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

They are a majority condemned to suffer in silence.

The most likely trajectory is Reform, where we respond to global crises but in an inadequate and piecemeal way that merely extends the curve outwards, to a greater or lesser extent. We manage to maintain our current civilisational pathway, with all its existing problems and inequalities, for some decades or possibly longer, but eventually hit an in

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

The basic idea of this second approach to regenerative design is that ‘atoms are heavy and bits are light’: it makes sense to manufacture products (made of atoms) locally to reduce transport costs and energy use, and base them on designs (made of bits of information) that are freely available globally through open-source digital platforms.

The moment has come, especially for those living in wealthy nations, to recognise a disturbing truth: that we have colonised the future. We treat the future like a distant colonial outpost devoid of people, where we can freely dump ecological degradation, technological risk and nuclear waste, and which we can plunder as we please. When Britain colo

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.

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

Every city should be striving to empower its citizens so their phones become a pocket-sized tool for grassroots democratic renewal.

Outdated Institutional Designs Our political systems have little capacity to take the long view: both representative democracy and nation states are geared towards short time horizons and responding to near-term interests rather than long-term risks. There is an absence of institutional mechanisms that give voice to the interests of tomorrow’s gene