, and because each decision to move seems so personal and unrushed, true migrations often occur beneath public awareness until they are largely a fait accompli that has reshaped the world that is the migration’s goal. The response is really more about the change wrought than the migration that produced it. Within large lands, migrations can also be internal. The Chinese, for instance, are actively encouraging the migration of Han Chinese into Tibet as a way of cementing the connection between Tibet and mainland China. America similarly encouraged homesteading as a way of claiming the central plains from Native Americans, about which I will have more to say later. Right now, three major migrations are actively at work changing the face of the United States. Their effects hold implications for every aspect of American life, from healthcare to education to what kind of arts are publicly supported. Understanding them is critically important, because if we do not correctly understand them, we will invest possibly trillions of dollars and millions of work hours constructing bridges to nowhere.
THE COMING WHITE MINORITY The Census Bureau reported in August 2008 that by 2042, America will be majority nonwhite. Those who identify themselves as Hispanic, black, Asian, American Indian,
EXPLORE March/April 2009, Vol. 5, No. 2
Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander will collectively outnumber non-Hispanic whites. Some demographers believe the actual tip point will occur even earlier, and they may well be right. This latest projection by the Census Bureau accelerates by six years the official projections made previously, in 2004, that saw this shift happening in 2050. As Sam Roberts reported in The New York Times, “The main reason for the accelerating change is significantly higher birthrates among immigrants. Another factor is the influx of foreigners, rising from about 1.3 million annually today to more than 2 million a year by mid-century, according to projections based on current immigration policies.”1 Think about this for a moment; it stunned me when I first absorbed it as more than a statistic. In my lifetime, we have gone from separate drinking fountains segregated by race, to an American President who is by heritage half white, half African, half Christian, half Islamic. And now I, child of two earlier white migrations, am poised to become a minority because of new large migrations. It is a measure of the resilience of our political system, and the tolerance built into the culture as the result of that system’s long endurance as an idea—the United States has the oldest continuous form of government on the planet—rather than a racial, ethnic, or religious grouping that this has happened. “No other country has experienced such rapid racial and ethnic change,” observes Mark Mather, a demographer with the Population Reference Bureau, a research organization in Washington.1 “A momentum is built into this as a result of past immigration,” says Jeffrey S. Passel, senior demographer at the Pew Hispanic Center. “In the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, there were more Hispanic immigrants
SchwartzReport
than births. This decade, there are more births than immigrants. Almost regardless of what you assume about future immigration, the country will be more Hispanic and Asian.”1
THE REEMERGENCE OF THE PLAINS They came in waves. It is one of the enduring iconic stories of our past, one of the legends we tell our children to teach them who they are. The Homesteaders, “opening” the Great Plains and the West, set in motion by the Homestead Act of 1862. They are there still in our mind’s eye. Their wagons named for Conestoga, a small town in Pennsylvania where they were first made, became the most numinous conveyance in American history until the advent of the Model T. For people like the Mormons, the wood and canvas wagons are still a living presence. Fueled mostly by the migration of Scandinavians, Germans, Scots, and Irish from their homelands where land was parceled out to peasants on a scale of yards, the land of the Great Plains and beyond represented a scale that could scarcely be imagined by those millions who poured into America. The small towns that soon dotted the central corridor of the American land mass became the very thing we meant when we said, “American heartland.” Beginning in the 1930s, though, the great experiment in family farming began to fail, replaced by massive agri-industrial farming requiring few people and many machines, and the towns were abandoned one by one. In the census of 1890, “desolate lands” were defined as land with a population of less than one person per 10 square miles. By the 1990s, parts of the Great Plains had reverted to that status. The Inter-University Consortium For Political and Social Research studied this, concluding: “In the next decades, aging farmers in the United States will make decisions that affect almost 1 billion acres of land. The future of this land will become more uncertain as farm transfer becomes more difficult, potentially changing the structure of agriculture through farm consolidation, changes in farm ownership and management, or taking land out of production.”2 The common wisdom is that the “Age of the Plains” is over.
