It’s time for humankind to recognize a disturbing truth: we have colonized the future. In wealthy countries, especially, we treat it like a distant colonial outpost where we can freely dump ecological damage and technological risk as if there was nobody there.
We have colonized the future because we are leaving our ecological and technological problems for future generations to solve. We burden them with our problems and constrain their ability to create their own future. And our descendants have no way of fighting this colonization; they are obviously not physically present and we have granted them no rights.
How do we de-colonize the future? We must stop short-term thinking. Here is a helpful infographic from Krznaric’s site. See also his book, which I plan to read.
