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Do people yet to be born have climate change rights?
- rektide 4y agoKim Stanley Robinson's Ministry for the Future (2020) rather revolves around this idea. In general, I do think humanity is an amazing creature with amazing ability to imagine & consider & decide. But our attentions are not meant for long term thinking, over many years & decades. Being able to understand long-term risk, long term harm seems like something that requires more deliberate care & concern & advocation than what the world today can really muster & bear; the allure of pop-news & the seductiveness of event, of being part of the current news cycle steals away a lot of more real, more persisting, more enduring caring, distracts. We need some way to recognize the irrevocable choices around us, those that send humanity down paths where there's no more ability to decide. I hear this idea in business a lot, and I'm forgetting the proper phrasing, but that idea of choices that, after being made, are hard to alter. Being a society that preserves liberal possibilities for humanity, that maintains freedom over time & doesn't think of liberty purely as a short-term thing, is part of what made humankind so interesting & capable a species. Long-term-ism is hard to maintain.