ABSTRACT
At a time when climate change seemed a fairly remote and, at worst, slowly and incrementally unfolding prospect, the World Commission on Environment and Development issued its report, Our Common Future, defi ning sustainable development as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs” (WCED 1987, 43). This defi nition, rehearsed catechism-like in the pronouncements of sustainability educators through the last decade of one century and the fi rst decade of another, becomes problematic given what is now understood about climate change. First, we better appreciate that the impacts of human-induced climate change are “seriously backloaded,” a “substantially deferred phenomenon” (Gardiner 2008, 31-32). Hence, the effects of global heating1 that we are currently experiencing are primarily the outcome of CO2 emissions from some time in the past (ibid.). Second, carbon build-up in the atmosphere is an inexorable phenomenon that is not easy, and may be impossible, to moderate or reverse within a crisisavoiding timescale, unfolding as it does to its own timetable (ibid.). The fi rst point calls into question our agency in contributing to the wellbeing of at least more immediate future generations (whose carbon fate may already be more or less sealed) and also the possibility of our ever being held specifi cally and primarily accountable by future generations for any climate change effects. The latter point also feeds into a sense of our helplessness about promoting ‘development’ of a kind that we can be assured will be of benign near-time intergenerational effect. The impact of efforts to enable future generations to meet their own needs appears indeterminable. The complexity of climate change thus renders elusive the connection of cause and effect and so provides fertile ground for a ‘business as usual’ disposition to prevail and for self-deception to fl ourish. “Climate change may be a perfect moral storm,” writes Stephen Gardiner (ibid. 37):
. . . its complexity may turn out to be perfectly convenient for us, the current generation, and indeed each successor generation as it comes to
occupy our position. For one thing, it provides each generation with a cover under which it can seem to be taking the issue seriously-by negotiating weak and largely substanceless global accords, for example, and then heralding them as great achievements-when really it is simply exploiting its temporal position. . . . By avoiding overtly selfi sh behavior, an earlier generation can take advantage of the future without the unpleasantness of admitting it-either to others, or, perhaps more importantly, to itself [italics in original].
