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.
Integrated 1000-year planning
Abstract This paper develops the concept of integrated 1000-year planning. The products of 1000-year planning, referred to as 1000-year plans, are intended to deal with issues on a global scale and address the survival of humanity and the protection of the earth’s environment. One thousand years is an appropriate global planning horizon because it is long enough to unmask big picture problems that appear to be invisible to today’s societies. Furthermore, this time horizon encourages the perspective that over the long-term, many problems that seem unsolvable today, and therefore receive little attention and few resources, can indeed be overcome. Topics of 1000-year plans are numerous and include: energy, land use, carbon management, oceans, biodiversity, nuclear and hazardous waste, water, human settlements, near-earth objects, and space exploration. The argument is made that responsibilities for action by current generations to benefit future generations be based on risk assessments and risk thresholds. In the near-term, 1000-year planning must be driven by an international grassroots coalition of scientists, policy analysts, environmentalists, planners, and concerned citizens.
A Machine That Would Go of Itself: The Constitution in American Culture
MICHAEL KAMMEN, a prolific and Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, seeks to trace the course of "popular constitutionalism" from 1787 to recent times. Instead of reinterpreting familiar legalistic themes, he attempts to describe the place of constitutionahsm "in the public consciousness and symbolic life of the American people" and to sketch what ordinary people have felt, believed, understood, and misunderstood about the broad framework of their government. Ironically, nonspecialists may become lost in what, of necessity, becomes a rapid journey through two centuries of ideas, attitudes, and imagery; but Kammen offers numerous points at which anyone can stop and savor his storytelling. How many already know that "the sacred charter" of 1787 remained invisible to the public throughout most of its own early history? (In 1882 a curious historian found it "folded up in a little tin box in the lower part of a closet" in the State Department.) And how many non-Trekkies are aware that the cult-classic TV series. Star Trek, once aired a sci-fi parable (entitled "Omega Glory") on American constitutionalism? Brief gems such as these, drawn from a wide range of sources, continually brighten the sprawling, analytical narrative. Kammen, for example, uses popular histories, themes submitted for student-essay contests, and ceremonial addresses to bolster his argument that the "cult" of Constitution worship emerged slowly, gaining momentum in the late 19th century and becoming a widely popular civil religion only after World War I. The author of People of Paradox (1972), Kammen finds popular constitutionalism awash in anomalies. For instance, he argues that "Americans have taken too much pride and proportionately too little interest in their frame of government"; that even specialists wrongly tend to conflate the narrower "history of the Constitution itself" with the broader story of "constitutionalism in American culture"; and— Warren Burger, take heed!—that orchestrated celebrations, such as the Centennial of 1887, have always produced less interest and constitutional edification than have spontaneous social-political conflicts.