The kind of world we leave behind is shaped by the way we live while we’re here

Good morning. December - another year closing.

The annual audit of nights and days, forcing us to admit how the passage of time accelerates as we age.

Glance back over 12 months and notice the headlines in the lives of those you cherish. With luck, plenty of love and laughter but we can’t help but notice too, the sadness and loss.

One of the minor irritations of getting older is how mortality interrupts your thinking, the disappointing dawning that, after an appropriate period of respect, everything will carry on without you.

So it was striking this week to hear that Priscilla Chan and her husband Mark Zuckerberg, 31, the founder of Facebook, will give away 99% of their fortune to try and improve the world that their new daughter grows up in.

With wealth of $45bn, they won’t be going short, but still, the arrival of their firstborn was a small epiphany.

You’ve 'already given us a reason to reflect on the world we hope you live in’, they write to little Max. 'Like all parents we want you to grow up in a world better than ours.

‘While headlines often focus on what's wrong,’ they continue, ‘In many ways the world is getting better.

Health is improving. Poverty is shrinking. Knowledge is growing. Technological progress… means your life should be dramatically better than ours today.

‘We’ll do our part...’ they say. ‘Because we have a moral responsibility to all children in the next generation.’

In short, they’re asking, how can we leave this world better than we found it?

That's also the question in Paris as 195 countries try to nail a plan to limit rising global temperatures - rises already adding jeopardy to life in many countries and threatening far more in the decades ahead.

‘The next generation is watching,’ says Barack Obama.

‘Instead of making excuses to our children and grandchildren,’ adds David Cameron, ‘We should be taking action.’

When you start to think about the world you leave to future generations, says Pope Francis, things look different.

‘We realize the world is a gift which we… must share with others,' he says. ‘What kind of world do we want to leave those who come after us?’

Well, it would be good to leave one without extreme weather patterns like storm, drought and heatwave, a world where we’re powered - not endangered - by the wind, waves and sun.

But technological innovation is as erratic as political progress - we can’t devolve the future to corporations or politicians.

The kind of world we leave behind is shaped by the way we live while we’re here.

If the wealth and influence of the Zuckerbergs is unique, their hopes and fears for their daughter are not. They sat down together and made a plan. That’s a good place to start.

At the top of our plan I’ll write the words of an American Christian, the farmer poet Wendell Berry:

'Do unto those downstream as you would have those upstream do unto you.’