SchwartzReport
But it isn’t quite that simple, nor that gloomy. To be sure, the farming village heartland of story, movie, and song is gone and will not return. But the Great Plains will remain the nation’s breadbasket and the primary source of wheat, as well as much of the barley, corn, flaxseed, sunflowers, sorghum, cotton, and cattle. As Jim Stephens, president of Farmers National Commodities, and a grain-marketing consultant says, “Despite population declines in many areas, the total acres of corn, soybean and wheat in Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota and Montana are up 7.2 million acres since 1950 to 48.3 million acres.”3 However, as the European model of small family farms ends, new models of living on the plains are arising and a new migration is beginning. One of its most interesting aspects is the return of Native Americans to historic lands. Speaking of this, John Mitchell writes in National Geographic Magazine, “If there was any surprise in the findings of the 2000 U.S. census, it wasn’t so much the loss of population from half the counties in the Great Plains; those numbers had been ebbing for decades. The surprise was the disproportionate gain in counties that contain the region’s Indian reservations, a growth that could not be pegged entirely to higher birthrates, better healthcare, casino jobs, and the availability of federally subsidized housing. Thousands of Native Americans long off the ‘rez’—Blackfeet, Crow, Flathead, Northern Cheyenne, Sioux—were putting the white man’s cities behind them and heading for home. ‘A lot of these people returning from the cities are retirees,’ says Fred DuBray, a Sioux who manages the InterTribal Bison Cooperative near the Black Hills. ‘This is where they want to be. This is where their heart is.’”4 Another shift lies in retirees seeking quiet, less expensive retirements. And young families seeking much the same, at the other end of life. Small metropolitan areas near interesting geographical features, or with the “good” bones of architecture, or proximity to a college and a medical center are attracting these people, and are actually growing. Fargo, North Dakota, for example, grew by 20% between 1990 and 2000. Joining Fargo are towns such as Grand Forks, North Dakota, Dubuque, Iowa, and Casper, Wyoming, all of which have enjoyed significant
growth. And inexpensive land costs near these groupings are attracting technical industry. But the factor that I believe will matter most is the one announced by President Obama, then President elect, on Monday, December 15, 2008, when he presented Nobel Laureate physicist Stephen Chu and the others he described as his “energy and environment team” to oversee the Green Transition and the shift in energy it represents. Why do I say this? Because through a stroke of extraordinary good fortune down these lonely flat states that constitute the nation’s central spine, with few metropolitan installations to break its momentum, flows one of the best wind corridors in the world. Already, libertarian ranchers, normally defined by their independence, are banding together to form wind cooperatives. We are about to experience something like the OklahomaTexas oil rush. And an entire new infrastructure is going to rise before our eyes. We are going to go back to the age when the Hoover Dam and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) lakes were created. As transportation from trains to automobiles shifts to electricity, and residential and office structures do the same, places with wind, like places with constant sun, are going to become extraordinarily valuable.
PERTURBATION ON THE COASTS Some years ago I did a research study in which I asked a population of Japanese and a population of Americans to imagine a place.5 I then asked them to categorize it as being (1) a mountain, (2) a city, (3) a sacred space, (4) a technological installation, (5) a land-water interface, or (6) farmland. To an overwhelming degree, the Japanese picked “a mountain” and Americans selected “land-water interface.” If one thinks about it, I believe it is not hard to see why this occurred. Japanese revere mountains in general, and Mount Fuji especially. It is a constant symbol in their art and literature. Americans are strongly oriented towards land-water interfaces. Our anthems speak of them, and our cultural memory is replete with tales that involve the shores of our oceans, lakes, and rivers and their deltas. Perhaps that is why, although worldwide about 40% of people live within 100 km/62 miles of a coastline or in land lying less than 10 meters/33 feet in height (the definition of coastal areas),
EXPLORE March/April 2009, Vol. 5, No. 2
75
in the United States that number is 53%.6 Nearly 160 million people live in coastal counties, an increase of 39 million since 1980. An additional 12 million are expected in the next decade. If the consensus models of climate change continue to correctly predict outcome, this cannot continue. States like Florida are obviously going to be severely impacted by the rise of seawater, and there is a very real chance that the Keys will simply go under the waves. But that’s just the obvious. Consider a state like New Jersey, where 60% of the population lives in a coastal county. Even in 2005, to those who bothered to look, the picture was remarkably grim, and recent developments suggest that those predictions, looking back from 2009, are not only holding true but are, perhaps, too conservative. Princeton University researchers led by Matthew Cooper carried out the 2005 study of the impact rising sea levels would have on the state and reported, “Sea level rise is a significant and growing threat to New Jersey.”7 Their study projected that “as much as 9% of the state’s low-lying land could be hit by periodic coastal flooding in a trend that would devastate property, disrupt wildlife, erode beaches, and salinate drinking water in populated areas. Worldwide, sea levels are expected to rise between 0.09 and 0.88 meter (0.29 and 2.88 feet) between 1990 and 2100. In New Jersey, the rise is projected at an overall 0.71 meter (2.3 feet) over the period.”7 Much the same could be said about every state down the Eastern seaboard, where a vast megalopolis essentially runs from Boston to Norfolk. I invite my readers to visit a site maintained by the University of Arizona Department of Geosciences Environmental Studies Laboratory (http://geongrid.
