It's time for humankind to recognize a disturbing truth: we have colonized the future. In wealthy countries, especially, we treat it like a distant colonial outpost where we can freely dump ecological damage and technological risk as if there was nobody there... It could be hard to grasp the scale of this injustice, so look at it this way: There are 7.7 billion people alive today. That's just a tiny fraction of the estimated 100 billion people who have lived and died over the past 50,000 years. But both of these are vastly outnumbered by the nearly seven trillion people who will be born over the next 50,000 years, assuming current birth rates stabilize. In the next two centuries alone, tens of billions of people will be born, amongst them, all your grandchildren, and their grandchildren and the friends and communities on whom they'll depend. How will all these future generations look back on us and the legacy we're leaving for them? ...over the past decade, a global movement has started to emerge of people committed to decolonizing the future and extending our time horizons towards a longer now. This movement is still fragmented and as yet has no name. I think of its pioneers as time rebels. They can be found at work in Japan's visionary Future Design movement, which aims to overcome the short-term cycles that dominate politics by drawing on the principle of seventh generation decision making practiced by many Native Americans communities...How is it that other species have learned to survive and thrive for 10,000 generations or more? Well, it's by taking care of the place that would take care of their offspring, by living within the ecosystem in which they're embedded, by knowing not to foul the nest, which is what humans have been doing with devastating effects at an ever-increasing pace and scale over the past century... (transcript)
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Wales is a small but progressive country, the only country in the world to have legislated to protect the interests of future generations, the only country to have appointed someone independent to oversee this. Across the world, our systems of government, of politics, of economics have tended to act in the short term. And often, the decisions that are taken discount the interests of future generations and the planet. But in Wales, we're trying to change that by passing a law which requires not just our government but all of our main public institutions to demonstrate how they're acting for the long-term and how the decisions they take don't harm the interests of those yet to be born. And so as a mum of five and the world's only future generations commissioner, I want to share with you today some of the lessons we've learned about how we're trying to leave the world better than we found it... (transcript)
Sophie Howe is the world's only future generations commissioner, a new kind of government official tasked with advocating for the interests of generations to come and holding public institutions accountable for delivering long-term change. She describes some of the people-focused policies she's helped implement in Wales, aimed at cutting carbon emissions, increasing sustainability and promoting well-being as a national goal. TED
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