The Year 2035

BY JEANETTE PRATHER

 Jeanette got her BA in journalism, French, international studies, and dance at Cal State, Long Beach circa 2007. Since then, she has published thousands of articles and blogs from zines to dailies to traditional glossies, as well as four books, and six musicals. She runs a local business, Stellaria Creative Company, and resides in Santa Cruz with her husband and two children.

With all the question marks that came along with 2020 – and, let’s be honest, 2021 so far – it might be ambitious to try and tackle what the world has in store for the coming decades. But let’s indulge this topic for the sake of our future generations, anyway! What might the world look like in 2035, for instance, for a child born now?

“We hope that the culture of our community in 2035 is a vibrant town square of open communication and critical thinking, fueled by cultural institutions and community hubs like museums,” said executive director of the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History, Felicia B. Van Stolk. “We envision a culture that nurtures curiosity, encourages asking questions, and values a diversity of perspectives.”

Stolk backs up this claim with a forecast report published by the American Alliance of Museums titled, “Museum 2040.” “Museums will become increasingly part of a traditional education for parents and students exploring more personalized learning plans,” said Stolk. “They will also become community centers and hubs for providing services beyond the typical exhibit. In particular, they will be resources for mental health, and some doctors have already begun prescribing visits to museums and nature centers as treatment.”

“Museums have grown beyond their physical walls and are now a part of their communities in a bigger way than ever, which puts them in partnership with more non-museum disciplines and sectors than ever,” wrote Dr. Cris Hon Garcia, the rotating CEO of the American Alliance of Museums, in a letter dated 2040 from the same document addressing its members. Garcia goes on to explain how organizational boundaries across many industry spectrums blur or disappear altogether. “The museum and the hospital, for example, may share spaces, objects, talent, and programs, while the police department and the school do the same. Museums have become fully integrated with our educational system—both of my children attended preschool in a museum and, as she enters her teens, my daughter has chosen our local natural history museum as the home base for her personal learning plan. Museums, houses of worship, libraries, and community centers are finding ways to work together to serve their communities, their clients, in ways nobody could have imagined a quartercentury ago.”

Agreeing with this statement, the marketing and public relations manager at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History (MAH), Ashley Holmes, rounded up some of the museum administration staff to comment on what they speculate human culture and society will look like come 2035. “We believe 2035 museums/cultural organizations have embraced their potential to be true spaces for inclusivity and courageous change, to uplift everyone with tolerance, accountability, and grace,” said the MAH administration. “We believe cultural organizations are essential in moving us through moments in time—the good, the challenging, and everything in between.”

The MAH goes on to predict that 2035 museums and cultural centers will know and own their responsibility to grow with their communities, as well as embrace new platforms for expression and interaction while adopting new technologies to move beyond limitations of physical buildings and space.

“In 2035, museums trust, listen and respect the community they are in and the land they stand on,” said the MAH administration. “They are spaces that hold and preserve the most beautiful stories, and are active spaces for gathering, listening, and sharing. Museums have become safer spaces for more stories, dialogue, and pushing the status quo.”

Additionally, artists weigh in on what they think the future will bring. Local Core Connected Learning teaching artist, Fred Mindlin. “Twenty thirty-five will be the first year of the Third Decade, which ushers in World Peace,” he wrote in the digital story, “String Stories.” “You see, the First Decade created a fundamental shift in global consciousness by enabling all children around the world to become curious, creative, selfdirected independent learners through the arts. The esoteric work of the Second Decade involves healing all the wounded adults who never got the message or have intractable learning challenges and restoring humanity’s nurturing relationship to the nature in which we are embedded. Now, in 2035, we can truly ‘Shake Hands Around the World’ and play an endless game of Cat’s Cradle.”

Unfortunately, with the onset of more civil global consciousness, comes the struggle in power relinquishing and disbursement by those who are in charge. According to Pew Research Center in an article interviewing hundreds of global experts (“Experts Predict More Digital Innovation by 2030 Aimed at Enhancing Democracy,” June 30, 2020), power dynamics will be both the catalyst in innovation as well as future problems. “Polarization of politics will continue, and positions will harden in the U.S. twoparty system,” wrote retired entrepreneur and business leader, Mike Gaudreau.

“The left will become too utopian and the right will veer toward national socialism that suits those who think immigrants are the cause of their issues. I fear there may be another civil war in the U.S. in the next 10 to 20 years, or at least a period of upheaval as seen in the 1960s.”

Assistant professor of UCSC’s legal studies program in the politics department, Anjuli Verma, cited a nationwide system collapse come 2035. “Outside of California, by 2035, states across the U.S. will have reached a deeper low and unbearable breaking point in the governing crisis and scale of need and human suffering under late-stage capitalism, climate change, and in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, which did not fully subside until 2023 and produced long-range effects still felt well into the year 2035.”