76
geo.arizona.edu/arcims/website/slrus48prvi/ viewer.htm), where they have dynamic maps showing what the projected impact of sea level rise will be. It is a very scary picture. Clearly, people in the coastal regions are going to experience radical change in their living patterns, and one probable outcome will be a migration back from the present coastline to some safer line inland. All of these migrations are occurring now, and will produce powerful forces for change in our future that will accelerate as the century spools out. They matter now, however, because thanks to the new Obama administration, we are undertaking the first massive national infrastructure building effort since the interstate highway program began in the 1950s. If the “past is prologue” and we must live for the next several generations on the decisions we make today, then it is important to our lives, and particularly the lives of our children and grandchildren, that we make decisions about where to place hospitals, schools, libraries, and other public facilities based not only on present needs and population patterns, but, also on the needs and patterns three decades from now. The time when climate change deniers could be taken seriously is long past, and the choices we make in the next few months will largely describe the America we live in tomorrow. REFERENCES 1. Roberts S. In a generation, minorities may be the U.S. majority. The New York Times. August 14, 2008. Available at: http://www.nytimes. com/2008/08/14/washington/14census.html. Accessed August 14, 2008. 2. Leonard SH, Gutmann MP. Land-use and transfer plans in the U.S. Great Plains. Great Plains Res. 2006;16(2):181-194.
EXPLORE March/April 2009, Vol. 5, No. 2
3. El Nassar H. Life of the plains is anything but plain, simple. USA Today. August 13, 2007. Available at: http://www.usatoday.com/news/ nation/2007-08-12-great-plains_N.htm. Accessed December 7, 2008. 4. Mitchell JG. Change of the heartland. National Geographic Magazine. May 2004. Available at: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ ngm/0405/feature1/index.html. Accessed December 7, 2008. 5. Schwartz SA, De Mattei RJ. The Mobius Psi-Q Test: Preliminary Findings. Research in Parapsychology. Roll WG, Beloff J, White R, eds. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press; 1983:103-105. 6. United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme, World Bank, World Resources Institute World Resources Institute. World Resources 2000-2001: People and Ecosystems: The Fraying Web of Life. Washington, DC: World Resources Institute; 2000. Available at: http:// www.wri.org/wr2000. Accessed December 5, 2008. 7. Hurdle J. Rising sea levels threaten New Jersey. Reuters. November 16, 2005. Available at: http://reuters.myway.com/article/20051116/ 2005-11-16T232315Z_01_MCC684168_ RTRIDST_0_NEWS-ENVIRONMENTNEWJERSEY-DC.html. Accessed November 16, 2005.
Stephan A. Schwartz is the editor of the daily Web publication The SchwartzReport (http:// www.schwartzreport.net), which concentrates on trends that will shape the future, an area of research he has been working in since the mid1960s. For over 35 years he has also been an active experimentalist doing research on the nature of consciousness, particularly remote viewing, healing, creativity, religious ecstasy, and meditation. He is the author of several books and numerous papers, technical reports, and general audience articles on these topics.
SchwartzReport
Migration By Stephan A. Schwartz
The SchwartzReport tracks emerging trends that will affect the world, particularly the United States. For EXPLORE it focuses on matters of health in the broadest sense of that term, including medical issues, changes in the biosphere, technology, and policy considerations, all of which will shape our culture and our lives.
