In today’s runaway world, we can’t aspire to leave a monument lasting 1,000 years, but it would surely be shameful if we persisted in policies that denied future generations a fair inheritance and left them with a more depleted and more hazardous world.
I’ll start with a flashback to 1902. In that year the young H G Wells gave a celebrated lecture at the Royal Institution in London. He spoke mainly in visionary mode. “Humanity,” he proclaimed, “has come some way, and the distance we have travelled gives us some earnest of the way we have to go. All the past is but the beginning of a beginning; all that the human mind has accomplished is but the dream before the awakening.” His rather purple prose still resonates more than 100 years later – he realised that we humans aren’t the culmination of emergent life.
But Wells wasn’t an optimist. He also highlighted the risk of global disaster: “It is impossible to show why certain things should not utterly destroy and end the human story... and make all our efforts vain... something from space, or pestilence, or some great disease of the atmosphere, some trailing cometary poison, some great emanation of vapour from the interior of the earth, or new animals to prey on us, or some drug or wrecking madness in the mind of man”.
