tag:theconversation.com,2011:/au/topics/future-generations-8589/articlesFuture generations – The Conversation2022-09-18T20:15:12Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1895912022-09-18T20:15:12Z2022-09-18T20:15:12ZWhat do we owe future generations? And what can we do to make their world a better place?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/483125/original/file-20220907-20-kl1u00.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=25%2C0%2C5725%2C3802&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://unsplash.com/photos/iRAvvyWZfZY">Markus Spiske via Unsplash</a>, <a class="license" href="http://artlibre.org/licence/lal/en">FAL</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Your great grandchildren <a href="https://whatweowethefuture.com/">are powerless</a> in today’s society. As Oxford philosopher William MacAskill says:</p>
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<p>They cannot vote or lobby or run for public office, so politicians have scant incentive to think about them. They can’t bargain or trade with us, so they have little representation in the market, And they can’t make their views heard directly: they can’t tweet, or write articles in newspapers, or march in the streets. They are utterly disenfranchised.</p>
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<p>But the things we do now influence them: for better or worse. We make laws that govern them, build infrastructure for them and take out loans for them to pay back. So what happens when we consider future generations while we make decisions today?</p>
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<p><em>Review: What We Owe the Future – William MacAskill (OneWorld)</em></p>
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<p>This is the key question in <a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/au/what-we-owe-the-future-9780861542505/">What We Owe the Future</a>. It argues for what MacAskill calls longtermism: “the idea that positively influencing the longterm future is a key moral priority of our time.” He describes it as an extension of civil rights and women’s suffrage; as humanity marches on, we strive to consider a wider circle of people when making decisions about how to structure our societies.</p>
<p>MacAskill makes a compelling case that we should consider how to ensure a good future not only for our children’s children, but also the children of <em>their</em> children. In short, MacAskill argues that “future people count, there could be a lot of them, and we can make their lives go better.”</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-i-feel-my-heart-breaking-today-a-climate-scientists-path-through-grief-towards-hope-188589">Friday essay: 'I feel my heart breaking today' – a climate scientist's path through grief towards hope</a>
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<h2>Future people count</h2>
<p>It’s hard to feel for future people. We are bad enough at feeling for our future selves. As <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-the-simpsons-are-needed-more-than-ever-in-the-age-of-donald-trump-99330">The Simpsons</a> puts it: “That’s a problem for future Homer. Man, I don’t envy that guy.”</p>
<p>We all know we <em>should</em> protect our health for our own future. In a similar vein, MacAskill argues that we all “know” future people count.</p>
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<p>Concern for future generations is common sense across diverse intellectual traditions […] When we dispose of radioactive waste, we don’t say, “Who cares if this poisons people centuries from now?” </p>
<p>Similarly, few of us who care about climate change or pollution do so solely for the sake of people alive today. We build museums and parks and bridges that we hope will last for generations; we invest in schools and longterm scientific projects; we preserve paintings, traditions, languages; we protect beautiful places.</p>
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<h2>There could be a lot of future people</h2>
<p>Future people count, and MacAskill counts those people. The sheer number of future people might make their wellbeing a key moral priority. According to MacAskill and others, <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/longtermism">humanity’s future could be vast</a>: much, much more than the 8 billion alive today.</p>
<p>While it’s hard to feel the gravitas, our actions may affect a dizzying number of people. Even if we last just 1 million years, as long as the average mammal – and even if the global population fell to 1 billion people – then there would be 9.1 trillion people in the future.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">The future of humanity could be unimaginably large, so those people deserve some moral weight.</span></figcaption>
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<p>We might struggle to care, because these numbers can be hard to <em>feel</em>. Our emotions don’t track well against large numbers. If I said a nuclear war would kill 500 million people, you might see that as a “huge problem”. If I instead said that the number is <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-022-00573-0">actually closer to 5 billion</a>, it still feels like a “huge problem”. It does not emotionally <em>feel</em> 10 times worse. If we risk the trillions of people who could live in the future, that could be 1,000 times worse – but it doesn’t <em>feel</em> 1,000 times worse.</p>
<p>MacAskill does not argue we should give those people 1,000 times more concern than people alive today. Likewise, MacAskill does not say we should morally weight a person living a million years from now exactly the same as someone alive 10 or 100 years from now. Those distinctions won’t change what we can feasibly achieve now, given how hard change can be. </p>
<p>Instead, he shows if we care about future people at all, even those 100 years hence, we should simply be doing <em>more</em>. Fortunately, there are concrete things humanity can do.</p>
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<h2>We can make the lives of future people better</h2>
<p>Another reason we <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0749597818302930">struggle to be motivated</a> by big problems is that they feel insurmountable. This is a particular concern with future generations. Does anything I do make a difference, or is it a drop in the bucket? How do we know what to do when the <a href="https://80000hours.org/articles/cluelessness/">long-run effects are so uncertain</a>?</p>
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<p>Even present-day problems can feel hard to tackle. At least for those problems we can get fast, reliable feedback on progress. Even with that advantage, we struggle. For the second year in a row, we <a href="https://dashboards.sdgindex.org/chapters/executive-summary">did not make progress</a> toward our sustainable development goals, like reducing war, poverty, and increasing growth. Globally, <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/much-better-awful-can-be-better">4.3% of children still</a> die before the age of five. COVID-19 has killed about <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-deaths-cumulative-economist-single-entity?country=%7EOWID_WRL">23 million people</a>. Can we – and should we – justify focusing on future generations when we face these problems now?</p>
<p>MacAskill argues we can. Because the number of people is so large, he also argues we should. He identifies some areas where we could do things that protect the future while also helping people who are alive now. Many solutions are win-win.</p>
<p>For example, the current pandemic has shown that unforeseen events can have a devastating effect. Yet, despite the recent pandemic, many governments have done little to set up more robust systems that could <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22983046/congress-covid-pandemic-prevention">prevent the next pandemic.</a> MacAskill outlines ways in which those future pandemics could be worse.</p>
<p>Most worrying are the threats from engineered pathogens, which </p>
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<p>[…] could be much more destructive than natural pathogens because they can be modified to have dangerous new properties. Could someone design a pathogen with maximum destructive power—something with the lethality of Ebola and the contagiousness of measles? </p>
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<p>He gives examples, like militaries and terrorist groups, that have tried to engineer pathogens in the past.</p>
<p>The risk of an engineered <a href="https://theconversation.com/5-virus-families-that-could-cause-the-next-pandemic-according-to-the-experts-189622">pandemic</a> wiping us all out in the next 100 years is between 0.1% and 3%, according to estimates laid out in the book. </p>
<p>That might sound low, but MacAskill argues we would not step on a plane if you were told “it ‘only’ had a one-in-a-thousand chance of crashing and killing everyone on board”. These threaten not only future generations, but people reading this – and everyone they know.</p>
<p>MacAskill outlines ways in which we might be able to prevent engineered pandemics, like researching better personal protective equipment, cheaper and faster diagnostics, better infrastructure, or better governance of synthetic biology. Doing so would help save the lives of people alive today, reduce the risk of technological stagnation and protect humanity’s future. </p>
<p>The same win-wins might apply to <a href="https://theconversation.com/a-clean-energy-grid-means-10-000km-of-new-transmission-lines-they-can-only-be-built-with-community-backing-187438">decarbonisation</a>, safe development of <a href="https://theconversation.com/irony-machine-why-are-ai-researchers-teaching-computers-to-recognise-irony-185904">artificial intelligence</a>, reducing risks from <a href="https://theconversation.com/are-vladimir-putins-nuclear-threats-a-bluff-in-a-word-probably-187689">nuclear war</a>, and other threats to humanity.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/even-a-limited-nuclear-war-would-starve-millions-of-people-new-study-reveals-188602">Even a 'limited' nuclear war would starve millions of people, new study reveals</a>
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<h2>Things you can do to protect future generations</h2>
<p>Some “longtermist” issues, like climate change, are already firmly in the public consciousness. As a result, some may find MacAskill’s book “common sense”. Others may find the speculation about the far future pretty wild (like <a href="https://www.cold-takes.com/all-possible-views-about-humanitys-future-are-wild/">all possible views</a> of the longterm future).</p>
<p>MacAskill strikes an accessible balance between anchoring the arguments to concrete examples, while making modest extrapolations into the future. He helps us see how “common sense” principles can lead to novel or neglected conclusions. </p>
<p>For example, if there is any moral weight on future people, then many common societal goals (like faster economic growth) are vastly less important than reducing risks of extinction (like nuclear non-proliferation). It makes humanity look like an “imprudent teenager”, with many years ahead, but more power than wisdom:</p>
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<p>Even if you think [the risk of extinction] is only a one-in-a-thousand, the risk to humanity this century is still ten times higher than the risk of your dying this year in a car crash. If humanity is like a teenager, then she is one who speeds around blind corners, drunk, without wearing a seat belt.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Sam Harris talks to William MacAskill about longtermism and effective altruism.</span></figcaption>
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<p>Our biases toward present, local problems are strong, so connecting emotionally with the ideas can be hard. But MacAskill makes a compelling case for longtermism through clear stories and good metaphors. He answers many questions I had about safeguarding the future. Will the future be good or bad? Would it really matter if humanity ended? And, importantly, is there anything I can actually do?</p>
<p>The short answer is yes, there is. Things you might already do help, like minimising your carbon footprint – but MacAskill argues “other things you can do are radically more impactful”. For example, <a href="https://eatforum.org/eat-lancet-commission/eat-lancet-commission-summary-report/">reducing your meat consumption</a> would address climate change, but <a href="https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/cause-areas/long-term-future/climate-change#3-what-are-the-most-effective-charities-and-funds-working-on-climate-change">donating money</a> to the world’s most effective climate charities might be far more effective. </p>
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<p>Beyond donations, three other personal decisions seem particularly high impact to me: political activism, spreading good ideas, and having children […] But by far the most important decision you will make, in terms of your lifetime impact, is your choice of career.</p>
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<p>MacAskill points to a range of resources – many of which he founded – that guide people in these areas. For those who might have flexibility in their career, MacAskill founded <a href="https://80000hours.org/">80,000 Hours</a>, which helps people find impactful, satisfying careers. For those trying to donate more impactfully, he founded <a href="https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/">Giving What We Can.</a> And, for spreading good ideas, he started a social movement called <a href="https://www.effectivealtruism.org/">Effective Altruism</a>.</p>
