Somewhere in a drawer is a document that names people who do not exist yet. A grandchild's children. "Issue then living." The remainder. Estate planning is one of the few places ordinary life routinely counts future people, and it does so with real precision: percentages, ages, conditions, a trustee bound by law to be fair to them.
The document assumes one thing it never writes down. That when those people open it, the water still comes.
This post is for the person drafting that document, the trustee holding it, and the foundation whose charter says in perpetuity. It is not an argument that you should care about future generations. You already do; you wrote them into the plan. It is about the one line the plan leaves out.
what future generations actually inherit
Future generations are the people who will live after the people making decisions today. In a family, they are the grandchildren and the children those grandchildren have not had yet. In a trust, they are the remainder beneficiaries. In a foundation, they are whoever the mission is for in 2080.
What they inherit comes in two parts, and only one of them gets drafted.
| what the plan transfers | what actually arrives with it |
|---|---|
| the deed to the ranch | whatever is left of the aquifer under it |
| the farm | the soil, at whatever depth the next fifty years leave it |
| the coastal house | the shoreline, wherever it is by then |
| the endowment | its purchasing power in a hotter, drier, more expensive world |
| the water right | a share of a river that may not fill it |
The left column is drafted, reviewed, and defended in court. The right column arrives anyway. It is the condition of the living systems the documents sit inside, and it is what the heirs will actually live in.
A future generation inherits two things: what the documents transfer, and the condition of the world the documents are opened in. Only the first is written down.
That is the whole argument. The rest is what to do about it.
trust law already counts future people
Fiduciaries have been legally obliged to future people for a long time. The Uniform Prudent Investor Act, adopted in some form by nearly every U.S. state, puts it in one sentence: "If a trust has two or more beneficiaries, the trustee shall act impartially in investing and managing the trust assets, taking into account any differing interests of the beneficiaries." The income beneficiary wants cash now. The remainder beneficiary — often unborn — wants the principal intact later. The trustee is required to hold both.
So the mechanism for weighing future people against present ones is not missing. It exists, it is enforceable, and it is measured in dollars. What it lacks is a column for the aquifer. A trustee can be flawlessly impartial between the income beneficiary and the remainderman and still hand the remainderman a section of land with no water under it, because nothing in the portfolio ever recorded that the water was an asset.
Impartiality is not a spending power. The Uniform Prudent Investor Act tells a trustee how to invest and balance beneficiaries. It does not authorize dipping into remainder to fund a place. The actor who can put a named basin in the instrument is the settlor, or a foundation or donor-advised fund writing a grant. A trustee can follow that instruction. A trustee cannot invent it.
Two neighbors this post is not. The effective-altruist version of this question counts future people in the trillions and asks what we owe them; that is a real conversation and it has its own post. The wealth-management version asks how to hold assets across generations without a harvest; that is the forever asset. This post sits between them: not how many heirs, not which asset class, but what condition the world is in when the heirs arrive.
a story is what you inherit when the system is gone
Take one place, because one is enough.
The High Plains aquifer — most people know it by its largest formation, the Ogallala — underlies about 175,000 square miles in parts of eight states, from South Dakota to Texas. It supplies drinking water to roughly 82 percent of the 2.3 million people living above it, and about 95 percent of what is pumped goes to irrigation. Much of the water in it is paleowater: it fell as rain during and before the last ice age. In parts of the southern High Plains, less than an inch of today's precipitation reaches the aquifer in a year.
The U.S. Geological Survey has tracked it from before serious pumping began, around 1950. Its 2023 report is precise. Between predevelopment and 2019, water levels fell an area-weighted average of 16.5 feet across the whole aquifer. In individual wells the decline reached 265 feet. Recoverable water in storage dropped by about 286 million acre-feet, roughly ten percent of the total — and about 170 million of those acre-feet came out from under Texas alone.
Ten percent sounds survivable, and for the aquifer as a whole it is. But an aquifer is not inherited as an average. It is inherited as the saturated thickness under one particular section of land, and along the southern High Plains the USGS already maps areas of little or no saturated thickness, where a new well will likely not yield water. The land your family holds sits in one place, not in the average.
This is what path-dependence means for an heir. Water that arrived before the last ice age ended and left in forty years of pumping is not coming back on any timescale a trust document contemplates. The deed to that section transfers cleanly in 2060. The people who receive it inherit the paper, and a story about the water their great-grandparents grew corn with.
A deed is a claim on a place. It is not the place. When the system under the deed is gone, what the heirs receive is the story.
For the aquifer as a natural asset — who depends on it, what it is worth, what a playa does — read the $35 billion asset nobody owns. The point here is narrower: this is the shape of the thing the plan leaves out, under land that is already in someone's estate.
price is a bridge, not the worth
None of this is a reason to put a dollar figure on a grandchild's water and call it settled. The dollar figure is not what the aquifer is worth. It is what lets a trustee act on the aquifer's behalf with money the trust already governs.
