The Good Ancestor by Roman Krznaric – review

There is much talk these days about decolonising – statues, buildings, curricula. All of that has to do with legacies of the past, but there is also a growing discussion among environmentalists about decolonising the future.

The idea is that colonised people are those who are denied representation and, as future generations have no say in the decisions taken today that will later affect them, they are effectively colonised by our present actions.

Roman Krznaric, a pop philosopher in the Alain de Botton mould, explores this predicament in his new book The Good Ancestor. Clearly, people who are not yet born cannot vote in current elections, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t be taken into account. Krznaric makes a convincing case that in our digital age of “pathological short-termism” we are giving less and less consideration to our descendants.

The subtitle of Krznaric’s book is How to Think Long Term in a Short-term World, and it is an argument for shifting our perspective from one of instant gratification to what he calls “deep-time humility” – the recognition that we are “an eye blink in cosmic time”. It is not a new concept by any means, and much of the ground he covers is almost wearily familiar.

The algorithm-fuelled acceleration of consumer culture and the shortening of the attention span, the political preoccupation on next week rather than the next century or the one after, the quick returns of boom-bust speculative capitalism, and the endless pursuit of economic growth are all identified as key drivers of short-termism.

It is hard to argue against any of that, and Krznaric doesn’t try. For him, it is a straightforward case of a terminally degraded capitalist culture living beyond its means and largely indifferent to the despoliation we’re leaving to those who come after us. As a consequence, it makes for a rather uncomplicated polemic that, ironically, is well suited to the polarised and simplified discourse that the digital world has helped to foster.

There is more than a whiff of the Ted Talk homily to much of Krznaric’s prose and plenty of new buzzwords with which to decorate dinner party debates. “Time rebel” refers to those activists who are seeking “intergenerational justice”. “Legacy mindset” describes the wish to be remembered by posterity and “cathedral thinking” applies to the projects whose the lifespans extend beyond a human lifetime.

The most important phrase of all forms the title – “good ancestor”. If we, as a species, are to survive the coming threats to our existence (he cites Toby Ord’s estimate that we have a one-in-six chance of becoming extinct in the next century), we urgently need to think about what we bequeath not just to our children but our grandchildren’s grandchildren and beyond.

Krznaric is very good at identifying the problem. He speaks of Earth Overshoot Day, the point in the annual calendar at which we exceed the planet’s biocapacity – when the use of natural resources outstrips their regeneration. Currently, he says, we reach that mark on 29 July (this year, as a result of coronavirus economic contraction, it’s been calculated as 20 August), when it should be 31 December.

Central to being a good ancestor, therefore, is achieving sustainability. How do we do this? Krznaric is scathing of the view that science will find a way. It’s the same old Enlightenment conception of progress, he argues, that has justified environmental destruction and led to the climate change crisis. He names Steven Pinker as the champion of wishful scientific thinking. “He is like a child who believes they can keep blowing up the balloon, bigger and bigger, without any prospect that it could ever burst.”

Related: Why we need worst-case thinking to prevent pandemics

The alternative Krznaric suggests is “doughnut economics”, as put forward by his wife, the economist Kate Raworth. This entails a rebalancing between social wealth and ecological protection wherein “we meet the needs of current and future generations within the means of Earth’s crucial life-supporting systems”.

Again, it is hard to argue against the ambition but that blameless sentence conceals a monumental amount of political and social restructuring of the kind that has seldom run smoothly in history. The weakness of the book is that the solutions Krznaric puts forward are so far removed from the world as it currently operates that it is impossible to know if they are utopian dreams or workable answers.

Its presiding strength is that it squarely addresses the fact that we can’t continue in this fashion. Exactly how we break out of our solipsistic time bubble and develop a productive appreciation of our responsibility to future generations is an imperative matter for discussion. The Good Ancestor is a welcome place to start it.

• The Good Ancestor: How to Think Long-term in a Short-term World by Roman Krznaric is published by WH Allen (£20). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15