<p>Longtermism is one of those good ideas. It helps us better place our present in humanity’s bigger story. It’s humbling and inspiring to see the role we can play in protecting the future. We can enjoy life now and safeguard the future for our great grandchildren. MasAskill clearly shows that we owe it to them.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/189591/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Michael Noetel receives funding from the Australian Research Council, National Health and Medical Research Council, the Centre for Effective Altruism, and Sport Australia. He is a Director of Effective Altruism Australia.</span></em></p>Your great grandchildren are powerless in today’s society, but the things we do now influence them, for better or worse. What happens when we consider them while we make decisions today?Michael Noetel, Senior Lecturer in Psychology, Australian Catholic UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1811982022-09-15T11:58:27Z2022-09-15T11:58:27Z‘Too afraid to have kids’ – how BirthStrike for Climate lost control of its political message<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/479875/original/file-20220818-8567-jvy2q9.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=58%2C49%2C2344%2C1415&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Blythe Pepino, founder of BirthStrike, on the Tucker Carlson show.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saXUSm95fiw">YouTube</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In March 2019, Blythe Pepino, singer-songwriter and founder of the environmental activist group BirthStrike for Climate, appeared on the right-wing Tucker Carlson Tonight show <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saXUSm95fiw">on Fox News</a> in the US. </p>
<p>Carlson is a climate change denier, whose fans include Donald Trump and former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. Yet, he started his interview with Pepino with a welcoming tone saying: “This story makes me sad, I don’t wanna attack you, I want to take what you’re saying seriously, but I’m not sure I understand why you’re choosing not to have children, so I would be grateful if you’d tell us.” In her early thirties and smartly turned out, Pepino came across as someone who was pushing back her trepidation to try and convey an important message. She told Carlson:</p>
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<p>BirthStrike isn’t about trying to stop other people from having children … we feel too afraid to have kids because we feel we are heading towards civilisation breakdown as a result of the environmental crisis.</p>
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<p>Carlson – usually known for his confrontational interview style – remained apparently sympathetic, saying her answer was “sadder” than he was expecting. “You’re basically saying the species is over … we should in effect as a group end it, commit suicide?” </p>
<p>For Pepino, sharing her personal feelings about having children and the future they could face was intended to build solidarity and raise awareness. But her campaign raised a lot of people’s hackles and caused a lot of personal strife for her, ultimately leading to burnout and an early end for BirthStrike.</p>
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<p><strong><em>This story is part of Conversation Insights</em></strong>
<br><em>The Insights team generates <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/topics/insights-series-71218">long-form journalism</a> and is working with academics from different backgrounds who have been engaged in projects to tackle societal and scientific challenges.</em></p>
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<p>Looking at the case of BirthStrike offers insights into public conversations about the climate crisis – and how they intersect with personal decision making, representations of women in the media and the thorny topic of how reproduction and environmental concerns might, and might not, be related. While BirthStrike achieved wide media coverage, we were in the privileged position to carry out in-depth research with members of the group, including Pepino. </p>
<p>What we found offers a salutary lesson about how core messages and themes can be misconstrued and misunderstood when put through a high-profile media lens. What we describe here centres on Pepino’s account, as a founder of the group and who we got to know over the course of our research. But our experience of researching and speaking with people about BirthStrike has made it clear that many accounts exist; many stories could be told and landing on a single or complete take on what BirthStrike was, meant, or achieved is not possible.</p>
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<iframe id="noa-web-audio-player" style="border: none" src="https://embed-player.newsoveraudio.com/v4?key=x84olp&id=https://theconversation.com/too-afraid-to-have-kids-how-birthstrike-for-climate-lost-control-of-its-political-message-181198&bgColor=F5F5F5&color=D8352A&playColor=D8352A" width="100%" height="110px"></iframe>
<p><em>You can listen to more articles from The Conversation, narrated by Noa, <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/topics/audio-narrated-99682">here</a>.</em></p>
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<h2>What was BirthStrike?</h2>
<p>BirthStrike was founded by Pepino in the UK, but was open to people around the world. Pepino is a singer-songwriter who has experienced popularity and acclaim as part of the band <a href="http://www.entervaults.com/">Vaults</a>, whose music appeared on the soundtracks of the film <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2322441/soundtrack">Fifty Shades of Grey</a> and a <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/news/john-lewis-christmas-advert-2016-song-cover-vaults-one-day-i-ll-fly-away-moulin-rouge-a7402706.html">John Lewis Christmas advert</a>. She now fronts the band <a href="https://www.babylegsrecords.com/mesadorm">Mesadorm</a>.</p>
<p>Birthstrike sought to draw attention to the severity of the existential threats of climate change through public discussions about how they would affect future generations. It curated video and written testimonials on its website and social media so people could share their personal concerns about having children in the climate crisis, while Birthstrike activists attended demonstrations, rallies and other climate-related events.</p>
<p>Pepino carefully explained her fear about the likely effects of the climate crisis and the need for people to come together to try and prevent it becoming worse through demanding government action and corporate accountability. </p>
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<p>This conversation about how reproductive decision making might be entwined with anxieties about the future of humans on a warming planet has come to the fore in recent years. One well-known example is an <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-children-climate-change-aoc-instagram-young-people-a8797806.html">Instagram video</a> in which American congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez says: “There’s scientific consensus that the lives of children are going to be very difficult. And it does lead young people to have a legitimate question: Is it OK to still have children?” </p>
<p>BirthStrike aimed to provide a space for people – most, but certainly not all of whom, were younger women – to share and express their concerns about their future children’s lives in a world with an irrevocably changed climate. Pepino told us:</p>
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<p>When I’m afraid of something, where I want to change something, I think about how can I make this into a piece of theatre? Or how do I communicate this by song? Or … how can I communicate and connect with people around this and do something? </p>
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<p>We carried out <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01459740.2022.2083510">in-depth interviews</a> with 16 members of BirthStrike and the similar climate activist groups, <a href="https://conceivablefuture.org/">Conceivable Future</a>, based in the US, and No Future No Children, based in Canada, as well as others with related concerns to talk about their thoughts and decision making when it came to having children during the climate crisis. We analysed media coverage and 164 testimonials on the collectives websites – all of which centre on the idea that children born today will have very difficult lives. For the people involved in these campaigns, this is both a source of personal grief and a motivation for activism to halt the climate crisis. </p>
<p>BirthStrike fascinates us as researchers because it was an activist intervention that mobilised powerful “normal” ideas, such as the desire to have children, and which capitalised on the privileged idea that, if young articulate women expressed fear about bringing children into the world, this would be sufficiently alarming to galvanise broader action. </p>
<p>Yet at the same time, it sought to effect radical ends and Pepino and the other leaders of BirthStrike genuinely wished to work towards a world in which everyone felt safe enough to enjoy family life. In this way, it was progressive and problematic at the same time. </p>
<h2>Sounding the alarm</h2>
<p>We first met Pepino in 2019 and have interviewed her several times since. We have found her to be an intelligent and articulate person who thinks seriously about issues, but also has a keen sense of fun. Drinking coffee in the sunny kitchen of her rented house in east London during the summer of 2021, we asked her to reflect on the story of BirthStrike.</p>
<p>In 2019, she was living in Stroud, a rural town in south-west England with a long history of involvement in the environmental movement. Attending an Extinction Rebellion (XR) seminar and reading <a href="https://unfccc.int/topics/science/workstreams/cooperation-with-the-ipcc/ipcc-special-report-on-global-warming-of-15-degc">the IPCC’s 2018 report</a> led her to “wake up” to the existential threats of climate change. She knew she needed to do something and an idea occurred to her, which became BirthStrike. </p>
<p>She started to discuss her fears about the existential threats of climate change with friends and members of XR, and her particular concerns about the future of any children she might have. She said:</p>
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<p>The impression I got [from others] was, ‘I’ve been thinking about this, I don’t know how to speak about it because it seems really taboo and almost too scary for me to say out loud’.</p>
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<p>In our conversations, Pepino has reflected several times on how meeting her partner Josh had led to a profound conviction that she would like to have children with him. Yet, her deeper understanding of the climate crisis threw this into disarray. Like the other members of BirthStrike who joined her, she wondered how she could possibly bring children into a world facing ecological collapse. Another research participant described her feelings about finding BirthStrike like this:</p>
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<p>It was quite empowering to come across BirthStrike, because it felt like going out and talking about it was another form of protest … It’s sounding the alarm and saying ‘this is how bad it is’ … saying that ‘I’m too scared about this exact same society that you’re living in, to have children in it’ … On some level I hope it might wake somebody up. I mean, that’s kind of why I do it.</p>
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<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1102521679887052800"}"></div></p>
<p>In 2015, Pepino was involved in the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMYadSJmJxQ">Each Body’s Ready</a> campaign against a notorious Protein World advert that many <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/apr/28/beach-body-ready-tube-ad-protest-protein-world">criticised</a> for being sexist and body-shaming. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/thank-you-bikini-terrorists-for-moving-us-on-from-throwback-diet-ads-now-eachbodysready-40973">Thank you bikini terrorists for moving us on from throwback diet ads – now #eachbodysready</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>She drew on this and her experience in the music industry when she decided in 2019 that she needed to spread the message about the climate crisis to the general public. The aim was to spark conversations and use her own (in her words) privileged status as a middle-class white woman to “pull everyone in” and provoke “fast change”. She told us:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Those are the people I was trying to get to, the privileged community. The point of BirthStrike in a way, was to get to those people, and I was most happy when we were in <a href="https://www.cosmopolitan.com/uk/reports/a37446765/climate-anxiety/">Cosmopolitan</a>, when we were in those kinds of magazines, where we would be talking to people who were still in that dream of like, ‘everything’s cool … the world’s really nice’, you know? </p>
</blockquote>
<p>One of the aspects of the climate crisis that particularly concerned her, as she tried to explain to Carlson, is the political inertia and mismanagement of environmental threats that has led to climate change being a present reality rather than a future threat. </p>
