The racism on which the economics concept of regard for futurity was founded depended on a future-oriented vision of history in which the destruction such regard entailed in the present was itself a necessary sacrifice for the future.
Europeans thus sacrificed their consciences in the present. They destroyed landscapes, ways of life, entire peoples, with an eye toward future vindication. Earth’s bewildering variety was designed to drive man over time to find utility in it all, according to Rae, so that “[e]ven the barren deserts of Africa may, in after ages, be fertilized,” and water may “in time” be drawn “from the depths of the earth.” He held up as proof of Europeans’ particular regard for futurity the very ecologically and humanly devastating practices aimed at transforming the land—what the anthropologist and novelist Amitav Ghosh helpfully identifies as “terraforming”—that we now realize put the very future of life at risk.
What Europeans saw as Indigenous peoples’ careless use of “wild” terrain was in fact deeply knowledgeable and careful husbandry of land, forests, and water resources oriented toward perpetual mutual preservation of land and life. Today, climate and environmental experts advocate policies based on precisely such sustaining ecological practices as we confront a situation in which nations of the global north are, according to a 2020 study, responsible for 92 percent of all “excess global carbon dioxide emissions” and “have effectively colonized the global atmospheric commons.”
A redeemed attitude toward the land and the nonhuman beings we live alongside requires abandoning the notion of future-oriented sacrifice in a consumption-centering paradigm of “civilization.” “Sacrifice” implies giving up something to which we are objectively entitled, something actually desirable; it’s about martyring our needs for the future. But this is a time to question our assumptions about what is desirable, to recover from a consumption-driven, hyper-individualistic way of life to which we were never entitled and that has depended, from the first, on enslavement, genocide, ecological destruction, and alienation from ourselves, the land, and other beings. It is a way of life that would not be good for us or future generations even if the climate were not at stake.
Far from sacrificing consumption we ideally would indulge in, the climate crisis offers an opportunity to give up what we had no right to in the first place: not sacrifice, but redemption, from a way of life that we now know has been destructive of the Earth but have also long suspected was destructive of our humanity.