igration. The word evokes for me, and perhaps for you, images from the Bible. Charlton Heston’s Moses leading the Jews out of Egypt, across the Red Sea, and into the desert that lies beyond. Masses of people collectively on the move with common purpose, bringing with them all their goods and chattels. Never expecting to return. More than war, more than climate catastrophe, more than pandemics—migrations are a force for change. And this is as true for first world countries like the United States, Europe, or Japan, as it is for developing nations like China or Third World countries such as the nations of Africa. Migrations come in two varieties: glacial and volcanic. The 1994 Tutsi flood that poured out of Rwanda and the several million non-Islamic Sudanese forced from their villages by the progovernment Janjaweed militias are volcanic migrations— violent ejections of populations based on immediate crisis. The volcanic time frame is short term, because just as the Rwandans— both Hutu and Tutsi— came back as soon as it was possible, those ejected by a volcanic migration do not surrender their allegiance to their homeland and always hope to return. Theirs is the commonsense response of simple people caught in the ravenous jaws of some greater political purpose. In contrast, glacial movements represent a general surrender
M
74
of allegiance to the old land and an embracement of the new home, and typically take place over several generations. The Irish diaspora to the New World, resulting from the Corn Laws and the Potato Famine in the 19th century—a migration that profoundly changed America—is an example of this process. The movement of Hispanics into North America is another. Mostly because of their timing cycle, and because each decision to move seems so personal and unrushed, true migrations often occur beneath public awareness until they are largely a fait accompli that has reshaped the world that is the migration’s goal. The response is really more about the change wrought than the migration that produced it. Within large lands, migrations can also be internal. The Chinese, for instance, are actively encouraging the migration of Han Chinese into Tibet as a way of cementing the connection between Tibet and mainland China. America similarly encouraged homesteading as a way of claiming the central plains from Native Americans, about which I will have more to say later. Right now, three major migrations are actively at work changing the face of the United States. Their effects hold implications for every aspect of American life, from healthcare to education to what kind of arts are publicly supported. Understanding them is critically important, because if we do not correctly understand them, we will invest possibly trillions of dollars and millions of work hours constructing bridges to nowhere.
THE COMING WHITE MINORITY The Census Bureau reported in August 2008 that by 2042, America will be majority nonwhite. Those who identify themselves as Hispanic, black, Asian, American Indian,
EXPLORE March/April 2009, Vol. 5, No. 2
Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander will collectively outnumber non-Hispanic whites. Some demographers believe the actual tip point will occur even earlier, and they may well be right. This latest projection by the Census Bureau accelerates by six years the official projections made previously, in 2004, that saw this shift happening in 2050. As Sam Roberts reported in The New York Times, “The main reason for the accelerating change is significantly higher birthrates among immigrants. Another factor is the influx of foreigners, rising from about 1.3 million annually today to more than 2 million a year by mid-century, according to projections based on current immigration policies.”1 Think about this for a moment; it stunned me when I first absorbed it as more than a statistic. In my lifetime, we have gone from separate drinking fountains segregated by race, to an American President who is by heritage half white, half African, half Christian, half Islamic. And now I, child of two earlier white migrations, am poised to become a minority because of new large migrations. It is a measure of the resilience of our political system, and the tolerance built into the culture as the result of that system’s long endurance as an idea—the United States has the oldest continuous form of government on the planet—rather than a racial, ethnic, or religious grouping that this has happened. “No other country has experienced such rapid racial and ethnic change,” observes Mark Mather, a demographer with the Population Reference Bureau, a research organization in Washington.1 “A momentum is built into this as a result of past immigration,” says Jeffrey S. Passel, senior demographer at the Pew Hispanic Center. “In the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, there were more Hispanic immigrants
SchwartzReport
than births. This decade, there are more births than immigrants. Almost regardless of what you assume about future immigration, the country will be more Hispanic and Asian.”1
THE REEMERGENCE OF THE PLAINS They came in waves. It is one of the enduring iconic stories of our past, one of the legends we tell our children to teach them who they are. The Homesteaders, “opening” the Great Plains and the West, set in motion by the Homestead Act of 1862. They are there still in our mind’s eye. Their wagons named for Conestoga, a small town in Pennsylvania where they were first made, became the most numinous conveyance in American history until the advent of the Model T. For people like the Mormons, the wood and canvas wagons are still a living presence. Fueled mostly by the migration of Scandinavians, Germans, Scots, and Irish from their homelands where land was parceled out to peasants on a scale of yards, the land of the Great Plains and beyond represented a scale that could scarcely be imagined by those millions who poured into America. The small towns that soon dotted the central corridor of the American land mass became the very thing we meant when we said, “American heartland.” Beginning in the 1930s, though, the great experiment in family farming began to fail, replaced by massive agri-industrial farming requiring few people and many machines, and the towns were abandoned one by one. In the census of 1890, “desolate lands” were defined as land with a population of less than one person per 10 square miles. By the 1990s, parts of the Great Plains had reverted to that status. The Inter-University Consortium For Political and Social Research studied this, concluding: “In the next decades, aging farmers in the United States will make decisions that affect almost 1 billion acres of land. The future of this land will become more uncertain as farm transfer becomes more difficult, potentially changing the structure of agriculture through farm consolidation, changes in farm ownership and management, or taking land out of production.”2 The common wisdom is that the “Age of the Plains” is over.