<p>She wanted to spread the message – and, perhaps, some of the fear that she felt – in order to persuade others to unite to pressure governments and corporations to act to prevent the worst predictions coming true. Though, as she later acknowledged to us, she became increasingly unconvinced that many journalists were understanding the nuance of her argument.</p>
<h2>An epiphany?</h2>
<p>At one point in his interview, Carlson suggested Pepino had had something akin to a religious conversion, and in some ways it is an apt comparison. The story she tells of her awakening to the existential threats of climate change does sound like an epiphany – it was a point of no return where she could no longer un-see the realities of the climate crisis, and felt compelled to warn others. </p>
<p>The 2021 Netflix film <a href="https://www.netflix.com/dk-en/title/81252357">Don’t Look Up</a> has been read as an analogy for inertia about the climate crisis. In the movie, PhD candidate Kate Dibiasky (played by Jennifer Lawrence) discovers an enormous comet headed for a collision course with the Earth. Along with her PhD adviser, Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio), she tries to convince the world of the threat that the comet poses for life on Earth while there might still be time to avert its course. They appear on television breakfast show, the Daily Rip, where the frivolous, and scientifically illiterate, treatment of their message by the show’s hosts infuriates Kate to the point where she screams, “we’re all going to die!”, only to be discredited on social media as a hysterical lunatic.</p>
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<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/RbIxYm3mKzI?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
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<p>Watching Don’t Look Up, and the character of Dibiasky in particular, reminded us of Pepino and the struggle she had to be taken seriously as a conveyor of a very serious message. Both she and Kate were cropped-fringed Cassandras, trying to convince the world of an existential threat that was incontrovertibly supported by <a href="https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg2/">scientific data</a>. </p>
<h2>Losing control of the message</h2>
<p>While Pepino and other spokespeople for BirthStrike consistently emphasised that they had no intention to tell people what to do, this was often how their message was interpreted. Pepino told us how the media “ended up talking about population numbers a lot” and “constantly referring to fertility rates” which she felt undermined their call for system change.</p>
<p>This interpretation can be attributed to two existing narratives about climate change. The first of these is a “<a href="https://www.reference.com/world-view/definition-neo-malthusian-theory-3015a8d65f028b9e">neo-Malthusian</a>” argument that people should have fewer children because a growing human population contributes to carbon emissions. The second one is that people should take personal actions to mitigate their own impact on the environment. Both of these arguments, which were officially disavowed by BirthStrike, have been criticised: the first for ignoring the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/02/17/eugenics-is-trending-thats-problem/">insidious history</a> of population control, from mass murder during the Holocaust to compulsory sterilization in India in the 1970s and China’s one-child policy. It has been used to justify curtailing the sexual, reproductive and human rights of people on the grounds of race, people on low incomes, people with disabilities and people with diverse gender and sexual identities. The second argument has been criticised for deflecting responsibility away from corporations and governments which hold <a href="https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220504-why-the-wrong-people-are-blamed-for-climate-change">far greater responsibility</a> – and power – to prevent climate change than individuals. Pepino said:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I knew right from the beginning that population was going to be an issue … So the name BirthStrike, I think, triggered a lot of populationism, essentially, in people’s brains most of the time. So whenever people did read pieces on us, unless it categorically was all about the fact that we weren’t doing a population thing, then it would often be misconstrued as a population thing.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>She noted that some journalists didn’t know about the history of population control. Because of this, they didn’t understand the potential danger of inciting ideas about <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-we-should-be-wary-of-blaming-overpopulation-for-the-climate-crisis-130709">overpopulation</a>. </p>
<p>In reality there is clear evidence which shows that global human population is not increasing exponentially, but is <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/health-53409521">in fact slowing</a> and is predicted to stabilise at around 11 billion by 2100. It could be argued that focusing on human numbers obscures the true driver of climate change – modern capitalism’s focus on endless growth and profit accumulation. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/why-we-should-be-wary-of-blaming-overpopulation-for-the-climate-crisis-130709">Why we should be wary of blaming 'overpopulation' for the climate crisis</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>The danger that Pepino described reached its grim nadir in recent <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/may/17/buffalo-shooting-suspect-eco-fascism">mass killings</a> by eco-fascists, animated by the “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/08/a-deadly-ideology-how-the-great-replacement-theory-went-mainstream">Great Replacement</a>” theory (which has repeatedly been pushed by Carlson). The theory is predicated on the premise that white Americans and Europeans are being actively “replaced” by immigrants of colour.</p>
<p>Another problem for the BirthStrike campaign was that sex and reproduction are usually thought of as private matters, so many were confused about the link that Pepino and others were making between their personal feelings and decisions and their political demand for systemic change to address the climate crisis. We are used to hearing about how we should care for the environment and reading lists of tips about how to reduce our carbon footprint, so it’s not surprising that many heard BirthStrike as an instruction not to have children in order to save the planet. </p>
<p>Sex and reproduction are still in many ways taboo subjects and many, especially those who are more conservative, do not want to hear about them in the media. Childlessness is also stigmatised, especially for women, while declining birth rates are causing some <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-55226098;%20https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-46558562">governments</a> and <a href="https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2021/07/baby-bust-how-declining-birth-rate-will-reshape-world">public</a> <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/03/27/do-it-for-denmark-campaign-wants-danes-to-have-more-sex-a-lot-more-sex/">commentators</a> to panic about ageing societies and the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/11/16/opinion/sunday/capitalism-children.html">future of humanity</a>. </p>
<p>Carlson, who is married to his boarding school sweetheart and has four children, ended his interview with some paternalistic counsel, remarking:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It’s a bit early for me to be giving you advice, but I just wanna end with this: I think you should have children, I think they solve a lot of problems, put things in perspective. You seem like a nice person …</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Carlson claimed to be taking Pepino’s concerns seriously though, like other rightwing commentators who discredited BirthStrike as just another example of “<a href="https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/stephen-kruiser/2019/03/23/birthstrike-movement-fights-climate-change-by-not-having-babies-or-something-n64547">climate hysteria</a>”, he framed this in terms of her personal feelings rather than her political opinion. His comment, “you seem like a nice person”, while apparently friendly, also implies a judgement about what “kind” of person should reproduce.</p>
<p>Pepino recognised that she was unsettling deeply held ideas about what <a href="https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691167480/making-a-good-life">makes a “good life”</a>. She said:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It’s critiquing the very pro-natalist aspect of our society and how we’re led to believe that children equals good … I suppose we were playing with the shock element of disagreeing with that in order to show how fucked up things are, basically.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Carlson has a history of <a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/2021-fox-news-still-spreading-dangerous-climate-denial">pushing climate denialism</a> and, during the interview, he made several attempts to reposition Pepino’s specific focus on climate change towards a narrative of the fall of western “civilisation” and political influence. Pepino had mentioned “civilisational collapse” as a likely outcome of the climate crisis and he picked up on this to suggest that her argument was that, “the species is over, we should effectively as a group commit suicide”. This kind of misanthropic argument has been rejected by Pepino, as it can invoke apathy and a sense of doom that can paralyse activism – precisely the opposite of what she was aiming to do with BirthStrike.</p>
<p>BirthStrike suffered a problem of representation – both in terms of who and what people understood the movement to be, and in how their message was interpreted and represented to the public by journalists. This is illustrated by the Carlson interview, but also by subtler approaches, such as frequently pairing BirthStrike with campaigners who are focused on “overpopulation” in <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2019/06/05/health/birthstrike-climate-change-scn-intl/index.html">articles</a> and <a href="https://www.battleofideas.org.uk/2019/session/the-battle-over-birth/">panel debates</a>. Or misrepresenting BirthStrike as only including <a href="https://www1.cbn.com/cbnnews/cwn/2019/march/scared-of-the-potential-danger-to-the-planet-some-british-women-go-on-birthstrike-nbsp">women</a>, or conflating BirthStrike’s specific argument with a generalised <a href="https://www.spiked-online.com/2019/08/02/the-turn-against-motherhood/">misanthropy</a> or <a href="https://quillette.com/2021/01/20/birthstrike-the-movement-to-end-all-movements/">anti-natalism</a>.</p>
<p>Conservative commentators like Carlson clearly have a reason to downplay or reframe such unambiguous messages about the existential threats of climate crisis, yet even for those who are more sympathetic to Pepino’s point of view, the message of existential threat is very troubling to hear. Indeed, Pepino’s own sense of despair when she realised the potential effects of climate change was precisely what led her to question whether having children was the right thing to do. When she read the <a href="https://unfccc.int/topics/science/workstreams/cooperation-with-the-ipcc/ipcc-special-report-on-global-warming-of-15-degc">2018 IPCC report</a> and attended her first XR seminar, she said she felt that: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>… a lot of the fears I’d had about climate change and, and the environment and how humans treat the world were essentially coming true … and so I became sort of addicted to the idea of telling the truth [about the climate].</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Whose reproduction is newsworthy?</h2>
<p>Importantly, the critique of BirthStrike didn’t only come from the right. When we have told people about <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01459740.2022.2083510">our research</a> on this movement, those on the left sometimes dismiss those involved in BirthStrike and groups like it as just being “privileged” white, middle-class women who are demonstrating a sense of entitlement. In other words, why should anyone would care whether they have children or not? </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Protestors holding signs and banners and wearing covid-19 masks and school uniforms." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/479891/original/file-20220818-2226-al5pgb.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/479891/original/file-20220818-2226-al5pgb.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/479891/original/file-20220818-2226-al5pgb.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/479891/original/file-20220818-2226-al5pgb.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/479891/original/file-20220818-2226-al5pgb.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/479891/original/file-20220818-2226-al5pgb.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/479891/original/file-20220818-2226-al5pgb.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A group of student protesters striking for climate change action in Melbourne, Australia, in May 2021.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/melbourne-victoria-australia-may-21-2021-1978126466">Shutterstock/Christie Cooper</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This critique is a generalisation, of course – not everyone involved in BirthStrike fits this characterisation and Pepino herself deliberately tried to leverage her position as a white middle-class woman (and as someone with a media profile) to effect progressive goals. Nonetheless, it is crucial to recognise that, throughout history, some people’s reproductive decisions have been more respected and supported than others and that this tends to reflect how people are categorised by race, class, disability, gender and sexuality.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/its-a-national-crisis-uks-birth-rate-is-falling-dramatically-121399">'It's a national crisis': UK's birth rate is falling dramatically</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>As <a href="https://zora.medium.com/sorry-yall-but-climate-change-ain-t-the-first-existential-threat-b3c999267aa0">some commentators</a> have also pointed out, many people in marginalised groups and throughout history have experienced existential threat. So the idea of climate change’s threat to survival being a wake-up call reflects the relative privilege of those involved in the campaign.</p>
