Right now most political systems around the world base their family policies on a lie, that the act of having children should be based on parental autonomy, what parents want, rather than child equity, or what children need. Decades ago rich world leaders created this lie in order to avoid paying their fare share to collectively invest in children – through things like planning incentives – and to ensure them what things like the Children’s Rights Convention promises. They preferred to exploit the unsustainable growth that not investing created, and the growth-based economics that created the climate crisis.
Faced with this reality, and the fact that the New York Times rose to influence upon that unsustainable growth, its lead – Joe Khan – simply wants more growth. On balance, the outlet’s reporting (much of which should be labeled as opinion) pushes women to have more kids, irrespective of the conditions in which they are born, in order to enrich people at the top of the economic pyramid who – per one Nobel Laureate – rely on growth to make money through investment.
If you wanted to do the most good in this world, and to change the arc of our future to ensure the freedom and democracy things like the Children’s Convention could create, you would target Kahn and other concentrations of influence (online or in person) to admit the truth of what they do, and support changing course. Freedom is impossible without fairness because we have no way to consent to the influence of other people, and to bring that liberty we can focus on these concentrations to pay what they owe, what they took by imposing the costs of their power on our freedom.
This is something you can do.
TAKE ACTION: Urge Joe Khan at @nycscribe, or engage him in person, to admit that he’s harming children and the environment by supporting unsustainable growth that benefits a few.
If you wanted to be free from the power of others, you might migrate towards nations where you had more social mobility, where government was democratically elected, and where the rule of law – preventing things like arbitrary violence – operated. That would be liberating, but only relative to the nation from which you emigrated.
The move would not free you from the man-made climate crisis, the way your social positioning in that nation was determined by the resources you had at birth and in your development, or the way your vote is diluted by the size of the democracy itself. Relative to the ideal of freedom, your physical move might not be liberating at all.
Our thinking, when it comes to freedom, is clouded by what is called the “constitutive fallacy,” or basing your obligation to follow the law on coercive top-down instruments like written constitutions rather than bottom-up family reforms that actually empower and liberate people – in terms of their actual relations – and in a measurable way, enabling them to physically constitute – under the Children’s Convention – legitimate power relations between people from whose authority things like written constitutions must derive.
Resolving the fallacy allows us to orient from a just position, rather than knowingly being part of systems in which some benefit by placing costs on others.
This work can feel oppressive because it seems to impinge on our autonomy – the freedom to have as many children we like, in any conditions, irrespective of what they need and the impact on the nonhuman world. That sense of autonomy is an illusion because the private sphere of our family lives is not private at all, but shaping the public life of the future and it may very well be that freedom is an impossibility without fairness in creation, given that fairness is the base prerequisite for justice and liberty.
The idea that having and raising children is a personal or private matter to be left to the parent was not designed to protect; it was designed to eliminate the obligations of the wealthy, and the governments they influence, to collectively invest in the children they could instead exploit as labor, and to avoid drastic reductions in the arc of population growth that was creating massive returns on investments.
Recently Fair Start added an addendum to this letter. Read it here.
Open Letter to Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi Regarding India’s Human Rights Obligations in Developing New Family and Population Policies sent January 29th, 2023
This is the key thing to know: India should consider itself bound by international human rights and obligations to future generations when devising a new policy, which it needs desperately. The best human-rights based guidelines for that policy are described in filings now before the United Nations, and which treat Article 16 of the International Bill of Human Rights as the most basic norm – or grundnorm – around which all family and population policy must orient.
We, the undersigned are writing to urge you to bring your legislation in line with international human rights obligations to future generations, an opportunity signaled by Dr. Natalia Kanem of the United Nations Population Fund’s (UNFPA) via her bold statement on World Population Day that equality is not about counting people but making sure people count. India can use international law, the binding sources rather than the flawed Cairo Consensus, to guide its family policy reforms to ensure every child a fair start in life.
