The “200 year present” is a term coined by peace research pioneer & sociologist Elise M.Boulding.
It describes a way thinking of the fleeting present moment with full awareness of the effects of past actions and of our present actions on the future.
If one considers the life spans of the oldest and the youngest individual alive at any given time one gets a period across the “past,” “present,” and “future,” of approximately 200 years. This perspective encourages a long-term commitment to all of life in which we acknowledge that the past is still with us in its effects and that all aspects of the present moment — all our thoughts and actions — will determine the future.
When Martin Luther King, Jr. admonished us to “rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented culture to a person-oriented culture,” he hit upon the essence of the 200 year present, which demands that we shift from a materialist view of human beings to a consciousness-based view that embraces the unity of life across time - mettacenter.org 
> A favorite concept of mine is the 200-year present, a way of thinking about change. The 200-year present began 100 years ago with the year of birth of the people who have reach their hundredth birthday today. The other boundary of the 200-year present, 100 years from now, is the hundredth birthday of the babies born today. If you take that span, you and I will have had contact with a lot of people from different parts of that span. > > So think in terms of events over that span and realize how long change takes. You can see how difficult it has been to create these bodies and new ways and how in many ways we are slipping backward; but in other ways we are not. I take comfort to know that super-power hegemony has a very limited lifespan (decline and fall of Rome, the Ottoman Empire).” > > Elise M Boulding Interviewed by Julian Portilla — 2003