"Nothing is too wonderful to be true" - Michael Faraday (1791-1867)

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Wieringen in 2015 will look different than it does now. However, it is very hard to predict how different. If you take a look at the past instead of the future, you'll see why. When looking at the early 1980's, was it possible to predict that almost everyone would have a VCR nowadays, and that information technology would become the boom-industry it now is? Only a few years ago only a very select group of people at universities new of the existence of the Internet, but look at us now! Every day millions of people worldwide are "on line". A little bit longer ago, in the 1960's, pundits at IBM foresaw a worldwide market for computers would be six machines, perhaps a few more...
These are but a few examples showing the difficulties of forecasting the future.
Despite all this we will look into the future in this article. We will not be looking at a Wieringen as it might be, but rather to a Wieringen as it should be. A utopia, so to speak. Not only is this a lot easier, but it saves a lot of effort accounting for the possible failure of my predictions to come true...

As a precondition for our utopian dream we have chosen for a sustainable development of society. This means that while presenting our vision for the future we have to consider the following:

1. Sustainability means that you use all raw material very carefully, in such a way that future generations may live on the same level of prosperity as we do, without this costing more for them than it cost us. To put it differently: we'll have to be more efficient.
2. Because noone wants to hand in the gained luxuries, it is inevitable that some choices must be made. It is not realistic to ask everyone to go "back to nature". Besides, it would be impossible with the present population. The time that you could give everybody a piece of land on which to grow his or her own crops is long gone, there are simply to many of us for that.
3. Technology will continue to progress, but it is not reasonable to expect that anything goes in 17 years time. Cars won't suddenly use water instead of petrol (On the other hand, stranger things have happened!).
4. Not only fuel and ore reserves are limited, space is too. We must therefore make clear what we really want. Because everyone wants to use the scarce space for living, working and recreation it will be hard to make everyone happy.