Introduction

This chapter explains the central argument of the book and elaborates on the means the book will take to establish the argument. The chapter opens with a short fictional account illustrating the risks and challenges posed by long-term nuclear waste disposal. Central among these are the risks of the meaning of disposal sites being misunderstood or lost in the intervening millennia. This is followed by a reading of results of the Human Interference Task Force (HITF), assembled to provide expert recommendations on preventing uninformed interference with geologic waste repositories. The HITF provides the context for the central claim of the book: that current conceptions of responsibility depend on an understanding of future generations as minimally continuous with present generations in terms of knowledge and interests. The chapter concludes with a summary of the four following chapters of the book.