Contemporary climate discourse often invokes “future generations” as the moral horizon of environmental responsibility. This language carries emotional force, yet it positions the future as something separate from the present, a space that can be managed through technology or policy. Young people who mobilise for climate justice are frequently imagined as those who will inherit a damaged world rather than as active custodians within an ongoing lineage of care.
This framing reflects the temporal logic of industrial modernity, which treats the present as a site of extraction and the future as a space of endless possibility, growth, and technological rescue.
By projecting responsibility forward, the dominant discourse separates people from the consequences of present-day harm. The future becomes something abstract and distant, while existing relationships with land, communities, and ancestors are obscured.
This rhetoric also aligns with economic systems that depend on postponing accountability. If justice is always oriented towards a future that has not yet arrived, structural change can be deferred. Governments and corporations can promise innovation, targets, and net-zero timelines while continuing practices that reproduce ecological and social harm in the present. The language of “saving future generations” thus functions not only as a moral appeal, but also as a framework that can reinforce existing approaches and priorities.
Ancestral time presents a different temporal horizon. Within Indigenous and land-based philosophies, time unfolds as cyclical and relational. The past continues to live through memory, land, and practice, while the future extends from relationships nurtured in the present. From this perspective, young people stand within a continuum of responsibility that begins long before their birth and continues beyond their lifetimes.
The term Indigenous is used here in a broad and respectful sense to describe diverse traditions that share relational and place-based understandings of time and ecology, while acknowledging the distinct knowledges of specific communities. In many Indigenous cosmologies, ancestors, the living, and the unborn coexist within a shared moral field. First Nations teachings in North America and Māori perspectives express these temporal ethics through kinship with land and water, where ancestry is understood as a living relationship that sustains both community and environment. Youth climate activism can therefore be read as an act of remembrance that renews inherited obligations to sustain the conditions that make life possible.
For Māori communities in Aotearoa (New Zealand), ancestral time is articulated through whakapapa, a system of relationships connecting people to ancestors, descendants, land, rivers, and oceans. These relationships shape cultural practice, governance, and environmental stewardship. This understanding is reflected in the recognition of the Whanganui River as a legal person which frames land and water as part of an ongoing lineage of responsibility. For Māori youth engaged in environmental advocacy, climate action is closely tied to sustaining these relationships, with efforts to protect waterways and ecosystems understood as expressions of inherited responsibility and continuity.
Among many First Nations communities in North America, ancestral time is expressed through teachings that emphasise long-term responsibility and relational stewardship. The Haudenosaunee principle of considering the impact of decisions on the seventh generation articulates a temporal ethic that links present action with ancestral memory and future wellbeing. During movements to protect land and water, Indigenous youth have framed environmental action as an intergenerational responsibility grounded in relationships with territory, community, and history. Within this context, climate activism emerges as participation in a living continuum of care rather than a response to distant future risks.
To inherit ecological responsibility is to carry memory. Ancestral memory preserves both practical and ethical knowledge: how to live within ecological limits, how to maintain reciprocity with land and water, and how to express gratitude through action. Storytelling and ceremony sustain these inheritances, translating memory into practice. For young activists, connecting to ancestral memory redefines what it means to pursue justice. It links protest to continuity and situates activism within a lineage of care. Māori and First Nations teachings conceive ancestry as a living network of relations through which responsibility circulates. These traditions hold that caring for the land upholds the wellbeing of both ancestors and future generations.
Such knowledge systems offer a restorative way of thinking about youth engagement in climate movements. Rather than carrying the weight of planetary failure, young people can be seen as guardians of continuity. Their activism is political, cultural, and ethical, grounded in remembering how to live well within the world.
Ancestral time transforms intergenerational justice into an ethic of relationship. The living generation participates in a continuum of care that sustains balance among humans, nonhumans, and ecosystems. This sense of continuity is expressed through acts of tending, cultivation, and restoration that maintain the integrity of the web of life. Care endures through attention, patience, and shared labour. Future wellbeing arises from the preservation of relational balance in the present, rather than from distant policy goals. For young people, climate responsibility is lived through reciprocity in the relationships that sustain existence.
Indigenous approaches to stewardship emerge from participation rather than authority. To act responsibly involves acknowledging dependence on the earth and supporting its capacity to care in return. This ethic of reciprocity grounds climate justice in everyday practice and connects generations through shared acts of maintenance and gratitude.
Recognising climate responsibility through ancestral time also carries decolonial significance. Colonial modernity imposed a linear conception of progress that disrupted relational temporalities and severed connections between people, ancestors, and ecosystems. Youth movements that embrace ancestral ethics of care challenge this legacy by asserting time as relational, shared, and continuous. Across the world, Indigenous and Global Majority youth are weaving ancestral teachings into climate activism.
Movements such as the Pacific Climate Warriors, a network of young activists from Pacific Island nations, frame their advocacy around the protection of ancestral homelands affected by rising sea levels. Sámi youth in northern Europe connect opposition to mining and energy projects with the preservation of reindeer herding landscapes and cultural traditions, and Indigenous Youth for Wet’suwet’en in Canada frame engagement with pipeline debates through responsibilities to ancestral territory and future generations, linking ecological defence with ancestral continuity. Their calls for justice are grounded in memory, kinship, and place. These movements demonstrate that the struggle for climate justice involves restoring relational time and remembering how to live within cycles of interconnectedness.
This perspective can also be read as a form of temporal sovereignty. It allows communities to define the pace and purpose of their resistance according to values of balance and continuity, rather than the speed of industrial progress.
For young activists, reclaiming this temporal agency turns climate justice into a project of ethical and cultural renewal.
Through this perspective, young people are placed within an ecology of responsibility that is both inherited and ongoing. Justice arises from acts of remembrance that sustain connection. The future, within this view, already lives in the relationships maintained or neglected each day. To inhabit ancestral time is to practise hope as care and to approach activism as the renewal of belonging. Young people become continuators of an ancient conversation about harmony and coexistence. Their movements seek not only to prevent loss, but to restore relationship. In recognising this inheritance, climate justice emerges as an intergenerational act of repair, a promise renewed in every gesture of attention, gratitude, and stewardship.
Olya K-Mehri is a researcher and practitioner in climate justice, working across a national public-sector consultancy and leading IDVRM’s Centre for Climate, Migration and Place.
The opinions and experiences presented in guest articles are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Center.
