What Does the Future Hold For Our Grandchildren?

Leonardo Boff

30/08/2009

Opinión

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Watching my grandchildren playing in the garden, bouncing around like kid goats, rolling on the ground and climbing up and down the trees, two feelings arise in me. One is of envy, because, with the four prosthetics that I have in my lower limbs, I cannot do any of those things. And the other is of concern: what will the world be like that they will have to face within few years?

The predictions of the most reliable specialists are threatening. There is an ominous or magic date that is always mentioned: the year 2025. Almost everyone affirms that if we do not do something now, or if we do not do enough, the ecologic-humanitarian catastrophe will by then be unavoidable.

Nor does the slow recovery of the present economic-financial crisis that is being felt in many countries yet represent a solution.

Only that the free-fall has been stopped. Development-growth is returning, but accompanied by another crisis: the crisis of unemployment. Millions are condemned to be structurally unemployed, this is, they will not return to the labor market and will not even remain in the reserve army for the production process. They are, simply put, dispensable. Can permanent unemployment mean anything other than a slow death and a profound disintegration of the meaning of life? And to that, add the ominous date when there are forecasted to be from 150 to 200 million climate-change refugees.

The «State of the Future 2009» (O Globo de 14.07/09), a report prepared by 2,700 scientists, emphatically says that primarily due to global warming, by 2025, about three thousand million people will not have access to drinking water. What does that mean? Simply put, that those thousands of millions, if they are not aided, would die of thirst, dehydration and other illnesses. The report says more: half of the world's population will be involved in social convulsions due to the global socio-ecological crisis.

The 2008 Nobel laureate for economics, Paul Krugman, always calm, and a critic of the insufficient measures taken to confront the socio-environmental crisis, recently wrote: «If the consensus of the specialists in economics is dark, the consensus of the specialists in climate change is terrible» (JB 14/07/09). And he comments: «if we continue acting as before, it is not the worst case scenario, but the most probable one, that the rise in temperature will destroy life as we know it.»

If that is what will probably occur, my concern for the grandchildren becomes anguish: what kind of world will they inherit from us? What life or death decisions will they be forced to make?

We act as if the Earth were for us and our generation. We forget that she belongs primarily to those who will come, our children and grandchildren. They have the right to be able to enter a minimally habitable world, with conditions necessary for a decent life, one that will not only allow for their survival, but also for them to flourish and grow.

The scenarios to which we have referred force us towards solutions that will change the global framework of our life on the Earth. It is of no use to keep on earning money by selling the right to contaminate (carbon credits) and a green economy. If the genius of capitalism is knowing how to adapt to each circumstance, as long as the laws of the market are preserved and with the opportunity for profit, we must now recognize that this strategy is no longer possible. It could precipitate the predictable catastrophe.

If we want a future, we must start from other premises: instead of exploitation, a human/nature synergy, because Earth and humanity form a unique whole; instead of competition, cooperation, the basis for constructing a society with a human face.

Prigogine, Heisenberg, Morin, theoreticians of complexity, uncertainty and chaos, give me some hope, when they say: in reality, everything functions according to the following dynamic: disorder leads to self-organization and to a new order, and thus, to the continuity of life at a higher level. Because we love the stars, we are not afraid of darkness.

- Leonardo Boff, Theologian, Earthcharter Commission

Free translation from the Spanish by contacto@servicioskoinonia.org, Refugio del Río Grande, Texas

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