ancestors on jabel

Sat, 24 Jun 2023 09:18:39 -0400

I encountered Gary Snyder’s phrase “we are the primitives / of an unknown culture” this week and it gave me that mind-opening feeling. I’ve left a tab open to do some digging into its context and meaning.

Mon, 19 Dec 2022 23:41:00 -0400

“Ten Theses on Intergenerational Stewardship” by Prince Michael zu Salm-Salm, a German aristocrat committed to long-term care of the land. I don’t hold with aristocracy but this is worth reading.

How to be a good ancestor

Fri, 19 Aug 2022 07:20:53 -0400

Roman Krznaric’s TED talk:

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.