Most of what a community decides plays out over years; environmental choices play out over centuries, which means the people who will live with them are not yet here to object. A society powerful enough to change the climate, exhaust the soil, or drain water faster than it refills has become powerful enough to take from people who cannot vote, speak, or refuse, and once a generation's reach extends that far, those people count, for the same reason a silenced neighbor counts. Spending down what the future cannot rebuild or consent to is just extraction with time doing the silencing. The same pattern shows up right now wherever the costs of pollution are piled onto particular communities out of sight. So the pillar's question is not whether to weigh the future but what institutions a present generation must build to stand in for the citizens who are not yet in the room.

A political community endures across time, and every later domain depends on the conditions it leaves for the people who follow. Environment derives from [§8.11](<8.11 Technology.md>) (Technology) and [§8.7](<8.7 Mortality.md>) (Mortality). Mortality is established ([§8.7](<8.7 Mortality.md>)) as the temporal horizon against which any participant's life becomes intelligible; technology ([§8.11](<8.11 Technology.md>)) as the means by which a population's reach extends across that horizon. Applied to environmental questions, the two together imply that the political community includes not only the population living now but also the populations that will live with present choices. Failing to recognize future participants is the same kind of failure as failing to recognize current ones — located across time rather than space, but governed by the same [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>) mutual-recognition constraint. Once technology makes the future materially vulnerable to the present, intergenerational consideration follows directly.

Consider concretely an aquifer that takes ten thousand years to recharge, drawn down over fifty years to grow crops. The present generation enjoys cheap food; the next generation inherits a region without irrigation. No one had to actively harm the next generation; the present generation simply took from infrastructure they did not build and could not replenish. The same form of extraction shows up in atmospheric carbon (returns over millennia what is released over decades), in fish stocks (return over decades what is harvested over years), and in topsoil (returns over centuries what erosion removes over decades). The political question the section identifies is not whether to consume from these reserves at all (sustainable use within the reserves' replenishment rate is licensed) but how to build institutions that recognize the consumption rate against the reserve's actual replenishment, and that count the people downstream of the depletion as participants whose claim is not less serious because they cannot vote yet.

Four results land in this section.

*Intergenerational extraction is extraction across time.* The current generation can draw dividends from infrastructure (atmospheric carbon budgets, soil-regeneration cycles, ocean-acidification reserves, biodiversity stocks, freshwater aquifers) that future generations cannot build, cannot replenish on the relevant timescale, and cannot consent to having pre-spent. The same derivation that makes regulatory capture problematic in any present domain makes intergenerational extraction problematic across time on the same premises. Time is not a license to externalize costs. It is only an interval across which externalization is harder to recognize.

*The extraction pattern runs across populations as well as across time.* Environmental costs externalized intragenerationally onto specific populations follow the same structural logic the time-axis derivation runs: toxic-waste siting concentrated in fenceline communities, infrastructure-failure exposure (Hurricane Katrina, the Flint water crisis), and the racially uneven distribution of pesticide and air-quality exposure that the environmental-justice tradition has documented for decades (Bullard, *Dumping in Dixie* 1990) are extraction at the boundary of which populations the political community has been recognizing as participants whose conditions are at stake. The temporal axis and the population axis are not separate problems; they are the same structural failure of recognition operating along different dimensions. Just-transition policy (the workforce-recognition design that prevents environmental-policy adoption from being blocked by reasonable concerns of displaced workers) is the corresponding institutional answer at the labor-power register (developed at [§9.7](<9.7 Economy.md>) and [§9.14](<9.14 Convergence.md>) for the workforce-transition register specifically).

*The technology condition scales the obligation to the reach.* The framework's environmental claims are conditioned on what [§8.11](<8.11 Technology.md>) establishes about technology: a population whose technology has extended its reach to the climate, the oceans, the biosphere, and the atmosphere has a recognition obligation across that reach. A population whose technology had not extended that far would not have the same obligation, because the future would not yet be something the present could affect. The framework therefore does not impose a transhistorical environmental ethic; it derives the present-tense obligation from the present-tense reach of the technology. As technology extends further (synthetic biology, atmospheric engineering, deep-time waste storage, machine systems whose effects propagate across centuries), the recognition obligation extends with it. The fork [§8.11](<8.11 Technology.md>) closes on lands here as the species-scale test case: technology under structural-extraction political-economy is predicted to break the conditions; technology under shared-structure maintenance is predicted to save them.

*Future participants are absent from every present recognition system.* The asymmetry is not a contingent failure of present institutions; it is what time itself produces. Future participants cannot vote, cannot lobby, cannot litigate, cannot strike. Any system the political community uses to recognize direction, [§9.3](<9.3 Representation.md>) (Representation), the legal system, the price system, deliberative venues, takes input only from people already in the arrangement. The argument derives that some institution has to compensate for that absence: constitutional protections of the conditions; long-horizon advisory bodies with real standing; budget processes constrained by planetary-boundary maintenance; intergenerational-impact assessment in major decisions. The specific compensating design is underdetermined; the requirement that some such design has to exist is not.

