What will life in America be like 100 years from now? Below is one possible scenario, related in an “interview” with an American set a century in the future.
In this scenario, people’s standard of living declined, but their quality of life improved. Why? Mostly because the rule of Organize at Human Scale made a comeback.
Hi, I’m Joe Castle. I run a feed and seed in town, with a warehouse down near the train station. My hobby is county history, so once in a while I take the train to the county seat to root through the archives.
How has the county changed in the past century? Well, first off, there aren’t as many people living in it now. The population used to be 350,000, but it started getting smaller after Great Depression II. It kept getting smaller in a gradual way, and now it’s around 50,000.
You’re probably wondering what caused GDII. Lots of things, but the two biggest were money and gas. First the national money system went haywire, then gas got scarce. People back then depended on both, so they had some hard times. The county fared better than a lot of places, but it wasn’t easy for anyone here.
With time, people here picked up the pieces and built a new way of life. I imagine you’d like to know how we live now, so let me tell you about my county in the year 2124.
Energy
The energy source that we care about most is food—the one that people run on. So, around half of us work on 50-acre farms. Since the Organic Revolution, we’ve doubled our yields compared to a century ago. Some farmers go the tractors-and-biofuels route, but most use horses to pull plows and such. It’s not as fast, but it’s less expensive and more reliable.
We get most of our protein from chickens, which most farms raise. Some farmers graze dairy and beef cattle up in the hills. A lot of people hunt deer in the mountains, or they just get a farmer’s permission to shoot one eating harvest leavings. They also hunt the wild boar that tear up the fields, and fishermen pull a lot of catfish out of the river.
We also grow a fair bit of rice in the valleys. Funny thing, while the climate changed in ways that made most of the continent hotter and drier, it made this area hotter and wetter, which made it possible to grow rice where we used to grow corn. Now it’s one of our staple crops.
As for vegetables, most families grow their own in backyard gardens. Some get dried, some get canned, and you’re fixed for veggies that last through the winter.
Most of the energy that we use for heating, cooking, and generating power comes from biofuels. We grow soybeans to make biodiesel, and ferment “humanure” to make methanol. Doesn’t smell very nice while it’s being made, but it works great in train engines.
Because the county got a head start on using biofuels, that became a big export business here. We sell a lot of it to customers up north, and we’ve got a factory in town that makes some of the country’s best biofuel equipment. Sheet steel and pipe come in on the train, then get shipped out again as fermentation tanks.
Architecture
Back in the 2060s, most of the subdivisions and strip malls were torn down, and their materials were salvaged. It was either tear them down and reuse the building materials, or watch them turn into slums. Those salvage operations also kept a lot of people working while the local economy was rebuilt.
The salvage came in handy because we had to build new public buildings to replace the ones put up between 1970 and 2030. Those old buildings were designed to use air coolers, and when the coolers became too expensive to run, the buildings got too hot and stuffy to use four months out of the year. I know it sounds crazy, but the windows in some of them wouldn’t even open!
Now we live and work in buildings where all the windows open. Most have a foot of insulation in the walls and ceiling. Lots of glass on the south side, too, to let winter sunshine in. Roof overhangs keep the summer sun off the windows.
Oh, and all our buildings have a solar heater box on the roof. We run water pipes up there, paint them black, cover them in glass, and this gives us hot water when the sun shines.
Transportation
Every town still has its streets paved, but not with blacktop. We use brick and stone now. Once you get out of town, most of the roads are dirt. They don’t cost much to maintain, and work fine for pulling carts and pedaling around on bicycles.
To move people and goods from town to town, we use the county rail system. One line runs north to south, the other runs east-west, and a few spurs tie it all together.
Nobody uses cars anymore. Ambulances and fire trucks make runs when they need to, a few buses carry livestock around, and old biodiesel pickups are sometimes used. For the most part, though, motor vehicles are a thing of the past. We mostly use bicycles to get around.
Commerce
We buy and sell things much the same way people did a century ago, but we conduct most transactions in our local currency, the blackbird. The way it came about is an interesting story.
In the 2030s, the currency they used—dollars—first got too scarce around here, then became too abundant. When dollars lost their value, some local bankers got together to create a new county currency. They figured that the county’s real wealth—the crops people grew and the things they could do—was still intact, local folks just needed a way to trade it.
They had a local jeweler engrave some steel plates to print up bills. When he engraved them he put a picture of a crow on them. He figured that crows, being smart and resourceful birds, would make a good symbol for the new bills. The bills got printed in black ink, since that’s all the county could afford at the time, and people called them “blackbirds.”
Then the county’s leaders did something new. They didn’t back the new currency with metal, grain, or anything else that could be hoarded. They backed it with people. With every child born in the county, 50,000 ‘birds were put into circulation. When someone died, 50,000 were taken out. That rule has held, and the blackbird has kept its value ever since.
You can’t buy some things, like wholesale computers and bikes, using blackbirds. For that, you need to go down to the bank and convert them into national currency. But for buying things that get produced right here, like food and houses, ‘birds work just fine.
Communications
The Internet is still around, but it runs over phone lines, at the same speed it did in the 1990s. You can send and receive all the email you want for free, but the commo utility charges a monthly fee to serve up the local news site and other web sites to your house.
Computers are expensive, but they’re worth it. Once I tried running my business using a paper ledger instead of an electronic spreadsheet, and it just about drove me nuts.
Books are prized, and something of an art form. Paper is expensive, so publishers take care to make sure that the books they put out look nice. The local library has quite a few books, but only new ones are available for loan—the old ones stay in the reading rooms.
Socializing
I understand that a century ago people tended to stay at home and watch a lot of television. We don’t, because we don’t have it: the infrastructure got too expensive to maintain, so it faded away. Sometimes we’ll listen to the radio, but most people like to go visiting in the evenings when the weather’s nice. I live in town, so I don’t have to walk far before I’m invited up onto a neighbor’s porch for a glass of tea.
When we gather in groups for social functions, it’s usually at a church hall or the grange hall. When we get together informally, it’s usually down at the pub. It’s a good place to relax, and whenever you pop in for a pint, you can count on knowing most everybody there.
The churches sponsor a dance every month or two, and young people come from all over the county to meet, flirt, and dance salsa rueda. It’s not all young people at the dances, though—folks of all ages come. Sometimes my wife and I go, and we have a great time.
Life
I guess what you really want to know is, what’s it like to live here in the year 2124?
Our standard of living is lower than it was a century ago. We don’t have machines to wash our dishes and dry our clothes. Airliners are a thing of the past, and no one has a handheld phone. But I feel like our quality of life is higher. We have more leisure time than people did back then, and we know our neighbors better. From what I’ve read, we have a lot less stress.
It’s a comfortable way of life, but there’s adventure to be had, too. Some of our young men take the train to New Baltimore and sign on to crew the big wind-powered freighters that sail the Atlantic. Some grab their spears on the weekends and hunt wild boar up in the mountains.
I think we’re more connected than people were then. We’re more connected to each other, to the land, to our past, and to the future, too. The property lines of our farms are marked by lines of tall trees, just like the shade trees that line town streets. Some of those trees were planted by my grandparents, and they’ll be there for my grandchildren. That feels good.
A century ago, this county amounted to a boom town, pumped up on Federal money and running on cheap oil. Then the boom busted, and that whole way of life changed. First for the worse, then for the better. Much better, in my opinion. If I could live in any place, at any time, I’d choose right here, right now: my county in the year 2124.
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