Our responsibilities towards future generations

Abstract

Future generations will undoubtedly enjoy sophisticated instruments of communications which may make our contemporary telephones, themselves undergoing rapid change, obsolete. But it was through a telephone call from UNESCO (where I was then Director of the Division of Human Settlements and Socio-Cultural Environment) to Professor Peter Serracino Inglott, then in Milan, that ten years ago . the project on the rights of future generations to their environment was born. It was not an easy delivery since, at that time, social sciences midwifery at UNESCO was exercised by a person who felt that such future-oriented offspring might distract one from contemporary concerns. Following her strictures, one adapted the project to concentrate on present generation responsibilities to future ones. Teleologically, however, the programme remained unchanged: namely to affirm the rights of future generations through an international instrument (e.g. charter, declaration) which would also provide a supranatural mechanism to conserve and develop those rights. In doctrine, the project is rooted in the philosophy of the unity and continuity of the human species, and on that concomitant concept of the common heritage of mankind which is the foundation of inter-generational equity. UNESCO included this programme in its outgoing Medium Term Plan (1984- 1989) which states explicitly that one of the Organization's objectives is the pursuit of a "global environmental ethic based on a wise use of the resources that the planet offers to men and that human ingenuity succeeds in discovering and turning to account. Such an aim in the long-term implies changes in the manner in which .resources are used in most countries in the world, eventually involving far-reaching changes in behaviour and recognition in the primacy of such values as solidarity and equity, in application not merely to people alive today but to those who will come after us, as opposed to behaviour guided solely by immediate self-interest". [Excerpt]