Future generations risk 'enslavement' without a vote now

Damian Carrington's Environment Blog at the Guardian (UK): It's a new year, so let's start with a new idea: a democratic body to safeguard the basic needs and fundamental interests of future people.

That is the proposal of Rupert Read, a philosopher at the University of East Anglia, in a report called Guardians of the Future for the think tank Green House. The core idea is both radical and straightforward: a council of "Guardians of Future Generations", chosen like a jury from the general public, would sit above the existing law-making bodies and have two core powers. A power to veto legislation that threatened the basic needs and interests of future people and the power to force a review, following suitable public petition, of any existing legislation that threatens the interests of future people.

After the UN climate change summit in Durban in December I wrote, our current glacial progress in tackling global warming is piling costs and hardship onto our descendents in a way that will make the current global debt crisis seem minor by comparison. The changes to our economic, food, energy and water systems needed to adapt to changing climate get more expensive the longer we leave them. So ideas about how to represent the interests of people yet to exist are welcome.

I asked Read why he took on the issue. "It came from the worry that it is clear that the current institutions of government are not working and are not future proof," he said. "It also came from a philosophical direction: seeking for a way take the future seriously and in a democratic way."

"The proposal being made here is that we give future people en masse the nearest possible equivalent to the vote," he says. The need for democratic representation of unborn people led Read to the idea of a "super-jury". "Random selection would emphasise that we all share this responsibility for future people, and that none of us and all of us are ideally placed to do this vital job," he writes in the report....

A misty valley in Swift's Creek, Victoria, Australia, shot by Fir0002, flagstaffotos.com.au, Wikimedia Commons, under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 only