Scientists at NASA reported today that the Western United states may experience decades-long "mega-droughts" in the near future because of rising carbon levels in the atmosphere. San Diego, where I live, is dry at the best of times. Right now, this makes it seem like a paradise, but you need to be living in a time of extraordinary abundance for a place where it "hardly ever rains" to sound like a paradise. For most of human history, living somewhere where it "hardly ever rains" would have been a nightmare.
This line of thinking leads quickly to questions like "What happens if we all need to leave? Where do we go?" And, because I'm in my thirties, "Will I seriously regret it if I buy property?" More generally, it gets me thinking about how when I look around at the planet, the places where basic natural resources in short supply tend to be pretty violent. Which is all a roundabout way of saying that I am exceptionally pessimistic about the likelihood of the world forty or fifty years from now being a place I want to live in. For one thing, my country's strides in social justice, equality, tolerance, and just plain safety for its citizens correlate closely with the unprecedented prosperity, material abundance, and physical comfort of the last century. For another, I can't find very many positive examples of large groups of humans going from a time of abundance to a time of scarcity, without a lot of violence.
Here's where this is going: when educators talk about "21st century skills", we usually assume that these involve the internet. But the internet is the ultimate product of cheap energy and global stability - it works because lots and lots of servers never get switched off, and because an exceptionally complex international network of cables, satellites, and dishes is being maintained. So I just don't feel confident that the internet as we know it is here to stay. That isn't to say that I don't think it's possible that the kind of innovation we've become used to will continue on indefinitely into the future, I just think it's very possible that it won't.
I think "21st century skills" are at least as likely to be the skills that make it possible to maintain a resilient, civil community that respects the strongest and the weakest equally, at a time when there is less of everything to go around.
I know this is an exceptionally depressing blog post, and one that is bound to upset people. I really, really, really am not writing it looking for a fight. Rather, I'm writing it because I feel like I spend most of my time suppressing these anxieties and avoiding thinking about them, and I want to acknowledge them in the hope that I can find a way forward. Right now I feel like I'm assuming a future that I don't, based on the data I have, actually think is very likely, and that seems like a problem.