The Good Ancestor: How to Think Long Term in a Short-Term World

Hence he and many others favour ‘rewilding’ rather than ‘conservation’, which is not about trying to restore nature to some remembered prior state but about enabling ecological processes to resume by reintroducing plants and animals that can kickstart the recovery of wilderness and wildness.

But then, thanks to reading Blessed Unrest by Paul Hawken, I came to realise that the hundreds of thousands of environmental organisations around the world effectively operate as a massive decentralised religion, each worshipping the same deity that has been venerated by indigenous peoples for so long: Mother Earth.

History tells us that collective action works. Yet drawing a strict line between individual and communal endeavours is a false dichotomy. Our personal actions are not a pointless drop in the ocean, for the simple reason that their ripple effects can turn into waves.

And the clock is ticking. We are enveloped in the paradox that we cannot wait patiently for long-term thinking to gradually emerge and make its presence felt: we need it urgently and immediately to tackle the multiple crises heading at speed towards us. As Martin Luther King Jr wrote, ‘we are confronted with the fierce urgency of the now’.8 Tomorro

‘The communal clock,’ writes Le Goff, ‘was an instrument of economic, social and political domination’ that enabled the rise of commercial capitalism.

Yet if we truly wish to become good ancestors, we need to expand our conception of legacy and think of it not just as a route to personal glory or as a bequest for our offspring, but as a practice of everyday life that benefits all future people. We can think of this as a transcendent ‘legacy mindset’, where we aim to be remembered by the generatio

Moreover, the studies show that thinking about death and how we want to be remembered when we are gone can have enormous social benefits by helping to forge a sense of intergenerational care and responsibility. This is very much counter to the culture of death denial that pervades Western society. We expend enormous energy shielding ourselves from

‘We are the first generation to know that we face unprecedented global environmental risks, but at the same time we are the last generation with a significant chance to do something about it,’ warns the earth system scientist Johan Rockström.

At this moment in history the dominant force is clear: we live in an age of pathological short-termism.

This may be the ultimate historical lesson of the Great Stink: that radical long-term planning can be kickstarted by a crisis. It is the essence not of cathedral thinking but what I think of as ‘sewer thinking’. Sometimes nothing but a crisis can shake dominant actors and institutions out of their slumber. It’s a lesson absolutely understood by act