We have an everyday language for describing our economic relation to the future, using terms like stock price, interest rate, the advance of technology, and economic growth. But none of these terms explains the source of unearned income, to show how those coming later pay the bill. Nor do they explain how lives in the present are encumbered by previous extractions from the future or how such privatized relations to the future, in which tomorrow’s forms of life become assets bought and sold in the present, contribute to the destruction of a viable collective future. In fact, the language of finance blinds us to this relationship, persuading us that future human livelihoods are not the source of the gains but their beneficiaries.

In the face of the climate crisis and other anthropogenic disruptions to the balance of earth systems, including the destruction of river basins, the collapse of habitats, the accelerating extinction of species, and the poisoning of land, sea, air, and human bodies with synthetic plastics and agricultural biocides — and aware of the very unequal vulnerability of different human communities to these disruptions — we need to understand how this blindness is produced. Having already exceeded safe and just limits to the human modification of the earth, we are seeing everywhere a belated acknowledgement that the future livability of the planet must today be taken into account.