The Coming Clash of Generations

John Elkington

February 15, 2010

Am preparing to lead a joint SustainAbility/Volans Book Club session tomorrow evening, which will focus on George Friedman’s The Next 100 Years. Reading it in its entirety recently on a flight from somewhere to somewhere, I came away even more convinced that we should be basing our work not so much on issues like climate change, important though that agenda is, but on demographics – overlaid with multiple forms of footprint analysis, of the sort that the Global Footprint Network is working on.

I will be taking in several other books that I think people should be reading, among them Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks, by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler. I am also nibbling at the edges of People Quake: Mass Migration, Ageing Nations and the Coming Population Crash, by Fred Pearce. And, on my to-buy list: The Pinch: How the Baby Boomers Took Their Childrens’ Future – and Why They Should Give It Back by David Willetts. An excellent review of the latter can be found here.

All grist for the mill in the project we are developing on ageing, entrepreneurship and sustainability, with the first brainstorm to be hosted by Accenture on 3 March. A central point made by Willetts is that there is now “a breakdown in the balance between the generations.” How long, I wonder, before younger generations – and their champions – pitch their interests to the Baby Boomers in terms of human rights?