Fair Start as the First and Overriding Human Right
All forms of political obligation begin with a list of norms, or human rights, that attempt to objectively limit the subjectivity of democracy. The order of these lists – from the International Bill of Human Rights to India’s constitution, show why the Cairo Consensus, which was driven by elites who did not want to invest in children but rather exploit population growth for profit, ensured an unsustainable population explosion, massive inequality, and the climate crisis, is a failure.
The first norm that must begin any set of human rights is the right to have children, accounting for the people themselves, and that norm – despite what Cairo intended – cannot be subjective to the parents but must be based on the fair and objective needs of children, as outlined in the Children’s Rights Convention. To give parents unlimited power over their future children is a form of property in persons. Many charities, funded by wealthy persons more interested in protecting their wealth than doing good, push distracting campaigns that do little good in the face of things like massive inequity and a climate crisis set to kill millions.
They are hiding something called the “constitutive fallacy,” basing one’s obligation to follow the law on top-down instruments like written constitutions rather than bottom-up family reforms that actually empower and liberate people – in terms of their actual relations – and in a measurable way, enabling them to physically constitute – under the Children’s Convention – legitimate power relations between people from whose authority things like written constitutions must derive.
Truly free people will limit and decentralize the power others have over them, including via reallocating property rights, by actually constituting systems in which they are empowered.
This means changes in the actual practice of India’s family and population changes can happen bottom-up, through class struggle that seeks to invest more in planning for the future of families at the bottom of India’s economic demographic.
An example of the fallacy involves what’s been called the #famscam, in which several civil society organizations were outed by a whistleblower in 2023 for violating ethics rules and knowingly undoing claimed progress with outdated family policies that disempowered most people in order to – per one Nobel Laureate – grow economies that benefitted a few at cost to freedom and democracy.
We urge you to continue your bold actions, and to take a clear public position recommending just and sustainable family planning to address rising global inequality – including gender inequity and the climate crisis. Governments, NGOs, and major foundations are failing women, children and future generations. Without a universal effort to implement equitable and sustainable family planning programs, Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), FP2030 commitment, and Human Development Index benchmarks cannot be achieved, and human rights will continue to erode.
And they will do so in a world where the climate crisis continues to unfold more quickly than expected, leaving the dead in its wake.
Just and sustainable family planning centers on human rights and accounts for the needs of women, children and future generations – something that current family planning programs across the globe fail to do. Family planning that is just and sustainable:
● Ensures equitable access to family planning and education
● Ensures equitable entitlements at birth and moves towards using fiscal and other policies to ensure that all children are born and raised in conditions that comply with the Children’s Rights Convention
● Ensures every child is born with a fair start with sufficient resource
● Reflects the disparity of ecological impacts between wealthy nations and less wealthy ones, and allocates responsibility proportionally, including calling for the waiving of property claims where appropriate to account for the costs externalized – relative to the Children’s Convention – in the creation of concentrations of wealth
These resources empower individuals and families and enable communities and governments to sustainably and equitably invest more in each child and their future while upholding reproductive rights.
However, current political, religious, economic, and cultural pressures to increase births and obstruct family planning programs are driving our biggest global crises and putting the health, safety, and welfare of current and future generations in peril. The growing human population, with 8 billion alive today, is already too much for earth to sustainably and ecologically support.
Unsustainable population growth, a documented threat multiplier, contributes to catastrophic climate change, unprecedented flooding, pandemics, ecosystem destruction, groundwater depletion, mass extinctions, and environmental degradation. Worsening inequality, in large part driven by our growing population, is also a grave threat to democracy and political stability across the globe.
The Right to Found a Family
Current family planning programs and policies demonstrate clearly the UN’s misinterpretation of the right to found a family under Article 16 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Article 16 should have been exercised in a way that protects all generations – from the middle of the 20th Century to those in 2050 – equally. The United Nations also should have interpreted Article 16 as being consistent with other human rights obligations, such as the Children’s Rights Convention, FP2030, as well as the SDGs.
Because they see the conditions being created today, 40 percent of young people have expressed concerns about exercising their right to plan a family. A robust application of Article 16 could allay those concerns. Instead, the United Nations succumbed to member state pressures to promote and coerce large, unsustainable families and increase population growth rates in the 20th century.
