How Can We Be Good Ancestors?

Hello to you all. Let me ask you a question. How can we be good ancestors? This, I believe, is the great existential question of our age. It's about recognizing that although we have ancestors, we too are the ancestors of the generations to come. It's about thinking about the legacies we will leave. It's about considering how we will be remembered for what we did or did not do at this pivotal moment in the human story. It's about taking the long view and, as René said, building to last. So I'd like to introduce to you four ways of thinking about being a good ancestor. But before I go there, let me introduce you to my children. I think it was a big general election at that time. My partner and I decided to give our then 11 -year-old kids an unusual birthday present. We decided to give them our votes in the election. So we all sat around the kitchen table, we discussed the party manifestos and the electoral system, and they then told us where to put the X on the ballot sheet. And in case you're wondering, they don't exactly have the same political views as their parents. Now, we did this, of course, because they have no voice in our political systems. Yet our decisions as adults will affect their lives more than our very own. And this is part of a larger problem that I think of as the tyranny of the now. The way that our politicians can't see beyond the next election or the latest opinion poll. Businesses can't see beyond the quarterly report. We're looking at our phones and clicking the buy now button. And in this age of chronic short-termism, we need to recognize there are so many long-term challenges coming our way. We need to be thinking about the next pandemic that might be on the horizon. Dealing with wealth inequality and racial injustice which get passed on from generation to generation. Dealing with the risks for new technologies like AI and genetic engineering. And of course, dealing with the global ecological crisis which is right here, right now, in floods and droughts and storms. But it also has a slow violence behind it. It will get worse year on year, decade on year. How are we going to be on decade? How are we going to feed 10 billion people with the prospect of massive global crop failures in the years to come? And one of the ways I think about this is that I believe that humankind, particularly those of us living in the wealthy countries of the global north, we have colonized the future. We treat the future like a distant colonial outpost devoid of people where we can freely dump ecological degradation and technological risk as if there was nobody there. Yet, of course, that future is full of all the millions and billions of generations to come. But it can be quite difficult sometimes to picture them. So let me help you do that. This is an image I call the scale of unborn generations. There in the little green circle are the 8 billion of us alive today. If you go back 50,000 years, let's get long-term here, almost 100 billion people have been born and died. If we go forward 50,000 years, assuming current birth rates level off and stabilize, nearly 7 trillion people will be born. So there in that giant orange circle, all your children and grandchildren, if you have them, and their grandchildren and their grandchildren, and the communities and friends on whom they will depend, how will they remember us? And somebody who really thought about this issue was the great immunologist Jonas Salk, most famous developing the polio vaccine in the 1950s. But in later life, he said, the great question facing our civilization is this, are we being good answers? And he believed that if we were going to be remembered well by future generations, we would need to extend our time horizons. And instead of thinking just on the scale of seconds, minutes, and hours, we need to think on the scale of years, decades, centuries, and even beyond that. And in order to do that, how do we do that? Well, I think we need to recognize a distinction in the human brain between what I think of as the marshmallow brain and the acorn brain. The marshmallow brain is the part of our neuroanatomy, which is all about short-term thinking, instant rewards, immediate gratification, of course, named after the famous marshmallow test where kids had the marshmallow put in front of them in the 1960s and were told if they could resist eating it for 15 minutes, they were rewarded with two marshmallows. And the famous finding was that most kids couldn't resist and they snatched the snack. But this is not the only story of who we are. We also have an acorn brain, which lives here in the dorsolateral. The acorn brain is the central prefrontal cortex. The acorn brain is all about long-term thinking and planning and strategizing. And there's always a struggle going on between the marshmallow and the acorn. Do we upgrade to the latest iPhone or plant a seed in the ground for posterity? Do we party tonight or do we save for our pensions for tomorrow? And we need to learn to switch on the acorn brain. In fact, human beings are quite good at this. Other creatures do plan ahead a bit. So a chimpanzee might get a stick, strip off the leaves, and turn it into a tool to put into a termite hole. But they will never make a dozen of those tools and set them aside for next week. But