About Time

"Future generations may well have occasion to ask themselves, 'What were our parents thinking? Why didn't they wake up when they had a chance?' We have to hear that question, from them, now."

Al Gore, "An Inconvenient Truth"

What is the future – or, as I prefer to put it, what are the futures? Throughout the twentieth century, the cultures we like to call “modern” have been obsessed with the futures. Indeed, our contemporary culture is littered with futures past, cluttered with the flying cars, the superhighways, the robots and food pills of early science fiction. Once upon a time, the futures seemed so bright – but with the coming of the atom bomb, and, now, global warming, the futures just aren’t what they used to be. While the fading of bright futures affects us all, it is, as Al Gore suggests in my epigraph above, of particular relevance to our children and their children. What, if any, legacy are we leaving them?

Children nowadays, for their part, are pretty sure that we’re not leaving them anything. When I was nine I remember sitting in the car with my mom in rural North Carolina. I was depressed. When she asked me what was wrong, I outlined my dream: an enormous garden where everyone could come and play together. The problem, I feared, was that it would never happen because there was going to be a nuclear war. Indeed, a few years later Sting came out with one of his first solo hits, “Russians”, that recast this fear for parents instead of children: “How can I save my little boy from Oppenheimer's deadly toy? / There is no monopoly in common sense / On either side of the political fence / We share the same biology / Regardless of ideology / Believe me when I say to you / I hope the Russians love their children too.”

For those of us who grew up in the latter half of the 20th century, the absent future could clearly be blamed on nuclear weapons. Since then, though, a whole bevy of new futuricidal technologies and situations have arisen, from genetically-engineered viral plagues to nanotechnological “grey goo”. In Michael Chabon’s excellent article on the Long Now Foundation, he tells how his own son takes the extinction of humanity for a given: to this kid, the future means this afternoon, tomorrow, or next week, because the likelihood of humans making it past another hundred years seem slim indeed.

What ever is to be done about this creeping pessimism infecting our world’s children? While it’s too late to undo the damage modern human societies have done, too late to uninvent nuclear weapons, internal combustion engines, and the thousand and one other modern ills, we can set ourselves, now, to the task of inventing new futures and, in the present, to making those futures viable. Ecology, in this light, is essentially children’s issue, and livable futures an essential children’s right. What can we give our children, right now, what can we show them to inspire a new hope for the future of life on our planet? Our love, yes – and also love for all beings, love for the wide green world that one day they, too, will be able to pass on to our grandchildren.

Do the humans love their children, too? Yes, we do! It’s about time to show them.