The Green Guardians of Future Generations

Green Guardians of the Future an idea from the same University that brought us Climategate

Rupert Read a philosopher at the University of East Anglia Climategate Central has come up with a radical new way to control the way we live, by proposing those yet to be born should be represented and have a voice.

When the ecomentalists present a new idea control scenario and describe it as “radical” and “straightforward” then you can safely bet, it will be anything but straightforward.

It’s a new year, so let’s start with a new idea: a democratic body to safeguard the basic needs and fundamental interests of future people.

That is the proposal of Rupert Read, a philosopher at the University of East Anglia, in a report called Guardians of the Future for the think tank Green House. The core idea is both radical and straightforward: a council of “Guardians of Future Generations”, chosen like a jury from the general public, would sit above the existing law-making bodies and have two core powers. A power to veto legislation that threatened the basic needs and interests of future people and the power to force a review, following suitable public petition, of any existing legislation that threatens the interests of future people.

Read’s view is doubtless one where frakking and drilling for oil would be detrimental to future generations, who would by proxy want a stagnant economy in a Green Agrarian Society.

Read accepts the idea of a powerful legal body protecting future people will be seen as extreme. “It is a very radical idea but many great ideas in history were once seen as outlandish,” he says. When the Green Party, of which Read is a member and a former councillor, started promoting recycling in the 1970s and 1980s, he says “people laughed at and ridiculed us – now it is taken for granted.”

Recylcing forced on the population by punitive fines from local authorities for leaving the rubbish bin out too long, for having the wrong trash in the wrong bin or having the bin on the wrong bit of pavement, the Guardians of Future Generations would doubtless involve punitive measures, but then has there ever been idea  from the Greens that did not involve harsh penalties for failing to comply?