Down to the wire : confronting climate collapse / David - Index of

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72 politics and governance
Our future and the future of our democracy depend greatly
on our sense of connection to each other and our obligations to
future generations. Economist Kenneth Boulding once asked in
jest “what has the future done for me . . . lately?” By defi nition the
unborn can do nothing for the living, but the idea of posterity—
a decent future for our children and theirs—does a great deal
for us. Our hopes for the future inspire the best of which we are
capable. Absent that hope, we easily fall victim to shortsightedness,
anomie, and carelessness in managing our contemporary affairs.
Even were that not so, are we in some manner obliged to care
about generations to come? The founder of modern conservatism,
Edmund Burke, once described the living generation as trustees
obligated to pass the inheritance of civilization from the distant
past on to future generations. That inheritance includes all the best
of civilization—our laws, customs, culture, and institutions—and
the ecological requisites—clean air and water, healthy ecosystems,
and stable climate—on which they depend. But without advocates
in the present and lacking any standing in the law, posterity has
no power to enforce its rights. The U.S. Constitution mentions
posterity in the preamble but not thereafter. In the more than two
centuries since the Constitution was written, no signifi cant case
law has developed to protect posterity, leaving it defenseless against
harms perpetrated on it, knowingly or not, by previous generations.
10 It might be argued that it has always been the case that
each generation benefi ts from the progress bequeathed by earlier
generations and suffers the effects of, say, soil loss or the loss of
biological diversity accidentally incurred. It is presumed, however,
that on balance the benefi ts more than offset the losses. It is an
open question how much the members of any generation know
the effects of their actions on later generations. But until roughly
the mid-20th century, the scale of costs imposed from one generation
to the next was contained locally or regionally, and the damage
was often repairable in a matter of decades or centuries. The
intergenerational costs of climate change, however, are another
matter entirely. They are global, permanent (as we measure time),