We Boomers won the environmental lottery

July 5, 2024

We all see the myopic folly of the person who wins big on the lottery and squanders the proceeds – discarding the possibility of a lifetime’s comfort and security for a few months or years of absurd extravagance. Why then can so few recognise that we Boomers won the environmental lottery?

In our lifetimes we have been able to achieve levels of health and education unimaginable to earlier generations, we have enjoyed unprecedented lifestyles, and yet we have done so at a pace which consumes and destroys the environment which sustains us. Unlike the spendthrift lottery winner, we may not live to see the environmental poverty that will follow from our myopic self-indulgence - that poverty that will cripple the planet’s liveability for future generations. It is they who will face these consequences.

We Boomers are, as Mike Scrafton notes, the ‘pivotal generation’. We have enjoyed the environmental lottery’s winnings, but we also have the knowledge of what must be done to protect those to come from the unmanageable consequences of our extravagance. We can see the danger, we have the knowledge to still minimise it. We owe a moral responsibility to future generations to curb our environmental extravagance urgently.