A New Golden Rule

The first 5 or 10 minutes of this video is well worth watching.


Bill McKibben and James Hansen spoke at this conference, but according to the NY Times, the show was stolen by Jostein Gaarder, the Norwegian author of Sophie’s World, who made a moral argument that we need a new golden rule that includes our neighboring generations... "you shall do to the next generation what you wished the previous generation had done to you."


I also really liked Gaarder's other idea that we need a new Copernican revolution. He says that the idea that idea that our generation is the most important generation of humanity, that the sun rises and sets around our generation, is as ridiculous as the notion that the sun and all the stars revolve around the earth.


At the end of the conference he said, "If we don't start thinking about the next generations, they will never stop thinking about us."