Help me look a step ahead

In that time horizon, I wouldn't be surprised if water shortages make farming uneconomical in parts of the Central Valley. What does unused Californian farmland become? Grassland again? The eventual introduction of high-speed rail may also lead to a widened commuter-shed for California's cities, leading to urban development in current desert or farmland.

My bets are on solar farms - which aren't/won't be limited to deserts (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panoche_Valley_Solar_Farm) and http://www.mercurynews.com/science/ci_22219233/california-releases-first-ever-fracking-regulations.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/94GL00005/full magnet-essential Rare Earth Elements in and around Lake Mono and the other alkaline lakes of the Great Basin-- and the Chinese have already made one attempt to hijack the market.

i drive all the time between orange county and central california. I think about this a lot as the miles tick on by....most of the state is pretty empty, especially further north, and in the many rugged mountainous coastal and desert areas. The easy spots are taken. i think a lot about industrial decay--lots of semi abandoned, paved over areas, full of crumbling buildings, pollutants, etc, left behind as the sprawl moves newer commercial space out. Not all of them can be converted to artsy co-ops or office space, and the information economy (or whatever this is) doesn't need it, or needs more modern facilities. shopping malls, old Mervyn's centers, space all over that is under used or filled by a string of cheap big box stores that come and go. They barely even paint the inside of the old (insert store name here) before they move in. I've seen first hand, an old manufacturing facility demolished one pick-up truck load at a time by metal scavengers while the community tried to figure out who actually owned the land. Nothing happened until they started taking the Rail Road tracks next to it. No one wanted the liability of ownership, the responsibility to clean it up. what happens if X% of the commercial landscape is ditched through shell companies and bad paperwork trails to avoid taxes, toxic chemical cleanup, etc? perhaps eventually parts of the sprawling suburban organism will curve back in, demolish the empty supermalls and turn them into green belts, but they would have to truck in organic soil if they wanted tomatoes. Old farmland is full of chemicals. Old farmland that had industrial space built on it is probably worse. Sometimes i fantasize about getting a couple of hundred people with sledge hammers together to see what the main drag in my hometown would look like with one less giant, empty parking lot.