The long traditions of intergenerational obligation reached for what this section recovers structurally. The biblical reading of stewardship as *to till it and keep it* (Genesis 2:15 NRSVUE), the Indigenous lineages of seventh-generation thinking that Haudenosaunee and other traditions have carried for centuries (Whyte on settler-colonialism-and-climate-justice; Kimmerer's *Braiding Sweetgrass* 2013 carrying the tradition into contemporary analytic conversation), Edmund Burke's contract between the dead, the living, and the unborn (1790), and the Catholic encyclical lineage on creation care (most recently *Laudato Si'*, 2015) all located the binding force of intergenerational obligation in either divine command, ancestral debt, or partnership with creation. The Inversion is the same one §6 ran on the divine attributes: the binding force the tradition located in a transcendent ground is what political life is doing in plain view, once the bearer is correctly identified as the population whose technological reach has crossed the horizon. Stewardship in the recognition sense is real, demanding, and constitutive of what a technologically-extended population can coherently do, answerable to the conditions [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>) and [§8.11](<8.11 Technology.md>) already established, not to a backup ontology. The framework's intergenerational derivation converges with the canonical analytic-philosophical engagements with future obligation: Rawls's just-savings principle (*A Theory of Justice* 1971 §44) reaches a similar standing obligation through a veil extended across generations; Parfit's non-identity problem (*Reasons and Persons* 1984 Part IV) is handled by the framework through cross-temporal recognition rather than identity-preserving counterfactual comparison; Gardiner's *A Perfect Moral Storm* (2011) develops three structural failures (intergenerational, global, theoretical) that parallel the framework's three results closely. The Earth-system-science tradition converges on the same operational requirement from a different direction. The Stockholm Resilience Centre's planetary-boundaries framework (Rockström et al. 2009; Richardson et al. 2023) identifies nine biophysical thresholds (climate change, biosphere integrity, biogeochemical flows, ocean acidification, land-system change, freshwater use, atmospheric aerosols, stratospheric ozone, and novel entities) whose transgression destabilizes the conditions under which complex political life is possible. The framework's derivation is from Earth-system science, not the premises of [§9.5](<9.5 Environment.md>); what aligns is the conclusion. The stewardship traditions and the planetary-boundaries science converge on the same operational floor: the recognition obligation across time is discharged by staying within the conditions the future presupposes.

*The framework engages the environmental-policy-tradition objection.* The opposition comes from three directions: free-market environmentalism, deep ecology, and cost-benefit prioritization. The framework grants the core insight in each: property-rights and market mechanisms can help internalize externalities where binding caps close the long-horizon recognition gap; ecological systems carry complexity and value that human-centered politics often underweights; and cost-benefit analysis belongs in implementation above the structural floor. The parting point is the floor itself. Future participants cannot vote, lobby, litigate, or enter prices, so the conditions they presuppose cannot be left to market pricing or ordinary cost-benefit tradeoff. The full objection-and-reply architecture is developed at [§9.5.1](<9.5.1 What is Disputed.md>); the parent claim is only that intergenerational recognition fixes a floor below which policy design may not fall.

A fourth direction presses from value theory rather than policy, and it is worth naming because the section's vocabulary invites it. Rolston's biocentric and systemic-value position (*Environmental Ethics* 1988; *Conserving Natural Value* 1994), distinct from the deep ecology the section already engages, holds that natural value is not exhausted by what experiencing subjects can be harmed by: non-sentient organisms pursue goods of their own, species are evaluative kinds whose extinction is the loss of a kind rather than of tokens, and ecosystems carry systemic value that the instrumental framing of 'reserves', 'stocks', and 'biodiversity stocks' cannot register. The framework grants that this instrumental vocabulary does not capture everything Rolston is tracking, and that grounding all value in harm-to-experiencers would be an arbitrary stipulation if the standing account behind it were arbitrary. But the standing account is not arbitrary: it grades moral standing by capacity for the kinds of experience the moral framework tracks (§9 root, 'Universal rights extend by capacity'; [§9.6](<9.6 Agriculture.md>)), so intrinsic value in non-experiencing nature is foreclosed by derivation rather than by oversight. Where the framework parts from Rolston is exactly here: the systemic and species-level value the biocentric tradition locates in nature itself, the framework locates in nature's standing relation to the experiencing subjects (present and future) whose conditions it maintains. The parting is principled rather than dismissive. It preserves everything the intergenerational derivation needs (ecosystems, species, and systemic stability are protected at the strength the future's conditions require) while declining to ground standing in goods no subject can experience, and it accepts that decline as the cost of a standing account that carves at capacity rather than at the species or the system.

What remains open. Climate policy, biodiversity policy, and specific technological restrictions remain design questions. The fixed constraints are intergenerational recognition, extraction across time, and the technology-conditioned scope of both. Policy designs that satisfy those constraints remain open. Designs that violate them (by drawing from temporal infrastructure future participants cannot replenish or consent to having spent) are precluded on the same logic [§9.7](<9.7 Economy.md>) establishes for present-tense extraction. Sustainable use within the constraints is licensed; general use-preclusion is not the position, and that failure mode is marked at [§9.5.2](<9.5.2 What is Required.md>) against pure-deep-ecology readings.


- [9.5.1 What is Disputed](<9.5.1 What is Disputed.md>)
- [9.5.2 What is Required](<9.5.2 What is Required.md>)
- [9.5.3 What is Predicted](<9.5.3 What is Predicted.md>)
- [9.5.4 What is Confirmed](<9.5.4 What is Confirmed.md>)
- [9.5.5 What is Concluded](<9.5.5 What is Concluded.md>)


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← [9.4.5 What is Concluded](<9.4.5 What is Concluded.md>) | [9.5.1 What is Disputed](<9.5.1 What is Disputed.md>) →
