A legacy for future generations
By Marcel Côté
Have you heard of Évariste-Vital Luminais or Alphonse de Neuville? Maybe not, but you know of Vincent van Gogh. Yet, at the end of the 19th century, Luminais and de Neuville were hailed by critics as two of the greatest painters of their time. Museums prided themselves on creating a legacy for posterity and paid a small fortune for their paintings, while poor van Gogh sold just a single work of art while he was alive.
Deep down, we scoff at these 1890 burghers who preferred fashionable mediocrity to van Gogh’s genius. And how about the risks taken a few years ago by the directors of the National Gallery of Canada, which paid more than $1 million for a Barnett Newman painting that was basically a red stripe flanked by two blue ones? This painting could join the works of the Luminais of the world that are gathering dust in museum vaults. But it begs the question: what legacy do we want to leave our descendants?
It is difficult to predict what will be valuable or useful 100 years from now. Every generation wants to bequeath a positive balance sheet and a better world to the next. What is considered good or beautiful today may not be tomorrow. So what can we leave those who will follow and what should we protect so that we can pass it on intact?
I know our grandchildren and their grandchildren will figure it out, just as we did with our legacy. Are we happy with the world our grandparents left us? We can thank them for coming to Canada or for preserving our lakes, forests and wildlife.
We can also readily forgive them for destroying certain vestiges of the past and polluting here and there, but there is probably not much we can hold against them. Nevertheless, our forebears worried a great deal about the collective heritage, just as we do. One of the great debates during the 1930s was the size of the debt to be passed on to future generations. In 1945, even after financing the post-Depression recovery and the Second World War, the country’s debt was only $17 billion, less than half the annual deficits of the early 1990s. (The current debt totals $430 billion.)
Hence my great skepticism about today’s worries, such as the aging population and the scarcity of young workers bank- rupting Canada’s pension plan. Our grandchildren’s children will surely find a solution. They will smile at the concerns of their 2005 forebears who panicked about the ability of their descendants to share fairly the financial resources of their time.
Nevertheless, future generations may be in for a shock. They may not be inheriting the world we inherited from our predecessors. If we don’t change our ways, we will leave a planet seriously changed by our consumption habits.
In fact, for the first time in history, the legacy passed on from generation to generation for millions of years is in jeopardy. Mankind is imposing a tremendous burden on the earth, of which global warming is the most striking symptom. Although major natural climate cycles may have caused temperature variations over the centuries, it is becoming increasingly difficult to deny that human activities are warming the planet and producing changes that will be felt long after we are gone.
The world over, glaciers have receded by several kilometres. The habitat of Arctic wildlife has warmed up. The temperature in equatorial waters has risen significantly, fostering more hurricanes. The end of the world is not coming. Mankind will adapt. But we may go down in history as great predators who destroyed more than they built.
In that context, Canada’s prevarications about the Kyoto Protocol and our increasing greenhouse gas emissions are a shame. Each morning, millions of us drive to work in our 4X4s and SUVs, spewing out more carbon dioxide in 20 minutes than our ancestors produced in a week.
This devil-may-care attitude is destroying the legacy left to us by past generations. Our ravenous energy consumption and our modern lifestyle are profoundly affecting the human habitat, and for this we will be harshly judged by future generations. It’s time to think about what we want to leave behind and to change the way we live.
It is nice to worry about paintings that we want museums to preserve and about the deficit of the Canada Pension Plan that we will bequeath to our grandchildren. But I am sure they would prefer we leave them glaciers and Arctic habitats and all the features of the climate we and our forebears have known for thousands of years.
Marcel Côté is a partner at SECOR Inc. in Montreal |