<p>As the campaign grew, the leadership expanded. Jessica Gaitán Johannesson became more involved in leading the group, and became co-founder. Johannesson is a writer, who published <a href="https://scribepublications.co.uk/books-authors/books/the-nerves-and-their-endings-9781913348656">a collection</a> of essays related to climate and responsibility, including one about her involvement in BirthStrike and her perspective as a queer woman of colour. </p>
<p>Reflecting on the experience Johannesson wrote: “Running BirthStrike taught me that using birth as a political tool, in a society that only sees individual choices and not the context in which they’re made, nor the incredible injustice surrounding them, inevitably leads to judgment. In a society mired in racism and exploitation, this is dangerous: whose children are deemed desirable? Who should be having fewer? It was a difficult lesson to learn in many ways, but one I’m also grateful for.” </p>
<h2>Burnout: the end of BirthStrike</h2>
<p>Ultimately, in the summer of 2021, the leadership of BirthStrike decided to disband the campaign and propose rerouting members towards a private group in which they could share their feelings and gain support, instead of an explicitly political campaign.</p>
<p>During 2020 and 2021, Pepino had conversations with her partner about the “political danger”, as he saw it, of getting involved in the population debate. She also asked for advice from researchers (including us) about why BirthStrike was being misrepresented as a campaign to tell people to have fewer children to reduce their carbon footprint. Further reflecting on this, Pepino said “the whole conversation about population is just inappropriate right now because we are too immature to have the conversation … We haven’t done our homework. We haven’t cooperated, we haven’t evened things out, we’ve not accounted for wealth inequality”.</p>
<p>It is no coincidence that this realisation about the political dangers of the campaign came at the same time in which people in the UK, US and all around the world were coming to recognise the true <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/george-floyd-black-lives-matter-impact/">scale</a> of racism and inequality in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and the disproportionate effects of the pandemic on <a href="https://www-ncbi-nlm-nih-gov.ezp.lib.cam.ac.uk/pmc/articles/PMC7211498/">racialised groups</a>.</p>
<p>This is apparent in the statement that BirthStrike released announcing its decision to end the campaign, which described how months of reflection and the public conversations about racial and social justice sparked by the Black Lives Matter movement had led to an understanding that it would be “dangerous” to continue in the same vein. </p>
<p>In the public announcement the group named the “flaws” in the campaign. First, they attributed the name itself, BirthStrike, to their being aligned with the neo-Malthusian argument that more children means a bigger carbon footprint. The statement continued:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Witnessing the loss of control of our narrative has been very distressing and humbling. We have to concede that we underestimated the power of ‘overpopulation’ as a growing form of climate breakdown denial – even in some of our most revered scientists and fellow climate activists.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The announcement reflected the intense consideration and reflection that Pepino and others put into BirthStrike and its future, as well as the importance of understanding the histories of previous activism around reproductive rights and environmental justice when starting a new campaign. </p>
<p>So, why did BirthStrike come to an end? As well as the leaders’ own sense of it having become dangerous, the fundamental problem for BirthStrike was the tension between individual reproductive decision making and the much broader “ask” of rapid structural change from governments and corporations to arrest the climate crisis. This tension ultimately confused their message. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/czZIYN51DiQ?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>The wide audience that BirthStrike were trying to reach found it hard to hear the message about the existential threats of climate change. Pepino aimed to raise the alarm but, for many, it was just too alarming. As she told us:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I think a lot of those [media] interviews, not only was it a prism of their not really understanding, but it was also a real inability to connect with the full emotional truth of what’s happening.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The implication of this message, that individual actions will not solve the crisis, also exacerbated the anxiety and uncertainty of this historical moment. Nonetheless, along with other contemporary social movements, BirthStrike did open up a space for discussion and provide a forum for people to discuss their concerns about having children in a warming world. Reflecting on this after the disbanding of BirthStrike in 2021, Pepino told us:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I’m still worried that its overall effect has been to amplify populationism as a topic, essentially … Then again, it did give a lot of the people who joined a sense of community … which was really useful, I think, for a lot of people who were really struggling at that time.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Historically, climate activism has focused on extreme weather events and their consequences. But the environmental crisis is also bound up with how people think about the future and what kind of world they want to live in. For many, this prompts thoughts about future generations – whether their own children, or a more generalised sense of people who will be born in coming decades, as well as the kinds of responsibilities that current generations bear towards them. Yet, attempts to appeal to apparently universal values, like women’s desire to be mothers, are tricky because they can reinforce norms of gender, family and sexuality. </p>
<p>Pepino has never completely discounted the idea of ever having children but recognised she needed to slow down and take care. She reflected:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I realised I was burnt out. I had a lot of health issues that I needed to look at … As a sensitive, artistic human, essentially, I could pretend to be that person for a bit. But I’ve given up on abusing my mind and my body to the point where I can be someone else, because I saw the road and the road was ill health.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The short history of BirthStrike shows that raising the alarm can be galvanising for some, but paralysing for others. Similarly, eye-catching demands can succeed in grabbing attention, including that of those who are not normally interested in these topics, but this can come at the cost of losing control of the political message. Because of the flaws in the campaign, the message about the existential threats of climate change and the likely unstable future of children born today often went unheard. </p>
<hr>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/313478/original/file-20200204-41481-1n8vco4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/313478/original/file-20200204-41481-1n8vco4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=112&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/313478/original/file-20200204-41481-1n8vco4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=112&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/313478/original/file-20200204-41481-1n8vco4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=112&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/313478/original/file-20200204-41481-1n8vco4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=140&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/313478/original/file-20200204-41481-1n8vco4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=140&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/313478/original/file-20200204-41481-1n8vco4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=140&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p><a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/social-media-and-society-125586" target="_blank"><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/479539/original/file-20220817-20-g5jxhm.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=144&fit=crop&dpr=1" width="100%"></a></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/181198/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Katharine Dow receives research funding from the Wellcome Trust. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Heather McMullen does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>BirthStrike offers a salutary lesson about how core messages can be misconstrued and misunderstood when put through a high-profile media lens.Katharine Dow, Senior Research Associate, Department of Sociology and Deputy Director of the Reproductive Sociology Research Group, University of CambridgeHeather McMullen, Lecturer, Centre for Public Health & Policy, Queen Mary University of LondonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1489472020-12-31T11:01:34Z2020-12-31T11:01:34ZHow to create a government that considers future generations<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/373329/original/file-20201207-23-11sibwx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/young-girl-holding-earth-her-hands-20797684">Kameel4u/Shutterstock.com</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>This year – 2020 – has been shocking. If I try to find a silver lining, I think it might be this – that finally, the need for effective planning to address long-term problems has come under the spotlight around the world. </p>
<p>A pandemic planning committee <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/06/13/boris-johnson-scrapped-cabinet-pandemic-committee-six-months/">had been scrapped</a> six months before coronavirus hit the UK – despite the fact that the threat from a pandemic had been known for some time. Similarly, an <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/03/trump-scrapped-pandemic-early-warning-program-system-before-coronavirus">early warning programme</a> to alert the government in the United States to pandemics was ended three months before COVID-19 began infecting people in China. Presumably lessons will be learned here.</p>
<p>The response to the COVID-19 pandemic has consumed political and media attention. But there are other long-term crises on the horizon that have had equally insufficient long-term planning. Many believe that democratic politics is too myopic: the horizons of politicians are restricted to the next election. I agree: short-termism in governance needs to be urgently addressed. </p>
<p>As we career towards escalating climate and biodiversity crises, interest has increased in what we can learn from examples of sustainable living, particularly from indigenous communities. For example, Iroquois philosophy, contains the “seventh generation principle”: the impact of any decision must be considered in the context of the next seven generations. </p>
<h2>Legislating sustainability</h2>
<p>In Wales, this ancient wisdom has been turned into legislation. It is the only nation in the world in which the need to protect future generations is embedded into law, and it has made sustainable development the organising principle of government. This means that the needs of the present should be met without compromising the needs of future generations. </p>