that's what human beings do. And we need to get a lot better at it. And one way we can do it is through what I think of as cathedral thinking. The idea of embarking on long-term projects going beyond your career, maybe beyond your own lifetime, named after the medieval cathedral builders where those who put in the first foundation stones knew that they would never see the building finished within their own life. Think of the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona started in the 1880s. It still isn't finished. And it's cathedral thinking that's allowed humankind to build the Great Wall of China and voyage into space. And one of my favorite examples of this are the sewers built in London starting in the 1850s. At that time, raw sewage was being dumped into the River Thames. Tens of thousands of people were dying of cholera and other diseases each year. But in 1858, in the long, hot summer of that year, the smell, the stink, it was known as the Great Stink, the smell was so bad that even members of Parliament in the Palace of Westminster on the river couldn't breathe. And that's when they passed the emergency legislation to build the sewers. And the thing is this, they built the sewers twice as big as they needed to be for the population at the time. And they used very expensive bricks and cement. And that's why those sewers are still in use today. And they used to be more than a century later. It's a brilliant example of cathedral thinking. You might even think of it as sewer thinking. And we need more of that. And there are many great examples of it around today. One of them, for example, is the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, collecting millions of seeds in an indestructible rock bunker in the Arctic Circle that's designed to last for a thousand years. It's a kind of botanical Noah's Ark. Or think about the Green Belt Movement started in Kenya by the great Wangari Matai in the late 1970s, designed to restore Kenya's ecology. Tens of millions of trees have been planted there in the decades since. More than 30,000 women have been trained in agroforestry skills. So my question to you now is this, really. What is your cathedral thinking project? What's not just your one-year plan or your 10-year plan, but your 100-year plan? Let me now turn to a second way to be a good ancestor. Developing a legacy mindset. Now, of course, with our legacies, we want to think about the skills, the culinary skills, let's say, that we might pass on to future generations. Or the recipes, the thousand-year-old strudel recipe we might pass on to future generations. But what about also passing on a livable planet? And where I find inspiration in thinking about the legacies we leave is in the idea of seventh-generation decision making. Found amongst many indigenous communities. And here's a lovely quote about it from Oren Lyons from the Haudenosaunee or Iroquois Confederacy. He says this, We are looking ahead, as is one of the first mandates given us as chiefs, to make sure that every decision we make relates to the welfare and the well -being of the seventh generation to come. And that is the basis by which we make decisions in council. Will this be to the benefit of the seventh generation? Now, it can be quite hard to think like that, particularly in our hyper-individualistic world where we are cut off from generations past and future. And in order to make a bit more of an emotional connection to future generations, I'd like us to do a little exercise together. It's called Human Layers, developed by the Long Time Project in London. It'll just take a couple of minutes. In order to do it, I'd like you all to please stand up and make sure you've got a tiny little bit of space in front of you. A little bit of space. Okay, here we go. So, I'd like you all now just to close your eyes for a moment and just take a deep breath. And with your eyes still closed, I want you to imagine the face of a young person in your life who you really care about. It could be a nephew or niece or child or grandchild. Just picture their face for a moment. And now, with your eyes still closed, I'd like you to take a small step forward. You've now traveled 30 years into the future. Again, think of this young person's face, now 30 years older, and think for a moment about the joys in their life and the struggles they might be facing. And now, with your eyes still closed, take a final small step forward. It's now that young person's 90th birthday party. They're 90 years old, surrounded by family and friends and loved ones and work colleagues and neighbors. Just go and have a look out the window for a moment. What kind of world do you see out there? What kind of crops are growing? What's on the supermarket shelves, if anything? What are people eating? And now, slowly open your eyes again and just stay standing. What I'd invite you now to do is that when I give you the signal, but only when I give you the signal, I would like you to get in a pair with someone next to you or behind you, ideally a stranger, I want you to spend just two minutes talking about the question on the screen there. What did this imaginative journey make you think, and how did it make you feel? So what did it make you think, and how did it make you feel? So on the count of three, I want you to blow