Parfit what?

I'm sorry I'm completely lost on the whole idea of the "future people". The idea of getting into the specifics of whether when we make a decision the people whom would have existed in the first option are no longer the exact same people who would have existed in the second is just mind-boggling. On 367 he states "If we choose...this will lower the quality of life more than two centuries from now. But the particular people who will then be living would never have existed if instead we had chosen conservation." I don't know about anyone else but that doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense to me, in the sense of logic. Whether or not these people are really the same people should not matter. The fact is that from a decision we are making, life could be worse for one group of people, or better for another group of people. In the "depletion or conservation case", I think that conservation would be the morally acceptable decision. It accounts for the fact that while "quality" of life would be somewhat more moderate, it would be better off for the whole in general, not just the people who are living in the next two centuries. While if delving into the technicalities of the argument, the people living worse off may not be the exact same people, there are still people involved, with the same moral rights and therefore are entitled to the better quality of life!
In the last full paragraph on 268 Parfit asks the question "Or does it matter whether these lives would be lived by the very same people?" and to answer him, I would say it does not! There will be people either way, people whose lives will be different due to our decisions and because of this it makes a moral difference.
Overall I like the idea of what Parfit is trying to do, and making an argument on the specifics of a situation to further clarify exactly what is going on is respectable. However, I do not think that it makes a whole lot of difference in the grand scheme of things. I belive most of the examples he gives need to be given a "black-and-white" perspective in that in one case, a decision can be made that is better for the future people, or one can be made that is worse for them. That it is. Whether or not they are the the actual same people does not matter, there will still be people in the same situation because of your direct action. Therefore, it is morally reprehensible to make that decision.