<p>The UN has described the <a href="https://www.legislation.gov.uk/anaw/2015/2/contents/enacted">Wellbeing of Future Generations (Wales) Act</a>, which was introduced in 2015, as <a href="https://www.futuregenerations.wales/making-it-happen/international/">world-leading</a>. The act, which I recently published <a href="https://northumbriajournals.co.uk/index.php/ijcle/article/view/1040">research</a> on, requires all 44 public bodies in Wales to work towards seven goals:</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/366730/original/file-20201030-17-1uo2l8n.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/366730/original/file-20201030-17-1uo2l8n.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=604&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/366730/original/file-20201030-17-1uo2l8n.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=604&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/366730/original/file-20201030-17-1uo2l8n.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=604&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/366730/original/file-20201030-17-1uo2l8n.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=759&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/366730/original/file-20201030-17-1uo2l8n.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=759&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/366730/original/file-20201030-17-1uo2l8n.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=759&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">The seven Welsh wellbeing goals.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Richard Owen.</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
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<p>Frustrated sustainability champions, who want to see change, can use the act as the support and permission they need to challenge the system. The sustainable development principle requires public bodies to work collaboratively, and listen to what people say. This has led to <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-south-west-wales-40972621">revised local wellbeing plans</a> where, for example, poor public transport is seen as fuelling poverty. </p>
<p>The Welsh government and public bodies can be held to account if they fail to comply with the sustainable development principle. A post – the <a href="https://www.futuregenerations.wales/">future generations commissioner for Wales</a> – has been created. This person – currently Sophie Howe – has statutory powers and is independent of government. She has “name and shame” powers to challenge unsustainable practice. </p>
<p>In 2019, she worked with civil society and used her influence to prevent a planned motorway being built. The Welsh government decided to <a href="https://gov.wales/sites/default/files/publications/2019-06/m4-corridor-around-newport-decision-letter.pdf">reject</a> it on grounds of both cost and the environment. </p>
<h2>Other approaches</h2>
<p>Some other countries have also introduced a longer term perspective to policy making. For example, Hungary introduced a commissioner for future generations in 2008. However, the commissioner’s powers were <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/322878298_Representation_of_Future_Generations_in_United_Kingdom_Policy-Making">later reduced</a>, probably because the commissioner intervened in over 200 cases a year.</p>
<p>Singapore’s approach has been to develop a government agency, the <a href="https://www.csf.gov.sg/who-we-are/">Centre for Strategic Issues</a>. It identifies whole-of-government priorities early, strengthens coordination across ministries and agencies to address these priorities, and translates them into policy plans. </p>
<p>The United Arab Emirates, meanwhile, have established a <a href="https://u.ae/en/about-the-uae/the-uae-government/ministry-of-possibilities">Ministry of Possibilities</a>. This is a virtual ministry which applies design-thinking and experimentation to develop new solutions to tackle critical issues. </p>
<p>And Finland has taken the approach of enhanced parliamentary scrutiny. Its <a href="https://www.eduskunta.fi/EN/valiokunnat/tulevaisuusvaliokunta/Pages/default.aspx">Committee for the Future</a>, was established in the 1990s. The Finnish <a href="https://vnk.fi/en/government-report-on-the-future">government</a> and parliament recognise complex issues at an early stage. They devise different alternative policies collaboratively while they are still under development. This is known as forward-looking scrutiny. Instead of parliamentary scrutiny of decisions which have already been taken, parliament scrutinises governmental plans for the future. </p>
<p>Other countries have taken participatory approaches. Scotland’s <a href="https://www.scotlandfutureforum.org/">Futures Forum</a> is a channel for public engagement with the Scottish Parliament by encouraging dialogue on long-term issues. The <a href="https://www.climateassembly.uk/">United Kingdom</a>, <a href="https://www.citizensassembly.ie/en/">Ireland</a> and <a href="https://www.conventioncitoyennepourleclimat.fr/">France</a> have used citizens’ assemblies. The assemblies in Ireland are considered to have been successful in developing a broad consensus in changing the law on abortion and same sex marriage. </p>
<p>Another approach has seen attempts to pivot the management of the economy away from a focus on GDP to instead consider a wider range of wellbeing objectives. New Zealand has adopted a <a href="https://www.treasury.govt.nz/sites/default/files/2019-05/b19-wellbeing-budget.pdf">Wellbeing Budget</a> with five priority areas.</p>
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<h2>Enforcing sustainability law</h2>
<p>So has all this had any tangible effects? The Welsh Wellbeing of Future Generations Act has led to behavioural change in policy. <a href="https://gov.wales/sites/default/files/publications/2018-12/planning-policy-wales-edition-10.pdf">Planning</a>, for example, has been strongly influenced by sustainability issues. Under new laws influenced by the act, people can <a href="https://gov.wales/one-planet-development-practice-guidance">circumvent tight planning</a> rules so long as they build an eco-home in the countryside and live sustainably off the land on which it sits.</p>
<p>But it has found less favour in the courts. In 2019, a high court judge <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-48272470">described</a> it as “vague, general and aspirational”. A <a href="https://services.parliament.uk/bills/2019-19/wellbeingoffuturegenerations.html">UK Future Generations Bill</a> currently before the UK parliament, which has been strongly influenced by the Welsh model, has stronger enforcement mechanisms. </p>
<p>But there may be advantages to the current weak enforcement mechanisms in the Welsh Act. Israel had a <a href="http://www.fdsd.org/ideas/knesset-commission-future-generations/">Commission for Future Generation</a> with an “effective veto” on legislation, but it was disestablished in 2016. As in Hungary, its wide-ranging powers may have been a factor in its demise. The situation in Wales may be transitional. Stronger powers may follow when the act is better established.</p>
<p>Current international crises have shown the need for long-term planning and the need to change political systems to better achieve this. Although there are different approaches to long-term planning across the world, the Welsh model is currently the most comprehensive and integrated. This is not to say that it cannot learn and be influenced by other approaches: it is actively seeking to do so.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/148947/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Richard Owen is a member of its Access to Justice Committee of the Law Society of England and Wales. He is a trustee of Hafal, the mental health charity; Chair of the Swansea Neath Port Talbot Regional Advice Network Steering Group, and a member of the LawWorks Cymru Advisory Group. All opinions expressed in this article are his own. </span></em></p>What the world can learn from Wales, the first place where sustainability is the organising principle of government, as well as what Wales is learning from the world about sustainability.Richard Owen, Professor in Legal Studies, Swansea UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1373702020-05-20T12:10:55Z2020-05-20T12:10:55ZAs collective memory fades, so will our ability to prepare for the next pandemic<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/336192/original/file-20200519-152298-1csozq4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=11%2C45%2C3766%2C2633&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">It takes roughly 90 years for the living memory of an event to disappear.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Virus-Outbreak-New-York/624d81c36ec74acd823fbf3963993928/17/0">Anurag Papolu/The Conversation via AP Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Just below the Japanese village of Aneyoshi, there’s a stone <a href="https://www.amusingplanet.com/2015/03/ancient-tsunami-warnings-carved-in.html">carved with a warning</a>: “Remember the calamity of the great tsunamis. Do not build any homes below this point.” </p>
<p>Placed there after a tsunami devastated the area in 1933, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/21/world/asia/21stones.html">it helped those who listened to it</a> remain safe from a similar disaster in 2011, almost 80 years later. </p>
<p>When the last wave of the coronavirus recedes, what kind of guide stone will exist for future generations? </p>
<p>This question is not just about recording history for history’s sake. <a href="https://www.seandonahue.org/about-me">As a political philosopher</a>, I see it addressing an ancient problem of my field: how to ensure societies remain stable over time. Tangible reminders – anything from stone tablets to digital artifacts storing information about an event – help <a href="https://cultureanddisaster.eu/handbook/1.3-role-memories-disaster">sustain collective memory of risk</a>.</p>
<p>However, the global scope and relative infrequency of pandemics like the coronavirus make them especially challenging to collectively remember. </p>
<h2>Burdens of bias</h2>
<p>An <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/coronavirus-pandemic-journals-letters-history-social-media-a9468136.html">unprecedented effort</a> is underway to fill vast digital archives with information related to the pandemic. Researchers at the University of Arizona, for example, have started a project called <a href="https://covid19.omeka.net/about">A Journal of the Plague Year: An Archive of Covid-19</a> that invites the public to contribute everything from personal videos to Instagram posts and internet memes about life during the coronavirus.</p>
<p>But simply storing information in a repository isn’t enough; people will neither be able to access nor interpret it without the proper social and technological infrastructure. </p>
<p>For a reminder to be truly effective, huge swaths of the population must recognize the risk and be able to adequately prepare. </p>
<p>Motivating people to achieve this latter aim is the biggest challenge. We are <a href="https://theconversation.com/in-battling-the-coronavirus-will-optimistic-bias-be-our-undoing-134476">biased in many ways</a> toward our personal experience, and we tend to underestimate or dismiss risks unless we encounter them firsthand. </p>
<p>Take the town of Eilenburg, Germany, which sits along the Mulde River. Residents had lived through many small floods, so they knew that water posed a hazard. They were nonetheless unprepared when, in 2002, a flood event of a kind that hits Europe <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/whats-with-the-weird-weather/">about once every 100 years</a> inundated the town. Because the smaller floods hadn’t been a big deal, they had <a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-008-9277-8">a warped understanding of the true risk of a major flood</a>. Many consequently doubted official warnings that the river was about to rise as high as it did. The same pattern of bias <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijdrr.2017.03.006">has been observed</a> in other disasters, such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/336194/original/file-20200519-152288-1uguph6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/336194/original/file-20200519-152288-1uguph6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=397&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/336194/original/file-20200519-152288-1uguph6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=397&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/336194/original/file-20200519-152288-1uguph6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=397&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/336194/original/file-20200519-152288-1uguph6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=499&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/336194/original/file-20200519-152288-1uguph6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=499&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/336194/original/file-20200519-152288-1uguph6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=499&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Unless you’ve experienced something firsthand, you tend to underestimate the risk.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Virus-Outbreak-New-York/0ca2a09e3de04103a9df937e809dffc3/129/0">Anurag Papolu/The Conversation via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
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<p>Challenges from this bias grow over time. All events eventually disappear from living memory – a process that takes about 90 years. Once this happens, later generations have fewer opportunities to have compelling conversations with eyewitnesses. These interactions <a href="https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2019/04/17/memories-of-disaster-fade-fast">are important motivators</a> for taking the threat of recurrence seriously. The disappearance of vivid personal memories of polio, whooping cough and measles <a href="https://www.living101.com/could-memory-play-a-key-role-in-the-anti-vaxxer-movement/">has plausibly contributed</a> to the rise of anti-vaccination sentiment, in spite of the well-documented danger of these diseases. </p>
