What future generations need from us
Abstract What do future generations need from us? Various procedures, including individual and group role playing at 13 locations in nine countries, can help us answer this question. In general, future generations need equal opportunity (a legacy as beneficial as ours was), our caring about their well-being, and attention to their needs in our legislatures and parliaments. Their particular needs are for us to focus on peace and security, the environment, the worst risks of all, governance, the knowledge base, children and learning. The needs of future generations may provide the centrepiece for a new global ethic that improves our prospects for a positive future.
Contributions to Sustainability by Communities and Individuals: Problems and Prospects
This report examines relationships between a comprehensive set of definitions of and viewpoints on the concept of Sustainability and the abilities of communities and individuals in the United States to meet the behavioral prescriptions inherent in these definitions and viewpoints. This research is timely because sustainability is becoming a cornerstone of national and international environmental strategies designed to simultaneously achieve environmental, economic, and social goals. In the United States, many communities have adopted sustainability principles as the foundation for both their environmental protection efforts and their socioeconomic development initiatives. This research is important because it highlights serious problems communities and inviduals may have in achieving sustainability expectations, and illustrates how much work is needed to help communities and individuals overcome numerous considerable and complex constraints to sustainability.
Philosophical Aspects of 500-Year Planning
A class of environmental problems, termed 500-year problems, poses significant threats to the world's societies. In 500-year planning there is a need for a sound philosophical foundation to guide the development of appropriate methods which analyze problems that cover very long time periods and that involve large uncertainties. In this paper philosophical aspects of 500-year planning, related to determining whether present generations are meeting their obligations to future generations, are addressed. Topics discussed include the treatment of future populations (as identifiable individuals or as enumerable groups) and the appropriate base for 500-year planning (utilitarianism or social contract theory). Adopting Rawls's concepts of the original position and of the veil of ignorance, a social contract is developed that guarantees the possibility of existence for all potential individuals, and sets limits on the risks that current and future populations might endure as a result of their ancestors' abuse of the environment. The specifics of the contract represent rational criteria upon which to base 500-year planning activities.