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

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74 politics and governance
of future generations? Some will say that rights can be assumed
only when agents are able to reciprocate, hence they must be living
at the same time and capable of reciprocity. But we provide for
the unborn in many ways without making any such assumptions.
Some people endow colleges, universities, and cultural institutions
for future generations. From Thomas Jefferson to the present it
has been common to object to the imposition of our fi nancial
burdens on posterity (Yarrow, 2008). In this case, however, it is the
right of future generations to life itself.
James Madison gave us another way to understand intergenerational
obligation. In the tenth of the Federalist Papers, he made
the case for controlling the power of factions in order to protect
the larger good. But from the perspective of posterity, the present
generation is but a faction with the unchecked power to consume
resources and infl ict irreparable damage to all subsequent
generations. Madison could not have foreseen the kinds of harm
one generation could infl ict on subsequent generations, but the
logic is equally clear for controlling the power of factions in both
instances.
Legally and morally, however, we are in new territory, and we
struggle to fi nd the concepts and words to describe our situation
in the hope that being able to name it, we might avert it. During
World War II the word “genocide” was coined to describe the
systematic and willful destruction of entire ethnic groups. But we
have no word to describe our own actions, the consequences of
which are now killing what the World Health Organization estimates
to be 150,000 people each year and will cause the death of
millions more in the future, and perhaps much worse. The effects
of our present use of coal, oil, and natural gas will kill into the
far future, but we cannot know exactly who, where, or how they
will die. We do know, however, that the number will be very large
and that they will perish in storms, or heat waves, or of strange
diseases, or in violence amplifi ed by famine, or in any of a thousand
other ways. We have, however, no word by which to describe
calamity at this scale and, as yet, no means to hold perpetrators