That is the job ensurance does. It funds the protection, restoration, and stewardship of a named natural asset before the loss, rather than paying out after it. The natural asset — the recharge zone, the playa, the headwater forest, the peatland — is the thing being handed down. Ensurance is how its condition gets funded so there is a working system to hand down.
For a bequest or a trustee, the instrument that fits is a certificate: a claim tied one-to-one to a specific place, with that place's condition and proceeds attached to it rather than to a theme. You can see what named places look like today at specific ensurance. Three features matter for this reader in particular.
The payment is present-tense: it funds a system that is generating water, soil, or habitat now, so there is no counterfactual to defend and no loss event required. Condition is what gets reported: whether the place is working — recharge, saturated thickness, canopy, flow — not only whether a number went up. And the hold can end: a place can move along a path to entrust, where it is permanently protected and the financial claim retires. A trust that holds a certificate to entrust hands the next generation a completed act, not another position to manage.
what a trustee or a bequest can actually do
Three moves, in the order the paperwork usually allows.
Name the place, not the cause. "The environment" in a bequest often becomes a grant to whichever large organization counsel names first. A named stock — this aquifer's recharge zone, this river's headwaters, this wetland — can be identified, monitored, and reported on for the life of the trust. Specificity is what makes the intent enforceable.
Fund condition, not only title. Tens of millions of acres in the United States sit under conservation easements that restrict development and often fund little ongoing stewardship; the stewardship gap is why protected land still degrades. A bequest that buys title and stops there has protected a story. One that also funds the place's condition has protected the place.
Choose a hold that finishes. Most long claims roll forever. A certificate held toward entrust ends in permanence. For a trust with remainder beneficiaries, that alignment is unusual: the fiduciary's duty to the unborn and the place's path to being beyond claim point the same direction.
Where this sits on the ledger is a question for your counsel. A grant from a foundation or a donor-advised fund can fund a named place, with the recipient holding legal control; a personal hold lives in a taxable account or a trust whose terms allow it. Ensurance is early, and says so: entrust permanence is young, the premium streams that service a hold are still being built place by place, and there is no thirty-year track record. Perpetual capital is exactly who can underwrite that earliness, at a size that respects the stage. None of this is tax, legal, or investment advice.
run the clock forward
It is 2060. The trust you drafted is being read. The remainder beneficiaries are adults you never met.
In one version, they receive the deed, the portfolio, and the section of land, and they drive out to look at it. The well is dry. There is a story about how it used to be, and they will tell it to their own children.
In the other version, they receive the same documents, plus a certificate that finished its pathway in the 2040s. The recharge zone above the family's land was entrusted; the playas were kept whole; the record of condition is continuous, and the name on it is yours. The well may still fail — paleowater does not refill on a trust's clock — but what transfers is a place someone kept working, not only a deed to an empty formation.
Both versions are legal. Both are well drafted. Only one of them is an inheritance.
If you have a place in mind — a basin, a stretch of river, land your family already holds — start a giving conversation. Bring the trust language; we will bring the place data and say plainly what is ready and what is not.
frequently asked questions
what do future generations actually inherit?
Two things: what the documents transfer, and the condition of the living systems those documents sit inside. Estate plans, trusts, and foundation charters draft the first — title, principal, percentages. The second — the aquifer under the land, the soil, the shoreline, the climate — arrives regardless and decides what the first is worth. Nearly every plan assumes the second is stable. The U.S. Geological Survey's High Plains record shows it is not.
is caring about future generations the same as longtermism?
No. Longtermism is a moral philosophy, associated with William MacAskill and Toby Ord, about how much weight the vast number of people who may live in the far future deserve; it drives funding of existential risk. Caring about future generations in an estate, a trust, or a foundation is a fiduciary matter about specific heirs and a specific mission over the next several decades, already enforceable through the duty of impartiality. They overlap on one point: both fail if the water, soil, and climate the future depends on are treated as constants.
how do you leave nature to future generations?
Name a specific place rather than a cause, fund its condition rather than only its title, and choose a hold that can end in permanent protection rather than one that must be managed forever. Ensurance certificates are one way to do that: a claim tied to a named natural asset, funding its protection now, with a path to entrust that retires the claim once the place is permanently protected. A bequest or foundation grant can fund the place directly; a trust can hold the certificate if its terms allow. Get counsel on the structure. Get the place right first.
the series
This is the fourth of five posts on the two longtermisms — the moral one and the fiduciary one — and the living present both treat as a constant.
- longtermism still needs a living present — the pillar: survival multiplied by what surviving is worth
- long-term investing still needs a living present — patient capital is a mandate; the planet it sits on is not a constant
- short-termism is why long money still acts short — the liability is decades; the scoreboard is a quarter
- future generations inherit a living system or they inherit a story — you are here
- a long-horizon book still needs a living clock — next in this series
For the capital-structure questions under all five, the hub is who can hold nature for decades. For the estate-planning framing that precedes this post, read the inheritance that's not in your trust. For the giving mechanics — foundations and donor-advised funds — start at a donor-advised fund is a parking lot.