<h2>Challenges from technology</h2>
<p>Perhaps bias can be overcome to some extent through technology. Watching videos of life in quarantine or interviews of those impacted by the coronavirus is the closest that future generations can get to experiencing the pandemic firsthand or having conversations with those who did.</p>
<p>But video and other media ultimately don’t provide conversation – only monologue. There were <a href="https://www.c-span.org/video/?458811-1/we-heard-bells-influenza-1918">videos of eyewitness testimony</a> and <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/journal-plague-year-180965222/">prudent accounts from historians</a> about the last comparable global pandemic, the 1918 Spanish Flu. And yet tangible reminders like these do not seem to have caused the public to form an accurate perception of risk. </p>
<p>Counterintuitively, technology can interfere with this effort. Digital media makes <a href="https://www.politico.eu/article/coronavirus-fake-news-fact-checkers-google-facebook-germany-spain-bosnia-brazil-united-states/">spreading</a> misinformation <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/08/technology/coronavirus-misinformation-social-media.html">easier</a>. And <a href="https://www.designnews.com/artificial-intelligence/deepfakes-looming-threat-2020/109800999062105">the emergence of deep fakes</a> suggests that there will be unforeseeable ways that people in the future might doubt convincing evidence about the coronavirus. In fact, many today continue to <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/05/17/eric-trump-coronavirus/">downplay the threat</a> in spite of the high death toll or <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/what-are-we-doing-doctors-are-fed-conspiracies-ravaging-ers-n1201446">dismiss other realities of the pandemic</a> as a hoax. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/336156/original/file-20200519-152298-1bvvrb3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=544%2C452%2C3585%2C2526&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/336156/original/file-20200519-152298-1bvvrb3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=432&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/336156/original/file-20200519-152298-1bvvrb3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=432&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/336156/original/file-20200519-152298-1bvvrb3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=432&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/336156/original/file-20200519-152298-1bvvrb3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=543&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/336156/original/file-20200519-152298-1bvvrb3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=543&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/336156/original/file-20200519-152298-1bvvrb3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=543&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Videos of eyewitness testimony and photographs only do so much.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/APTOPIX-Virus-Outbreak-New-York/8dd14b42e3304431b8d9b66344637daf/443/0">Anurag Papolu/The Conversation via AP Images</a></span>
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</figure>
<p>There remains a more basic problem. By enabling us to better preserve and spread information, technology has <a href="https://hbr.org/2011/03/information-overloads-2300-yea.html">overloaded us with it</a>. The amount of attention given to any topic <a href="https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-04/tuod-aoi041119.php">is decreasing</a> as the amount of information produced grows. A global pandemic might be at the forefront of everyone’s minds now. But can we assume that the reminders left behind will automatically get the attention they deserve from people living in an information saturated world?</p>
<h2>The hope of institutions</h2>
<p>In the long run, actively remembering the coronavirus cannot be everyone’s job; perhaps it’s best to depend on a relatively small number of people. They would, in effect, have to form a living guide stone with the power of warning the rest of the world when necessary. </p>
<p>Existing institutions don’t look like they’re up to this task. Universities broadly focus on creating new information and <a href="https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/03/22/ideas-improving-higher-educations-primary-role-work-force-development">preparing students for the job market</a>, not selectively spreading old warnings. Libraries are great at storing information but not at interpreting and communicating it to the public.</p>
<p>Government agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization seemingly have the power to capture the public’s attention. Yet even well-intentioned agencies <a href="https://theconversation.com/vital-signs-when-watchdogs-become-pets-or-the-problem-of-regulatory-capture-111170">can become manipulated</a> for other purposes. Among the reminders to keep alive is that these institutions must be guarded from corruption, and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/31/us-coronavirus-budget-cuts-trump-underprepared">the prospect of defunding or reorganizing them</a> cannot be taken lightly.</p>
<p>Meeting the challenges described above perhaps requires new institutions of memory that are resistant to corruption and that both the government and the public would be generally expected to consult. These institutions would have to provide a certificate of authenticity for the information they preserve by <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/must-politics-be-war-9780190632830?cc=us&lang=en&">earning and keeping the public’s trust</a>. Furthermore, those who maintain them would have to be experts at communicating these reminders in a way that grabs the public’s attention and overcomes bias. </p>
<p>One of the institutions that fulfills some of these criteria is the <a href="http://www.vmoc.gr/en/">Museum of the City of Volos</a>, in Greece. Originally built to house general information about the region – including facts about earthquakes and floods from the 1950s – the museum has recently increased its focus on promoting disaster risk awareness. It consulted with disaster preparedness experts and civil authorities to identify and reach at-risk groups, develop <a href="https://culturalmemory.socialsimulations.org/">cultural memory games</a>, and play a more visible role in the life of the city. Today, it serves as <a href="https://cultureanddisaster.eu/case-studies/volos.html">a case study</a> in how institutions can help preserve collective memory about risk. </p>
<p>Future generations deserve to be in the best position possible to deal with the next inevitable pandemic. This preparation includes regular reminders about what happened in 2020.</p>
<p>[<em>Get facts about coronavirus and the latest research.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=upper-coronavirus-facts">Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter.</a>]</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/137370/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sean Donahue does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>A global pandemic might be at the forefront of everyone’s minds. But we can’t assume that future threats will get the attention they deserve from people living in an information-saturated world.Sean Donahue, PhD Candidate in Philosophy, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and SciencesLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1017102018-09-17T10:52:20Z2018-09-17T10:52:20ZAre today’s white kids less racist than their grandparents?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/236459/original/file-20180914-177938-pydhqr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Do we have any reason to believe that each new generation of white people will be more open-minded and tolerant than previous ones?</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/father-young-son-closeup-how-supports-623462078?src=nMVsyazUNXDIBFKyJXQceA-3-48">Elvira Koneva</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In America’s children, we often see hope for a better future, especially when it comes to reducing racism.</p>
<p>Each new generation of white people, the thinking goes, will naturally and inevitably be more open-minded and tolerant than previous ones. </p>
<p>But do we have any reason to believe this? Should we have faith that today’s white kids will help make our society less racist and more equitable? </p>
<p>Previous research has had mixed findings. So in order to explore more fully what white kids think about race, I went straight to the source: white children themselves. </p>
<p>In my new book, “<a href="https://nyupress.org/books/9781479803682/">White Kids: Growing Up with Privilege in a Racially Divided America</a>,” I explore how 36 white, affluent kids think and talk about race, racism, privilege and inequality in their everyday lives.</p>
<h2>The limitations of survey data</h2>
<p>Before beginning my research, I looked at what previous studies on the racial attitudes of young white people had found.</p>
<p>According to some researchers, we do have reason to be hopeful.</p>
<p>Using survey data, they found that <a href="https://press.princeton.edu/titles/9910.html">young white people are expressing less prejudice</a> than generations before them. For instance, white support for segregated schools – a traditional measure of racial prejudice – has <a href="http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674745698">dramatically decreased over a 50-year period</a>. And <a href="http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0002716210386302">surveys show</a> that younger whites are less likely to express racial stereotypes than older whites.</p>
<p>But a second group of researchers disagreed. They found that whites today simply articulate racial prejudice <a href="http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0957926500011001003">in new ways</a>. </p>
<p>For example, <a href="http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0002764215588811">according to national survey data</a>, high school seniors are increasingly expressing a form of prejudice that sociologist Tyrone Forman calls “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Changing-Terrain-Race-Ethnicity/dp/087154492X">racial apathy</a>” – an “indifference toward societal, racial, and ethnic inequality and lack of engagement with race-related social issues.” </p>
<p>Racial apathy is a more passive form of prejudice than explicit articulations of bigotry and racial hostility. But such apathy can nonetheless lead white people to support policies and practices <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/du-bois-review-social-science-research-on-race/article/racial-apathy-and-hurricane-katrina-the-social-anatomy-of-prejudice-in-the-postcivil-rights-era/95F372BBEB724011527316B718A40604">that align with the same racist logic of the past</a>, like a lack of support for social programs and policies designed to address institutional racism or an indifference toward the suffering of people of color.</p>
<p>Other researchers question the ability of surveys <a href="http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/2332649217705145">to capture honest responses from whites about race-related questions</a> or <a href="https://academic.oup.com/socpro/article-abstract/56/3/403/1707581">to describe the complexity of whites’ perspectives on race</a>. </p>
<p>As useful as surveys can be, they don’t allow us to fully understand <a href="https://rowman.com/isbn/9781442276239/racism-without-racists-color-blind-racism-and-the-persistence-of-racial-inequality-in-america-fifth-edition">how white people explain, justify or develop their views on race</a>. </p>
<h2>What the kids are saying</h2>
<p>In order to better understand how white children think about race, I interviewed and observed 30 affluent, white families with kids between the ages of 10 and 13 living in a Midwestern metropolitan area. Over the course of two years, I immersed myself in the everyday lives of these families, observing them in public and in the home, and interviewing the parents and the kids. A few years later, when the kids were in high school, I re-interviewed a subset of the original group.</p>
<p>These children had some shared understandings of race, like the idea that “race is the color of your skin.” But when I brought up topics like racism, privilege and inequality, their responses started to diverge, and there was more variation than I anticipated. </p>
<p>Some kids told me that “racism is not a problem anymore.” But others told me in great detail about the racial wealth gap, employment discrimination, unequal schooling, and racist treatment of black kids by police. </p>
<p>As an 11-year-old named Chris explained:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“I think that the white kids, since they have more power in general in society … disciplinary actions aren’t brought down as hard upon them. But when it’s, you know, a black kid getting in trouble with the police … I think people are going to be tougher with them, because, you know, [black kids] can’t really fight back as well.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Although some of the kids had much greater understandings of the history of racism in America, others flattened time and lumped all of African-American history together, while also mixing up names and dates. </p>