the roof off this circus big top with your conversations. One, two, three, go. One, two, three, go. One minute left. One minute. One, two, go. One, two, go. of Quebec and Canada, in over 100 cities and municipalities, they actually have a chair for future generations when they're having council meetings decorated by local school kids to bring their voices into the room. Or there's a company called Faith in Nature, a pharmaceutical company, where they legally have given a seat to nature on the board and they have a legal obligation not just to make money but also to care about the living world and the people who will inhabit it. And so I ask you, you know, have you given, could you give a seat to future generations and nature herself when you're making decisions in your businesses, in your restaurants? But let's turn to a third way to be a good ancestor, which is expanding our empathic imaginations. Empathy is all about the art of stepping into the shoes of other people and seeing the world through their eyes. It's the fundamental social force which bonds us together. It creates cooperation, enables us to be resilient through crises and for civilizations to survive through the long term. And of course, the food industry has a special place in empathy building because the ritual of eating is one of those things that creates empathic bonds. The word, you know, companion comes from, as you know, originally from the sharing of bread together. Let me just introduce you to a couple of empathy building projects I've been involved in. One of them is called The Oxford Muse, which was invented to create conversations between strangers by a social historian called Theodore Zeldin, who you might know. He created the Oxford Food Symposium back in 1981. And for many years, I worked there organizing what were called conversation meals, where we'd invite people from different realms of life, different age groups, different socioeconomic backgrounds, different religions, and you would sit down with a stranger. And instead of being given a menu of food, you're given a menu of conversation with questions on it like, what have you learnt about the different varieties of love in your life? Or in what ways would you like to be more courageous? And it was kind of like the opposite of speed dating. You talk for two hours, not for two minutes. And another project I started about 10 years ago, I invented the world's first empathy museum, which was created to literally step into the shoes of other people. It's an international art project. It travels around the world. We have a giant shoe box that says a mile in my shoes on the side. You walk in the world's first empathy shoe shop. You'll be literally fitted with a pair of shoes belonging to a stranger. It could be a Syrian refugee or a Buddhist monk or a chef or an environmental activist. And you can literally walk a mile in their shoes while listening to an audio narrative of them talking about their life in their words. We've collected hundreds and thousands of pairs of shoes. Everywhere we go, we collect new shoes and stories. It's in Montreal at the moment. We've got shoes on particular themes like migration or climate change. We haven't yet done one in the food industry. I think that might be quite interesting because we often hear about the empathy deficit in the food industry. For example, between those working back of house, not really understanding the stress and strains of those working front of house and vice versa. And it might be interesting even to conduct kind of empathy job swap experiments where those up front go and work in the kitchens for a week, a year, and the other way around as well. But let me just take you now to a final way to be a good ancestor, which is the idea of finding historical inspiration, learning the lessons of history. History, I think, is one of the most undervalued resources for thinking about the future of humanity. And I'm very inspired by this wonderful quote from Goethe, who said, He who cannot draw on 3,000 years is living from hand to mouth. I love that idea of history as nourishment. And let me just take you back to one moment in history, which comes from my book, History for Tomorrow, which is this. Imagine you're standing on the old wooden Nihonbashi Bridge in the ancient Japanese city of Edo, now known as Tokyo. It's around 1750. In the era of the Togugawa shoguns, people are chatting, laborers are pushing cartloads of rice, seafood traders are rushing across to the fish market. Now, what made Edo, today's Tokyo, so remarkable was not just that it was a huge city of over a million people, so far larger than London or Paris or even Copenhagen at the time, but it also operated what we would today call a circular economy, where almost everything was reused, repaired, repurposed, or recycled. And partly because Japan at the time wasn't trading much with the outside world, there were shortages of precious resources like wood and cotton. So, for instance, a tradition of patchwork developed, known as borro, meaning tattered rags, where fragments of old cotton cloth were sewn together into garments, which were then passed on down the generations. Just like this one I'm wearing now, which is over 100 years old. Let me just go a little twirl. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.