SchwartzReport
But it isn’t quite that simple, nor that gloomy. To be sure, the farming village heartland of story, movie, and song is gone and will not return. But the Great Plains will remain the nation’s breadbasket and the primary source of wheat, as well as much of the barley, corn, flaxseed, sunflowers, sorghum, cotton, and cattle. As Jim Stephens, president of Farmers National Commodities, and a grain-marketing consultant says, “Despite population declines in many areas, the total acres of corn, soybean and wheat in Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota and Montana are up 7.2 million acres since 1950 to 48.3 million acres.”3 However, as the European model of small family farms ends, new models of living on the plains are arising and a new migration is beginning. One of its most interesting aspects is the return of Native Americans to historic lands. Speaking of this, John Mitchell writes in National Geographic Magazine, “If there was any surprise in the findings of the 2000 U.S. census, it wasn’t so much the loss of population from half the counties in the Great Plains; those numbers had been ebbing for decades. The surprise was the disproportionate gain in counties that contain the region’s Indian reservations, a growth that could not be pegged entirely to higher birthrates, better healthcare, casino jobs, and the availability of federally subsidized housing. Thousands of Native Americans long off the ‘rez’—Blackfeet, Crow, Flathead, Northern Cheyenne, Sioux—were putting the white man’s cities behind them and heading for home. ‘A lot of these people returning from the cities are retirees,’ says Fred DuBray, a Sioux who manages the InterTribal Bison Cooperative near the Black Hills. ‘This is where they want to be. This is where their heart is.’”4 Another shift lies in retirees seeking quiet, less expensive retirements. And young families seeking much the same, at the other end of life. Small metropolitan areas near interesting geographical features, or with the “good” bones of architecture, or proximity to a college and a medical center are attracting these people, and are actually growing. Fargo, North Dakota, for example, grew by 20% between 1990 and 2000. Joining Fargo are towns such as Grand Forks, North Dakota, Dubuque, Iowa, and Casper, Wyoming, all of which have enjoyed significant
growth. And inexpensive land costs near these groupings are attracting technical industry. But the factor that I believe will matter most is the one announced by President Obama, then President elect, on Monday, December 15, 2008, when he presented Nobel Laureate physicist Stephen Chu and the others he described as his “energy and environment team” to oversee the Green Transition and the shift in energy it represents. Why do I say this? Because through a stroke of extraordinary good fortune down these lonely flat states that constitute the nation’s central spine, with few metropolitan installations to break its momentum, flows one of the best wind corridors in the world. Already, libertarian ranchers, normally defined by their independence, are banding together to form wind cooperatives. We are about to experience something like the OklahomaTexas oil rush. And an entire new infrastructure is going to rise before our eyes. We are going to go back to the age when the Hoover Dam and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) lakes were created. As transportation from trains to automobiles shifts to electricity, and residential and office structures do the same, places with wind, like places with constant sun, are going to become extraordinarily valuable.