<p>One 11-year-old named Natalie told me:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Racism was a problem when all those slaves were around and that, like, bus thing and the water fountain. I mean, everything was crazy back in the olden days. … But now, I mean, since Martin Luther King and, like, Eleanor Roosevelt, and how she went on the bus. And she was African-American and sat on the white part. … After the 1920s and all that, things changed.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>When it came to the understandings of privilege and inequality, some kids made comments like, “There’s no such thing [as privilege]. Everyone gets what they deserve in life, if they work for it.” </p>
<p>Other kids disagreed, like 11-year-old Aaron:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“I think [whites] just kind of have the upside. … And since much of society is run by white people anyway, which is an upside, more white people are, you know, accepted into jobs, so they get the upside. So, yeah, I do think they have the upside.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I also found that many of the children expressed forms of racial apathy. When a black teenager was shot and killed by a police officer in the community, 16-year-old Jessica told me that she “did not care” about black people being killed because they “obviously did something to deserve it.” </p>
<p>But some kids, like 16-year-old Charlotte, had a very different reaction:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“It should all be stopped. There is actually a problem and a system that allowed this to happen. … Technically, legally, what that officer did was ‘okay’? It’s like, well, maybe that’s the problem. Maybe killing black people shouldn’t be legally ‘okay,’ you know?”</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>The importance of a child’s social world</h2>
<p>Why such stark differences among these kids?</p>
<p>It wasn’t simply a matter of these kids repeating the views of their parents.</p>
<p>I found that their perspectives were shaped less by what their parents explicitly said about race and more by the social environments these kids grew up in – and how their parents constructed these environments. </p>
<p>Decisions parents made about where to live, where to send their kids to school, which extracurricular activities to enroll them in, where they traveled and what media they consumed work to create what I refer to as a child’s “racial context of childhood.” </p>
<p>Within this racial context, kids developed ideas about race by observing and interpreting what was going on around them. And because of important variations in these social environments, the children made sense of race in different ways.</p>
<p>In this sense, my work builds on existing scholarship on how children develop understandings about race and racism in the context of <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0002713809604386">family</a>, <a href="https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/learning-race-learning-place/9780813554297">place</a>, <a href="https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/race-in-the-schoolyard/9780813532257">early school experiences</a>,<a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/integration-interrupted-9780199736454?cc=us&lang=en&#">elementary and secondary schools</a>, <a href="https://rowman.com/isbn/9780847688623/the-first-r-how-children-learn-race-and-racism">child care</a> and even <a href="https://academic.oup.com/socpro/article-abstract/49/1/58/1665430?redirectedFrom=fulltext">summer camp</a>. </p>
<p>All of these aspects of a child’s social environment play a role in shaping how they learn about race.</p>
<p>Are white kids less racist than their grandparents? My research with kids doesn’t give us any reason to believe that each new generation of white people will naturally or inevitably hold more open-minded and tolerant viewpoints on race than previous generations.</p>
<p>Dismantling racism in the United States will require more than just passive hope.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/101710/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Margaret Hagerman does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Over the course of two years, a sociologist studied a group of affluent, white kids to see how they made sense of sensitive racial issues like privilege, unequal opportunity and police violence.Margaret Hagerman, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Mississippi State UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/824772017-08-22T01:56:34Z2017-08-22T01:56:34ZHow the smartphone affected an entire generation of kids<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/182831/original/file-20170821-4987-1byqiui.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">New research is putting the first generation of kids to grow up with the smartphone into sharp relief.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-vector/young-girl-using-smart-phone-darkness-328952438?src=hRmx3HekkkvUQ_P3NZDVKw-2-62">Olga Tropinina</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>As someone who researches generational differences, I find one of the most frequent questions I’m asked is “What generation am I in?”</p>
<p>If you were born before 1980, that’s a relatively easy question to answer: the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Generation#cite_note-1">Silent Generation</a> was born between 1925 and 1945; <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_boomers">baby boomers</a> were born between 1946 and 1964; <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_X">Gen X</a> followed (born between 1965 and 1979). </p>
<p>Next come millennials, born after 1980. But where do millennials end, and when does the next generation begin? Until recently, I (and many others) thought the last millennial birth year would be 1999 – today’s 18-year-olds.</p>
<p>However, that changed a few years ago, when I started to notice big shifts in teens’ behavior and attitudes in the yearly surveys of 11 million young people that I analyze for my research. Around 2010, teens started to spend their time much differently from the generations that preceded them. Then, around 2012, sudden shifts in their psychological well-being began to appear. Together, these changes pointed to a generational cutoff around 1995, which meant that the kids of this new, post-millennial generation were already in college. </p>
<p>These teens and young adults all have one thing in common: Their childhood or adolescence coincided with the rise of the smartphone.</p>
<h2>What makes iGen different</h2>
<p>Some call this generation “Generation Z,” but if millennials aren’t called “Generation Y,” “Generation Z” doesn’t work. Neil Howe, who coined the term “millennials” along with his collaborator William Strauss, <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/neilhowe/2014/10/27/introducing-the-homeland-generation-part-1-of-2/#7dc592322bd6">has suggested</a> the next generation be called the “Homeland Generation,” but I doubt anyone will want to be named after a government agency.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/news/among-teens-iphones-reign-supreme-facebook-falters/">A 2015 survey</a> found that two out of three U.S. teens owned an iPhone. For this reason, I call them iGen, and as I explain in my new book “<a href="http://www.simonandschuster.com/books/iGen/Jean-M-Twenge/9781501151989">iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids are Growing up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy – and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood</a>,” they’re the first generation to spend their adolescence with a smartphone.</p>
<p>What makes iGen different? Growing up with a smartphone has affected nearly every aspect of their lives. They spend so much time on the internet, texting friends and on social media – <a href="http://www.monitoringthefuture.org/">in the large surveys</a> I analyzed for the book, an average of about six hours per day – that they have less leisure time for everything else. </p>
<p>That includes what was once the favorite activity of most teens: hanging out with their friends. Whether it’s going to parties, shopping at the mall, watching movies or aimlessly driving around, iGen teens <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/has-the-smartphone-destroyed-a-generation/534198/">are participating in these social activities at a significantly lower rate</a> than their millennial predecessors.</p>
<p>iGen shows another pronounced break with millennials: Depression, anxiety, and loneliness have shot upward since 2012, with happiness declining. </p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/66/wr/mm6630a6.htm">teen suicide rate increased</a> by more than 50 percent, as did <a href="https://www.samhsa.gov/data/sites/default/files/NSDUH-DetTabs-2015/NSDUH-DetTabs-2015/NSDUH-DetTabs-2015.pdf">the number of teens with clinical-level depression</a>. </p>
<h2>A link that can’t be ignored</h2>
<p>I wondered if these trends – changes in how teens were spending their free time and their deteriorating mental health – might be connected. Sure enough, I found that teens who spend more time on screens are less happy and more depressed, and those who spend more time with friends in person are happier and less depressed.</p>
<p>Of course, correlation doesn’t prove causation: Maybe unhappy people use screen devices more. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/182839/original/file-20170821-4938-mi9ww9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/182839/original/file-20170821-4938-mi9ww9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=443&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/182839/original/file-20170821-4938-mi9ww9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=443&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/182839/original/file-20170821-4938-mi9ww9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=443&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/182839/original/file-20170821-4938-mi9ww9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=557&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/182839/original/file-20170821-4938-mi9ww9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=557&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/182839/original/file-20170821-4938-mi9ww9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=557&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Social media use has been tied to unhappiness.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-vector/girl-smartphone-lying-bed-hand-drawn-587291741">Olga Tropinina</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>However, as I researched my book, I came across three recent studies that all but eliminated that possibility – at least for social media. In two of them, <a href="https://hbr.org/2017/04/a-new-more-rigorous-study-confirms-the-more-you-use-facebook-the-worse-you-feel">social media use led to lower well-being</a>, but <a href="http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0069841">lower well-being did not lead to social media use</a>.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, <a href="http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/cyber.2016.0259?journalCode=cyber">a 2016 study</a> randomly assigned some adults to give up Facebook for a week and others to continue using it. Those who gave up Facebook ended the week happier, less lonely and less depressed.</p>
<h2>What else is lost?</h2>
<p>Some parents might worry about their teens spending so much time on their phones because it represents a radical departure from how they spent their own adolescence. But spending this much time on screens is not just different – in many ways, it’s actually worse. </p>
<p>Spending less time with friends means less time to develop social skills. A 2014 study found that sixth graders who spent just five days at a camp without using screens <a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0747563214003227">ended the time better at reading emotions on others’ faces</a>, suggesting that iGen’s screen-filled lives might cause their social skills to atrophy.</p>
<p>In addition, iGen reads books, magazines and newspapers much less than previous generations did as teens: In the annual <a href="http://www.monitoringthefuture.org/">Monitoring the Future</a> survey, the percentage of high school seniors who read a nonrequired book or magazine nearly every day dropped from 60 percent in 1980 to only 16 percent in 2015. Perhaps as a result, average SAT critical reading scores <a href="http://blog.prepscholar.com/average-sat-scores-over-time">have dropped 14 points</a> since 2005. College faculty tell me that students have more trouble reading longer text passages, and rarely read the required textbook.</p>
<p>This isn’t to say that iGen teens don’t have a lot going for them. They are physically safer and more tolerant than previous generations were. They also seem to have a stronger work ethic and more realistic expectations than millennials did at the same age. But the smartphone threatens to derail them before they even get started.</p>
<p>To be clear, moderate smartphone and social media use – up to an hour a day – is not linked to mental health issues. However, most teens (and adults) are on their phones <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2015/11/03/health/teens-tweens-media-screen-use-report/index.html">much more than that</a>. </p>
<p>Somewhat to my surprise, the iGen teens I interviewed said they would rather see their friends in person than communicate with them using their phones. Parents used to worry about their teens spending too much time with their friends – they were a distraction, a bad influence, a waste of time. </p>
