ABSTRACT
This chapter's point of departure is that increasingly rapid climate changes and substantially reduced biodiversity have led to new conceptualisations of the relationships between environment, society, and time. In this chapter, these relationships are studied in terms of how current generations consider how we leave the world to future generations. The chapter distinguishes between three main understandings of temporality: clock time, event time, and natural time. It discusses how narratives are one of our most important ways of organising our perception of time and brings different understandings of temporality and narratives together through the concept of framing. Moreover, the chapter argues that national ideas are in general retrospective, while cosmopolitan ideas give priority to events in the present. Cosmopolitanism encompasses the entire world and creates a thin basis for motivation to act in solidarity. Finally, the chapter presents different approaches to studies of generations and discusses how future generations can be combined with these. It argues that future generations should be added to the established list in generational studies. People who have not yet been born cannot be studied as such, and these discussions concern the present days’ priorities.
