Future Generation

China Martens started her pioneering mamazine The Future Generation in 1990. She was a young anarchist punk rock mother who didn’t feel that the mamas in her community had enough support, so she began publishing articles on radical parenting in an age before the internet. The anthology of her zine, The Future Generation: The Zine-Book for Subculture Parents, Kids, Friends & Others, was first printed in 2007 and has been out of print for many years. Covering sixteen years, it uses individual issues as chapters, focusing on personal writing, and retaining the character of a zine that changed over the years—from her daughter’s birth to teenagehood and beyond. We are proud to present a tenth-anniversary edition including a new afterword by China’s grown daughter, Clover. The Future Generation remains a timeless resource for parents, caregivers, and those who care about them. Though first published in the 1990s, many of the essays and observations—about parenting, children, and surviving in a hostile political climate—still ring true today. The next four years are going to be especially demanding for those trying to balance parenting, politics, and survival. We’re going to need the voices and experiences in The Future Generation now more than ever.

Peter Lawrence�s Justice for Future Generations breaks new ground by using a multidisciplinary approach to tackle the issue of what ethical obligations current generations have towards future generations in addressing the threat of climate change. This

Finely written and meticulously documented, this book describes how--very early on--a small group of ordinary citizens began extraordinary efforts to demonstrate that the JFK assassination could not have happened the way the government said it did. In time, their efforts had an enormous impact on public opinion, but this account concentrates on the months before the controversy caught fire, when people with skeptical viewpoints still saw themselves as lone voices. Material seldom seen by the public includes a suppressed photograph of the grassy knoll, an unpublished 1964 interview with an eyewitness, the earliest mention of the "magic bullet," and an analysis of the commotion surrounding New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison's charge that anti-Castro CIA operatives were involved.

Before it was written, this book was spoken. For ten winter days in 1977, the orator Paul John—widely respected as a dean of Yup’ik elders, and recognized for his tireless advocacy of Yup’ik language and traditions—held an audience of Yup’ik students rapt at Nelson Island High School, in southwest Alaska. Hour after hour he spoke to the young people, sharing life experiences and Yup’ik narratives, never repeating a tale. Now, more than a quarter-century after Paul John’s extraordinary performance, Sophie Shield’s translations and Ann Fienup-Riordan’s editing have brought his words back to life, and to a new audience. This book records one elder’s attempt to create a moral universe for future generations through stories about the special knowledge of the Yup’ik people. Tales both authentically Yup’ik and marked by Paul John’s own unique innovations are presented in a bilingual edition, with Yup’ik and English text presented in facing pages. As Paul John says, "In this whole world, whoever we are, if people speak using their own language, they will be presenting their identity and it will be their strength."

The things we do today may make life worse for future generations. But why should we care what happens to people who won't be born until after all of us are gone? Some philosophers have treated this as a question about our moral responsibilities, and have argued that we have duties of beneficence to promote the well-being of our descendants. Rather than focusing exclusively on issues of moral responsibility, Samuel Scheffler considers the broader question of why and how future generations matter to us. Although we lack a developed set of ideas about the value of human continuity, we are more invested in the fate of our descendants than we may realize. Implicit in our existing values and attachments are a variety of powerful reasons for wanting the chain of human generations to persist into the indefinite future under conditions conducive to human flourishing. This has implications for the way we think about problems like climate change. And it means that some of our strongest reasons for caring about the future of humanity depend not on our moral duty to promote the good but rather on our existing evaluative attachments and on our conservative disposition to preserve and sustain the things that we value. This form of conservatism supports rather than inhibits a concern for future generations, and it is an important component of the complex stance we take toward the temporal dimension of our lives.

This book discusses imaginary future generations and how current decision-making will influence those future generations. Markets and democracies focus on the present and therefore tend to make us forget that we are living in the present, with ancestors preceding and descendants succeeding us. Markets are excellent devices to equate supply and demand in the short term, but not for allocating resources between current and future generations, since future generations do not exist yet. Democracy is also not “applicable” for future generations, since citizens vote for candidates who will serve members of their, i.e., the current, generation. In order to overcome these shortcomings, the authors discusses imaginary future generations and future ministries in the context of current decision-making in fields such as the environment, urban management, forestry, water management, and finance. The idea of imaginary future generations comes from the Native American Iroquois, who had strong norms that compelled them to incorporate the interests of people seven generations ahead when making decisions.

What do we owe to our descendants? How do we balance their needs against our own? Tim Mulgan develops a new theory of our obligations to future generations, based on a new rule-consequentialist account of the morality of individual reproduction. He argues that the resulting theory accounts for a wide range of independently plausible intuitions - covering individual morality, intergenerational justice, and international justice. In particular, the moderate consequentialist approach is superior to its two main rivals in this area - person-affecting theories and traditional consequentialism. The former fall foul of Parfit's Non-Identity Problem, while the latter are invariably implausibly demanding. Mulgan also claims that most puzzles in contemporary value theory (such as Parfit's Repugnant Conclusion) are actually puzzles in the theory of right action, and can only be solved if we abandon strict consequentialism for a more moderate alternative. The heart of the book is the first systematic exploration of the rule-consequentialist account of the morality of individual reproduction. Mulgan demostrates that this account is superior to all available alternatives, both consequentialist and non-consequentialist. Once we recognise the intergenerational dimension, moral and political philosophy cannot be considered in isolation. The latter must be founded on the former. Rule consequentialism provides the best foundation for a theory of intergenerational justice. Future People brings together several different contemporary philosophical discussions: obligations to future generations, the morality of individual reproduction, the demands of morality, and international justice. While the focus is on developing a new account, there are also substantial discussions of alternative views, especially contract-based accounts of intergenerational justice and competing forms of consequentialism.

Finely written and meticulously documented, this book describes how--very early on--a small group of ordinary citizens began extraordinary efforts to demonstrate that the JFK assassination could not have happened the way the government said it did. In time, their efforts had an enormous impact on public opinion, but this account concentrates on the months before the controversy caught fire, when people with skeptical viewpoints still saw themselves as lone voices. Material seldom seen by the public includes a suppressed photograph of the grassy knoll, an unpublished 1964 interview with an eyewitness, the earliest mention of the "magic bullet," and an analysis of the commotion surrounding New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison's charge that anti-Castro CIA operatives were involved.