PERTURBATION ON THE COASTS Some years ago I did a research study in which I asked a population of Japanese and a population of Americans to imagine a place.5 I then asked them to categorize it as being (1) a mountain, (2) a city, (3) a sacred space, (4) a technological installation, (5) a land-water interface, or (6) farmland. To an overwhelming degree, the Japanese picked “a mountain” and Americans selected “land-water interface.” If one thinks about it, I believe it is not hard to see why this occurred. Japanese revere mountains in general, and Mount Fuji especially. It is a constant symbol in their art and literature. Americans are strongly oriented towards land-water interfaces. Our anthems speak of them, and our cultural memory is replete with tales that involve the shores of our oceans, lakes, and rivers and their deltas. Perhaps that is why, although worldwide about 40% of people live within 100 km/62 miles of a coastline or in land lying less than 10 meters/33 feet in height (the definition of coastal areas),
EXPLORE March/April 2009, Vol. 5, No. 2
75
in the United States that number is 53%.6 Nearly 160 million people live in coastal counties, an increase of 39 million since 1980. An additional 12 million are expected in the next decade. If the consensus models of climate change continue to correctly predict outcome, this cannot continue. States like Florida are obviously going to be severely impacted by the rise of seawater, and there is a very real chance that the Keys will simply go under the waves. But that’s just the obvious. Consider a state like New Jersey, where 60% of the population lives in a coastal county. Even in 2005, to those who bothered to look, the picture was remarkably grim, and recent developments suggest that those predictions, looking back from 2009, are not only holding true but are, perhaps, too conservative. Princeton University researchers led by Matthew Cooper carried out the 2005 study of the impact rising sea levels would have on the state and reported, “Sea level rise is a significant and growing threat to New Jersey.”7 Their study projected that “as much as 9% of the state’s low-lying land could be hit by periodic coastal flooding in a trend that would devastate property, disrupt wildlife, erode beaches, and salinate drinking water in populated areas. Worldwide, sea levels are expected to rise between 0.09 and 0.88 meter (0.29 and 2.88 feet) between 1990 and 2100. In New Jersey, the rise is projected at an overall 0.71 meter (2.3 feet) over the period.”7 Much the same could be said about every state down the Eastern seaboard, where a vast megalopolis essentially runs from Boston to Norfolk. I invite my readers to visit a site maintained by the University of Arizona Department of Geosciences Environmental Studies Laboratory (http://geongrid.
76
geo.arizona.edu/arcims/website/slrus48prvi/ viewer.htm), where they have dynamic maps showing what the projected impact of sea level rise will be. It is a very scary picture. Clearly, people in the coastal regions are going to experience radical change in their living patterns, and one probable outcome will be a migration back from the present coastline to some safer line inland. All of these migrations are occurring now, and will produce powerful forces for change in our future that will accelerate as the century spools out. They matter now, however, because thanks to the new Obama administration, we are undertaking the first massive national infrastructure building effort since the interstate highway program began in the 1950s. If the “past is prologue” and we must live for the next several generations on the decisions we make today, then it is important to our lives, and particularly the lives of our children and grandchildren, that we make decisions about where to place hospitals, schools, libraries, and other public facilities based not only on present needs and population patterns, but, also on the needs and patterns three decades from now. The time when climate change deniers could be taken seriously is long past, and the choices we make in the next few months will largely describe the America we live in tomorrow. REFERENCES 1. Roberts S. In a generation, minorities may be the U.S. majority. The New York Times. August 14, 2008. Available at: http://www.nytimes. com/2008/08/14/washington/14census.html. Accessed August 14, 2008. 2. Leonard SH, Gutmann MP. Land-use and transfer plans in the U.S. Great Plains. Great Plains Res. 2006;16(2):181-194.
EXPLORE March/April 2009, Vol. 5, No. 2
3. El Nassar H. Life of the plains is anything but plain, simple. USA Today. August 13, 2007. Available at: http://www.usatoday.com/news/ nation/2007-08-12-great-plains_N.htm. Accessed December 7, 2008. 4. Mitchell JG. Change of the heartland. National Geographic Magazine. May 2004. Available at: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ ngm/0405/feature1/index.html. Accessed December 7, 2008. 5. Schwartz SA, De Mattei RJ. The Mobius Psi-Q Test: Preliminary Findings. Research in Parapsychology. Roll WG, Beloff J, White R, eds. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press; 1983:103-105. 6. United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme, World Bank, World Resources Institute World Resources Institute. World Resources 2000-2001: People and Ecosystems: The Fraying Web of Life. Washington, DC: World Resources Institute; 2000. Available at: http:// www.wri.org/wr2000. Accessed December 5, 2008. 7. Hurdle J. Rising sea levels threaten New Jersey. Reuters. November 16, 2005. Available at: http://reuters.myway.com/article/20051116/ 2005-11-16T232315Z_01_MCC684168_ RTRIDST_0_NEWS-ENVIRONMENTNEWJERSEY-DC.html. Accessed November 16, 2005.
Stephan A. Schwartz is the editor of the daily Web publication The SchwartzReport (http:// www.schwartzreport.net), which concentrates on trends that will shape the future, an area of research he has been working in since the mid1960s. For over 35 years he has also been an active experimentalist doing research on the nature of consciousness, particularly remote viewing, healing, creativity, religious ecstasy, and meditation. He is the author of several books and numerous papers, technical reports, and general audience articles on these topics.
SchwartzReport