Tomorrow isn’t such a long time
Whatever the answers to preserving our world’s natural resources might be, it seems clear that they won’t come overnight. How, then, can scientists and governments ensure that the steps they take today won’t jeopardize the fate of future generations? The answer, Harvard researchers say, may lie in part in a cornerstone to modern society — democratic process. Martin Nowak, a Harvard professor of mathematics and biology and the director of the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, and David Rand, an assistant professor of psychology and economics at Yale, worked with colleagues on a study in which allowing people to vote on the harvesting of resources led to the preservation of the resources for future generations. The study is described in a June 26 paper published in Nature. “There has been a great deal of work on how people cooperate with those they see every day — their colleagues or friends,” Nowak said. “But an...