<p>But it might be just what iGen needs.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/82477/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jean Twenge has received funding from the National Institutes of Mental Health and the Russell Sage Foundation. </span></em></p>Move over millennials, there’s a new generation in town. Dubbed ‘iGen,’ they differ from their predecessors on a range of measures, from mental health to time spent with friends.Jean Twenge, Professor of Psychology, San Diego State UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/232692014-03-07T06:04:17Z2014-03-07T06:04:17ZEnvironment policy must embrace uncertainty<p>The uncertainty of the future is a universal concern. Humans have always tried to see into the future with the aid of specialist knowledge – from the days when rulers consulted <a href="http://web.eecs.utk.edu/%7Emclennan/BA/Har.html">haruspices</a> and diviners, to our contemporary obsession with risk assessment. Exposed to natural hazards throughout different phases of human history – from predators when we were hunter–gatherers to droughts and pests when we became agriculturalists – we’ve tried to find ways of knowing more about what might be around the corner.</p>
<p>Today we handle the future using probabilities rather than animal entrails. Scientific tools, of which statistical analysis is one, have allowed us to intervene in the natural world in ways our ancestors would not have imagined possible. At the same time, we share with them some of their vulnerability to natural hazards. But thanks to our ability to transform the world around us, we also increasingly face hazards that are no longer simply natural. </p>
<p>Climate change and bacterial antibiotic resistance are two examples, both being unintended and unwanted outcomes of natural processes combined with human interventions. The recent floods in the UK, and their relationship to flood management practices, represent another example – in which <a href="http://www.climatecentral.org/news/report-ties-climate-to-extreme-events-but-shows-hurdles-16438">climate change is also implicated</a>. The question vexing policymakers in the wake of these events is: how to decide what to do about their likely future recurrence?</p>
<p>Here, statistics may be less helpful. The reliability of the picture they give us of the future is dependent on future outcomes being statistically comparable to past ones. What we may fail to recognise is that this assumption is often wrong. </p>
<p>Estimates of probability based on past data treat past outcomes as random. But when humans act the outcomes are not random. We act with particular goals in mind. </p>
<p>Our capacity for changing the world – particularly when our efforts combine with complex natural processes – can even create phenomena that are entirely novel in human experience, such as human-caused <a href="https://theconversation.com/topics/climate-change">climate change</a> and <a href="https://theconversation.com/topics/ozone-layer">ozone depletion</a>.</p>
<h2>Changing landscapes of risk</h2>
<p>Scientists studying climate change concur. They point out that the novel nature of human-caused climate change means that past estimates of the probability of flooding will no longer be reliable guides to the future. Oxford University’s Myles Allan suggests “just looking back at the historical record to plan flood defences or set insurance premiums is increasingly misleading”. And Reading’s <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/climate-change-means-we-will-have-to-get-used-to-flooding-9122443.html">Nigel Arnell</a> says: “We have long been exposed to risk from flooding, but climate change is loading the dice.” Of the rest of us, <a href="http://www.noiseofthecrowd.com/how-can-you-convince-the-uk-to-care-about-climate-change/">80%</a> suspect this is true. The extent to which such conclusions are shaping public policy is, however, debatable. </p>
<p>The Enlightenment taught us to make (or at least, claim to be making) decisions about what we should do, now and in the future, on the basis of reliable knowledge about the past. For us, this has come to mean rigorous statistical research. Much of our way of thinking about decisions is therefore tied up with the consequentialist moral philosophy implicit in this belief. We want to know what the outcomes of our actions are likely to be, so that we can weigh up risks and benefits and then act accordingly. </p>
<p>Bureaucrats bind themselves by rules that prescribe decision making procedures of this kind, such as those in the Treasury’s <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-green-book-appraisal-and-evaluation-in-central-governent">Green Book</a>. Yet when faced with a genuinely novel phenomenon like human-caused climate change, we find ourselves in a situation in which we do not have access to the data our consequentialist habits of mind require.</p>
<h2>The ethics of uncertainty</h2>
<p>We cannot wait for this data to become available. Whatever we do about human-caused climate change, we will need to make decisions in a state of uncertainty. However well-constructed climate models are, we cannot afford to test them by waiting to see if the scenarios they outline are in fact correct.</p>
<p>The underdeveloped branch of moral philosophy that deals with the <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/risk/">ethics of risk</a> gives us some pointers on how we can proceed when the outcomes of possible courses of action are unknown. For example, if we face situations where our actions create greater uncertainties about how the future will turn out, then we should not act as if business as usual will continue. </p>
<p>This is, however, often not what the rules encourage bureaucrats to do. Following economic orthodoxy, they tend to assume, for example, that future generations will <a href="http://www.treasury.gov.au/PublicationsAndMedia/Publications/2012/Economic-Roundup-Issue-3/Report/Considering-future-generations-8212-sustainability-in-theory-and-practice">continue to be better off</a> than present ones. The Green Book accordingly instructs policymakers to discount the future – to set a lower value on outcomes in the future than on ones nearer to the present. </p>
<p>But if there are plausible reasons to think business will not continue as usual, then the welfare of future generations has to count for more in policy than it does now. If the future facing us is, thanks to human activity, no longer what it used to be, then uncertainty is a reason for acting to prevent harm rather than for waiting.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/23269/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Chris Groves receives funding from the Economic and Social Research Council.</span></em></p>The uncertainty of the future is a universal concern. Humans have always tried to see into the future with the aid of specialist knowledge – from the days when rulers consulted haruspices and diviners…Chris Groves, Research Associate in School of Social Sciences, Cardiff UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/220382014-01-15T15:22:13Z2014-01-15T15:22:13ZFor future generations, it’s heads we win, tails they lose<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/39143/original/6pvrb9m3-1389799230.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Is the future black, red, or green? Bets please.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/39143/original/6pvrb9m3-1389799230.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/39143/original/6pvrb9m3-1389799230.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/39143/original/6pvrb9m3-1389799230.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/39143/original/6pvrb9m3-1389799230.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/39143/original/6pvrb9m3-1389799230.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/39143/original/6pvrb9m3-1389799230.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/39143/original/6pvrb9m3-1389799230.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Is the future black, red, or green? Bets please.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span>
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<p>Can you remember the first time you said “That’s not fair”? Perhaps you wailed, aghast as your favourite toy was taken from you, or after a visit to the park was cut short. And can you remember the first time someone responded “Life’s not fair”? There are entire galaxies of outrage that young children endure. But the blunt trauma of discovering you are not the centre of the universe, that someone else may be indifferent to the injustice you have suffered does tends to stand out. </p>
<p>A central element of fairness is sharing. Taking what is yours and not more because to do so would mean someone would have less. Of course what is rightfully yours may not necessarily be the same amount as mine or anyone else’s. <a href="http://mathworld.wolfram.com/CakeCutting.html">Slices of cake</a> are one thing. As the accounting gets more complex, working out fair shares can get quite complicated, if not positively creative. </p>
<p>Nonetheless fairness is seen as a necessary element when it comes to individual or collective decisions. You may disagree to what extent rich people should be taxed more than poor people; such disagreement would often be around whether it’s fair or not.</p>
<p>So is it fair for us to adversely effect the biosphere, when the impact will fall disproportionally on future generations? Given the potentially <a href="http://www.nature.com/climate/2008/0812/full/climate.2008.122.html">hundreds of years</a> carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere, along with the delays, sinks and feedback mechanisms that are part of Earth’s complex climate, it may take many decades or centuries for the consequences of our emissions to play out fully. If we are the captain setting sail on a course towards dangerous climate change, then the destination will only be reached some years after all currently aboard are dead.</p>
<p>Consider the <a href="http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=45165#.UtbHQnlvbfM">ten billion people</a> predicted to live on Earth in 2100. If they are to have lives worth living, then they would need to generate at least <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8213884.stm">50% more energy, grow 50% more food and gain access to 50% more water</a> than we do now. If we continue on a “<a href="http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/sres/emission/index.php?idp=27">business as usual</a>” scenario with our carbon emissions then they would need to do all that at the same time as rapidly adapting to the onset of dangerous climate change. Are we more important than these future people? Are our lives worth more? To what extent the welfare of these future people should be considered now, is a fascinating question that seems to cut deep into our <a href="http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/019824908X.001.0001/acprof-9780198249085">notions of right and wrong</a> and fairness. </p>
<p>People are held accountable for their actions irrespective of their intentions. Take the crime of manslaughter. If I fancied learning archery in my back garden, missed the target entirely and killed a neighbour by mistake, the fact I didn’t intend to wouldn’t mean I’m innocent, and wouldn’t change my prospects of spending time at Her Majesty’s Pleasure. Perhaps I could shoot arrows further into the next street. I would be just as responsible for any death or injury that resulted. Having the consequences of your actions separated in space, or time, doesn’t diminish your responsibility or culpability. </p>
<p>What complicates these discussions – what can, in fact, derail them entirely – is the assumption that consequences of our behaviour now are the unavoidable conditions that stem from greater development. We may not have a cure for cancer or personal jetpacks, but life for most in developed nations is significantly better now than it was 100 years ago. Surely one of the things that drives our emissions is the active participation in the process of development? People will have better lives in the future because we have built a better word for them.</p>
<p>Who can imagine what life will be like in 100 years? One thing we are increasingly sure about is that carbon emissions, together with habitat destruction, species extinctions and phosphorus over-use, are examples of pushing the planetary system beyond its <a href="http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v461/n7263/full/461472a.html">safe operating limits</a> for future generations. We seem to be in denial about the consequences of our actions, wishfully thinking that by the time the impact of our behaviour is felt, the world will be so changed that it will no longer by harmful.</p>
<p>We pull back, release, launch; we see our actions take flight with the empty promise that when they fall back to the ground they will have been transformed from mortal hazards into international, inter-generational largesse. And that is neither honest, nor fair.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/22038/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
Can you remember the first time you said “That’s not fair”? Perhaps you wailed, aghast as your favourite toy was taken from you, or after a visit to the park was cut short. And can you remember the first…James Dyke, Lecturer in Complex Systems Simulation, University of SouthamptonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.