Recent Headlines

Supporters Ask: How Is Fair Start Different from The Ministry for the Future?

Fair Start is bottom-up democratic override using the first human right, rather than top-down authority. The Ministry for the Future is a climate fiction ("cli-fi") novel by American science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson published in 2020. Set in the near future, the novel follows a subsidiary body, established under the Paris Agreement, whose mission is to act as an advocate for the world's future generations of citizens as if...

The Test: Is Your Position on Climate Policy Making the Crisis Worse?

Here is a simple test for whether any particular person, corporation, nonprofit, politician, etc. is making the climate crisis worse by adopting misleading climate policies, especially as we account for how people will actually experience the crisis: Do you or they support loss and damage climate reparations to places like the drought-ridden Amboseli, Kenya from perpetrators like Exxon, and as a matter than overrides Exxon's property rights to its wealth, if the resources would be used to...

Take Action: Urge Yale Law’s Heather Gerken to Admit Free Speech Doctrine Depends on the Power Relations of Speakers

Dear Dean Gerken, This is a great headline: "‘You cannot be an academic or a lawyer and not believe in free speech’: Dean of Yale Law." And the points you make are compelling. Yale Law School (YLS) is clearly taking a position on the value of free speech in the context of elevating controversial speakers, including some who might reinforce unjust hierarchies based on the history of colonization (Elon Musk leaving South Africa during apartheid with the wealth his family made under it would be...

The Fair Start Movement is the convergence of
social, eco, and reproductive justice to ensure every child a fair start in life as the first and overriding human right.

The climate crisis and worsening inequality are a threat to children everywhere – with effects being felt most by those communities least equipped to endure it.

We can change course. Children deserve equitable conditions, right from the beginning.

Fair Start helps shift unjust concentrations of wealth and power towards funding policies that instead empower all children with equal opportunities in life and a natural, biodiverse environment, by incentivizing and entitling well-planned, well-located, smaller and more equitable families. In short, we promote fundamental justice and freedom by actually accounting for, and improving, fundamental power relations between people, and between people and their ecologies. This is something almost no other group does, and it’s the best way to avoid failed families and parental regret.

Per our Newsweek piece and multiple peer-reviews, it is physically impossible for us to orient our lives and actions from a just and empowering place – or for governments to create obligations like property rights – without first ensuring through Fair Start planning truly fair, inclusive and participatory communities that can actually consent to such rules.

Fair Start family planning entitlements, which empower children, get us there.

Starting Upstream:

THe Most Effective APproach

A fair start in life is the first human right – it overrides all others. It is what children are entitled to under the Children’s Rights Convention, and what allows them to eventually be free from the power of others, and truly self-determining.

Ensuring a a fair start is the most effective and just thing we can do with impacts well beyond downstream alternatives. Let’s take back the wealth women and children deserve to make the best future for all. It’s time for truly comprehensive reproductive justice. Family planning entitlements that ensure children ecologically and socially equitable conditions of development are the first and overriding human right.