In this chapter, I will examine how Africans envision their futures and promote intergenerational justice. In African worldviews, a community is comprised of three generations: the living dead, the living, and the yet-to-be-born. The three generations are interconnected. The current generation should owe a debt of gratitude to its forbears for leaving a usable environment behind and fulfilling its moral obligation towards future generations. In the African worldview, successive generations share the environment (the land). According to African intergenerational ethics, natural resources ought not to be exploited beyond their limit, and the land ought to be taken care of for the benefit of present and future human generations, as well as for the good of non-human species. The Oromo of Ethiopia and other cultural groups in Africa do not simply consider justice, integrity, and respect as human virtues applicable to human beings, but they extend them to non-human species and Mother Earth. Thus, I argue that intergenerational thinking can help humanity to address both local and global environmental problems.

Volume 1 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations documents the lives and experiences of everyday people through the lens of human movement and mobility from 1400 to 1800. Focusing on the most important typologies of preindustrial global migrations, this volume reveals how these movements transformed global paths of mobility, the impacts of which we still see in societies today. Case studies include those that arose from the demand for free, forced, and unfree labor, long- and short-distance trade, rural/urban displacement, religious mobility, and the rise of the number of refugees worldwide. With thirty chapters from leading experts in the field, this authoritative volume is an essential and detailed study of how migration shaped the nature of global human interactions before the age of modern globalization.