FUTURETALK IN WEST VIRGINIA

Preparing for the millennium

Berkeley Springs, WV--A casual visitor would not take this tiny spa town nestled
up against Warm Springs Mountain for a hotbed of thinking about the future. In
fact, it's the past that seems to dominate.

George Washington, after all, bathed here for the first time 245 years ago. He
named the town Bath, bought land, and returned repeatedly to take the waters
with his Revolutionary War cronies. The local museum flaunts the town's history,
tourist accommodations tend toward the Victorian and country styles, and most of
the shops visitors see sell antiques, not computers or electronic gadgets.

Yet last winter, on seven different occasions, Tari's restaurant attracted a
capacity crowd of 40 people to dine on delicacies such as Jamaican jerked
chicken or spicy Thai steak salad and spend the evening talking about ``the
Future.''

``In Berkeley Springs,'' admits restaurant owner Tari Hampe, ``winters are very
slow. We were trying to come up with an idea to increase the weeknight business.
It really started because of the nature of the people who move here--they need
more than a typical small town has to offer.'' And, Hampe adds, because Jeanne
Mozier--resident astrologer, writer, public-relations consultant, and
movie-theater operator--is really into predicting the future.

``We are seven years from the millennium,'' Mozier said. To her, this suggested
a shift from dominance to cooperation, from 1 to 2, male to female, ecological
thinking as opposed to linear. Nineteen ninety-three was a uniquely significant
year because of the coming together of the planets Uranus and Neptune. ``With
these two planets coming together, you are going to get either dissolution or
the blowing apart of the existing form,'' she said. ``This is the time to be
thinking about what's on the other side of this change. We have an
opportunity--a chance to envision the future.''

Each program addressed a specific theme, such as Education 2000, Art 2000, or
West Virginia 2000. Speakers included a professor of education, a local
politician, a massage therapist, a dentist, a homeopath, a public-radio
reporter, and a numerologist.

One of the liveliest discussions focused on West Virginia, which ranks at or
near the bottom nationally by many social and economic measures and suffers from
an image of backwardness, yet attracts people like one couple who moved there
from Colorado because ``it has a rural environment and small communities that
still have the ability to look at the future and plan their own destiny.''

Just what is that destiny? ``The world is going to come to West Virginia,''
predicts poet Pat Love, clad in a red plaid shirt, from his perch on a barstool
in Tari's dining room. ``We have some of the only clean air, clean water left on
the East Coast.'' Love says we all must find solutions to the problems in our
communities--we must find the needs in our communities and take care of them.

As the March winds whistled outside, the amateur futurists brainstorming in the
cozy dining room had no trouble pinpointing either the state's needs or their
potential solutions: better roads, to promote economic development; more
libraries, to promote literacy; a more aggressive and hospitable state film
office, to encourage filmmakers to shoot on location in West Virginia; a
state-of-the-art fiber-optic system to make up for a lag in technology and spur
an economic and educational ``leap''; a consortium of nonprofit organizations to
collaborate on addressing problems such as poverty and environmental
degradation, and provision of sanitary living accommodations for the people who
lack them now; and increased but ``clean'' tourism to add fuel to the economy.

How will all this happen? ``This state can take some of the best ideas and
incorporate them into how we run things,'' says Cecelia Mason, Eastern Panhandle
bureau chief for West Virginia Public Radio. ``If another state has good things,
we can study them and bring them here.''

David Welch, a Berkeley Springs resident who works as a media consultant to
Republican candidates all over the country, thinks part of the answer may lie in
continuing discussions like the ones held last winter. ``While there's a growing
frustration with the political system and those who run it, people are finding
that coming together as ordinary citizens may be a better outlet for their anger
and creativity than writing their congressman,'' he says. ``I think a seed is
being planted (in the discussions), but it may take time to break through the
ground and bear fruit.''