Are we being good ancestors?
Jonas Salk, the mid-20th-century virologist, coined the question-turned-maxim, “ Are We Being Good Ancestors?” He called it humanity’s greatest responsibility, and said that we are not only a product of evolution, but its instruments as well.
If we want to be good ancestors, we should show future generations how we coped with an age of great change and great crises.
In Underland, Robert Macfarlane says the myriad crises of the so-called and apocalyptic era of the anthropocene asks this question more than ever.
What is the history of things to come? What will be our future fossils? As we have amplified our ability to shape the world, so we become more responsible for the long afterlives of that shaping. The Anthropocene asks of us the question memorably posed by the immunologist Jonas Salk: ‘Are we being good ancestors?’
adrienne maree brown echoes this thought in her brilliant Emergent Strategy, as a call to action:
Yes, resist the onslaught of oppression, but measure our success not just by what we stop, but by how many of us feel, and can say: I am living a life I don’t regret, a life that will resonate with my ancestors and with as many generations forward as I can imagine. I am attending to the crises of my time with my best self, I am of communities that are doing our collective best to honor our ancestors and all humans to come.