While in California, with Santa Cruz being one of the trailblazing locales, Verma predicts a substantially downsized prison system and armed police force by 2035. “Santa Cruz will have been one of the locales to trail blaze on decarceration and demilitarization and to imagine, as well as successfully implement, new systems, laws, policies, norms, institutions, and both institutional and personal practices that redirect resources away from the state’s criminal and carceral apparatus to systems of mutual social support premised on solidarity and social programs sustained by communities that are beginning to become less reliant on the state for welfare, belonging, safety, and survival,” said Verma.

“By 2035, it will have become culturally and politically unacceptable, and virtually impossible, to sustain the earlier era’s (2020-2021) levels of incarceration and policing in the U.S., and the few remaining outlier states who have tried thus far to stubbornly resist will begin to buckle under the fact of this new reality, and this new politics,” continued Verma. “Public safety and state power to keep peace in the U.S. will have been reconceptualized, making the focus of politics in 2035 the refinement and restructuring of state and local systems to respond more robustly to economic precarity, mental illness and psychological instability, and chronic illness, diseases and preventable death.”

So, it’s not all bad, but like most systems to evolve, there will be bumps along the way. Like, of course, the need to address an ever-increasing threat to Earth via climate change.

“Our planet is gradually getting warmer and this includes Santa Cruz,” said distinguished professor of earth sciences at UCSC, Gary Griggs, referencing his paper, “The Climate is Changing – What Can We Expect?” “We can expect more hotter days, more frequent droughts and water shortages, and more forest fires. More of California’s precipitation will fall as rain instead of snow, meaning that there will be less snowpack to release water later in the summer when we need it most, [and] our rainfall here will likely be more concentrated in the winter months, which would mean more frequent flooding.”

Griggs mentions that we can expect the sea level to continue rising slowly, possibly amounting to three or four inches (or higher) by 2035. “This means that the highest tides will cover more beach and flood low-lying areas more often,” he said. “All of this is happening because 80% of our energy supply is from burning fossil fuels (oil, gas and coal), which all produce greenhouse gases. We need to move to renewable energy sources (solar and wind) as quickly as possible to reduce or minimize these future impacts.”

While it doesn’t come as a surprise to most people that climate change is an immediate threat to the environment and needs radical intervention, the call to eradicate this trend may not be so widely known. Felicia Stolk, executive director at the Santa Cruz Museum of National History, says that everyone should get involved on a local level and contribute to Santa Cruz’s effort to include the community in an equitable 2030 climate action plan after implementing its first eight years, by adding your email address and completing a communityminded survey (opening February 8) on engagement preferences at TINYURL. COM/Y2DP8DP2.

“Our environment will certainly be different - change is inevitable, and impacts caused by climate change and resource use will take time to slow or reverse,” said Stolk. “However, there are some hopeful trends globally and locally that may lead us to a brighter environmental future, [like] a U.S. Senate resolution that is part of a global initiative called ‘30 by 30’ - a goal to protect 30% of land and water by 2030.”

Another prominent local institution, UCSC, has drafted a 2021 Long-Range Development Plan (LRDP) with an Environmental Impact Report (EIR), began in 2017, that included a lot of community feedback for the coming 20 years. The plan was initiated to help embrace the original vision for the campus, include more physical space while preserving its natural reserve, advance research capabilities, and oncampus circulation.

“We are focused on providing a high-quality education and research environment for the next generation of leaders while also respecting and protecting the natural environment that surrounds us, which is an important part of what makes our campus special,” Chancellor Cynthia Larive said in a press release titled, “UCSC imagines campus 20 years from now, releases roadmap for its future and accompanying environmental review” issued on January 7. “This plan charts an innovative, sustainable, and exciting course for our campus.”

“It’s impossible to fully predict university life 20 years from now,” said Vice Chancellor Sarah Latham in the same press release, “but it is prudent that our campus produces a well-thoughtout roadmap that can serve as a guide regardless of what the year 2040 brings.”

In a heartwarming letter titled “Those Who Came Before You” and written to her three-month-old baby grandniece Penelope, retired Art Coordinator for Palo Alto School District, Sharon Ferguson, wrote, “You smile so freely that when I look at your latest picture I can slip momentarily into the kind of limitless optimism that I cannot feel most of the day. These are hard times. We are navigating the first global pandemic, recovering from the destruction of devastating fires, and suffer the stress from the cruel actions of political leaders who have abdicated integrity, honor, and most dishearteningly, the truth.”

Perhaps Ferguson summed it up wonderfully when she wrote, “Your life is starting with so much care and hopefulness, that when the challenges you will undoubtedly meet come your way, you will be able to thrive because of those who came before you [and] found their passions and pathways to good relationships, intellectual curiosity, and creativity. These are the joys of living. Everything else is negotiable.”

With the onset of a more globally conscious human framework, it’s safe to assume that the leaders of the future free world are the artists, humanitarians, environmentalists, activists, historians, scientists, and other creatives of the world, in whatever context that might look.

“After all, everyone will have by [2035] learned to appreciate the power of an endless loop and the joy of a neverending story,” said local teaching artist, Fred Mindlin, “so we will see each of us as the spokes in a giant galactic wheel, as the old song goes, ‘Ezekiel saw the Wheel a Time, Every Spoke was Humankind.’”