You, your family, the government and the corporations are working together to make life miserable for your grandchild. Born into the injustice of culture, consumption, production and equity, all 4 stakeholders owe more to your unborn granddaughter than one thinks.
Justice across generations can be understood by one phrase and one analogy.
“You have no moral priority over the future generation.”
Imagine that your mother baked a pie and your siblings come home at different times, and each has been allocated a piece of the pie. This pie contains the elixir of life and is crucial for your survival. Would it be fair for your older brother, who comes early, to eat the entire pie or just his share of the pie?
In any circumstance, if any of your siblings decide to overconsume the pie simply by virtue of arriving before the others, it is a crime and grave injustice.
Let’s explore the analogy further: your mother represents the public sector, and the pie represents the earth’s resources. Not all mothers are great, though. The governments and private sector today, however, are an evil, abusive mother who knows she won’t be at home long enough to see the siblings who come later as her moral responsibility. They feed the entire pie to your oldest brother, who came home the earliest, to gain all his support. However, this pie is essential for survival, so you go to the shop and buy it, which you will pay for, even though it was free for your brother.
The paradox is that you will also consume the full pie and leave none for your younger sister, who will arrive home after you. She will once again have to pay the shop to buy the pie. She will also finish the entire pie instead of dividing it equitably for the siblings after it, and the cycle repeats itself. What if one sibling has no money to spend on this pie?
At some point, a sustainable shop will have fewer resources to make pie, making the ingredients more expensive until they end up in total depletion. Keyword: environmentally sustainable.
An unsustainable shop, on the other hand, will keep on wanting to earn and go to their supplier to gather more resources for making a pie even if it destroys the planet because the shop owner won’t live long enough to see it happen.
The question is why isn’t the evil, abusive mother doing anything? Because the pie is still technically being produced, it is just a matter of affordability and who gets it. Plus, she won’t be here for long; the blame can shift to the next adult.
We are the sibling who arrives first; it is key that we don’t consume the full pie and leave none for our future generation. The pie is the earth’s natural resource; even with the presence of an evil mother and shop owner, we still have control over individual consumption. You can choose to leave your sibling’s share of the pie.