We should be judged by future generations.
And we will be. I live in a kind of skin and mentality that puts me in front of those to-be great-great-grandchildren, who will read about us, watch documentaries about us, and talk about what we did here on earth, during our lives.
Let us not be bad ancestors
A super intelligence knows that every page and word in a book exists at once. The current page, occupied by the Anthropocenes (A. Minter, 2016, "How We Think About Recycling Is In Need of Repair"), is behaving as if future generations won't matter, that pages of extinction, ocean pollution, warming will be somehow made up for by the relative increase in wealth in emerging markets (#Gapminder). That has merits, but only if everybody learns to respect science, and learns to care.
Relative intelligence unites conservatives and liberals, and puts conservation back into "Conserve"-ative, and non-cancelling liberal thought back into "Liberal". Example - https://www.
Tralfamadore
Science is the best hope that those great-grandchildren will be around, be able to read, or listen, or care about the past generations. Here's a shout out to a UK effort.
https://todayfortomorrow.org.uk/
This was my thesis way back in high school, during a religious and meditative period of my life (Tao, Bhagavad Gita, New Testament, Plato, and other "wisdom"). Plato had a particularly indelible effect. Socrates only claim to wisdom was his self-knowledge that he was not wise.
I took that a step further... but did not learn until just a couple of years ago, via a recommendation from one of my sons to read "Slaughterhouse-Five" by Kurt Vonnegut, that my further step was not all that original.
If we accept that wisdom, intelligence and intellect exists on a range or scale - and most of us would especially if we put oysters and insects and mice on that scale - that creates an awareness that time exists. Time of course does not exist... it is our way of consuming reality in a fashion we can eat a bite at a time.
A mouse might recognize the difference in black spots and letters on a page, and might even be trained to click a reward key based on a word. But a mouse isn't going to understand Slaughterhouse Five. The entire book, however, exists at once on the shelf. Humans are more skilled than mice or oysters, but we have to digest the novel a word or sentence at a time, retain it in memory as we would a chewed morsel in the stomach, and cannot claim the ability to read an entire written work at once even though it is all there at once.
Vonnegut, via the Tralfanadorians, postulates an intelligence as much greater than ours as we are from the mouse or oyster, an alien race that is able to see time all at once. We can debate whether this is a "fate" or "fatalist" view, but I would argue that we are writing history as we go, and that the important thing is to imagine our acts today as they would be seen in 500 years of hindsight by new generations.
This is why I got into recycling. It seemed obvious to me that Extraction (Mining, Forestry, Fishing, Refining, Hunting, etc) at a non-sustainable rate would be "frowned upon", to say the least, in a future generation of surviving (or extinct) humans. I could employ myself through recycling, live comfortably enough, but "offset" my own consumption by setting up businesses and systems to reduce consumption.
I've done it be setting up a business. On route, I spent time in education, managing a non-profit, being an activist, and as a regulator and Peace Corps volunteer. Over the course of my career, I figured out that environmental regulation is not written for Nature. The most natural settings, most untouched and unblemished by humans, receive little economic priority. The percentage of tax dollars humans are willing to spend annually are primarily spent according to property value, especially real estate.
This puts a lot of weight on the shoulders of Recyclers and Repairers, whose raw material is generated by the human inhabitants that create property value.
#DistractionFromExtraction is the term I coined this week for the way lobbyists for extractive industries, like Petrochemical, Forestry, and Mining conglomerates, leverage the Environmental Legal System - the one focused on property values - to create guilt and liability and "externalization" theory against reuse ("counterfeit") markets. They have activists in twisted a navel-gazing excursion to "measure consumer waste diversion rates" (Like "zero waste" movements). I've already gone over the history of Keep America Beautiful in the blog - my home state of Vermont passed container deposit legislation to reduce litter in the 1950s, and KAB was formed to "lobby against litter" as an argument that the deposit law was unnecessary.
Environmental systems that are aimed at root causes are twisted into knots.
1. Reform the General Mining Act of 1872 (which utterly SHOCKED me in 1978, when I was a sophomore at Fayetteville High School in Arkansas).
- Mining lobbyists like Jack Abramov make sure that the Interior Department committee is run by Senators from Mining and Extraction industry states. A liberal Democratic Urban Senator doesn't waste their time joining that committee, it's so locked down. Pretzel.
2. Require Plastics Manufacturers (like carbon emitters) to "offset" as much plastic litter as they sell.
- Environmentalists tend to be from highly educated rich societies, and wind up
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