Children’s Rights and Intergenerational Justice
The misreading of Article 16 enabled pro-growth economic and pronatalist pressures to directly undermine the UN’s clear commitment to the rights of children, sustainable development, and intergenerational justice. As things stand, young and future generations face the prospect of significant reversals in human rights.
Mountains of evidence show that because of population-driven environmental threats, children born today and tomorrow will live “an unprecedented life”, facing “conditions older generations have never experienced.” The most recent report from UNICEF indicates that almost half the world’s 2.2 billion children face an “extremely high risk” from the impacts of the climate crisis and pollution. The inequities created by unsustainable growth policies also gravely impact the estimated 356 million children living in extreme poverty worldwide.
Just and Sustainable Family Planning
The global community has failed to promote or support family reproductive decisions that lead to healthy and sustainable ecosystems and equitable prosperity. Quite the opposite, in fact.
The best way to compensate current and future generations for this failure would be to reinterpret Article 16 as stated above and create an equitable balance of resources. Equitable distribution would ensure that children are born into just conditions including entitlements and a global vision that puts them first – with a fair start to a path forward.
Governments and community institutions must make sustainable, equitable investments in current and future families. They must be required to educate would-be parents about the benefits of delayed parenthood, birth spacing, and smaller families – including those with no children. These investments would create greater family financial stability, better social and emotional outcomes, higher standards of living, women’s empowerment, greater investment in each child, and would result in a more sustainable planet.
A declaration by the The Prime Minister would be a powerful step toward dispelling the myths that underpin pronatalism and challenging the reluctance to address unsustainable population growth. Such a statement would elevate discussions around the needs and wellbeing of existing and future generations.
Such a declaration also would highlight the urgency of substantial investment in comprehensive and equitable family planning programs. These programs not only realize individual rights but also advance the legitimate goal of creating equitable and sustainable birth conditions.
The United Nations has been criticized for not intervening to protect human rights in other contexts. This negligence has already resulted in calamitous consequences for the planet and the human species. It is therefore imperative that the Prime Minister call on governments, NGOs, and major foundations to promote equitable and sustainable family planning to ensure intergenerational justice and achieve true liberation for all people, starting with women and children.
A specific example of this is when civil society organizations knowingly undoing claimed progress with outdated family policies that disempower most people in order to – per one Nobel laureate – grow economies that benefit a few at cost to freedom and democracy. And even when shown the undoing, some groups have continued on course, opting for growth policies that will continue to undo claimed progress.
Many are fighting back against that, and for true freedom. And those who benefitted from unsustainable growth policies that did nothing to level the playing field between rich and poor kids know they are in trouble, now coming up with outlandish claims and a fake “underpopulation” crisis to decoy us away from justice.
This scam hides something called the “constitutive fallacy,” basing one’s obligation to follow the law on coercive top-down instruments like written constitutions rather than bottom-up family reforms that actually empower and liberate people – in terms of their actual relations – and in a measurable way, enabling them to physically constitute – under the Children’s Convention – legitimate power relations between people from whose authority things like written constitutions must derive.
Put another way, try to think, say, or do anything that does not derive from some set of theoretical or actual power relations, relations that would have had to derive from whatever norm created the people between whom those relations exist. It’s not possible to do, and for those relations to create obligations between people they must be created fairly.
Resolving the fallacy allows each of us – individually – to orient from a just position, rather than knowingly being part of systems in which some benefit by placing costs on others.
Truly free people will feel obligated to follow the law, including laws that create property rights, when they are empowered. They will limit and decentralize the power others have over them, including via reallocating property rights, by actually using resources at the top of the economic pyramid in the act of constituting systems in which they are empowered. This can be done universally through a simple change in employment benefits that ensures discretionary benefits impacting kids should be scaled inverse to wages, or more acutely, targeting the heads of companies like Exxon, as well as leadership at the United Nations, who use their massive influence to preserve unjust systems that heap costs on others.
How? He embraced anthropocentric population growth over the true liberation of animals, something only possible through rewilding and Fair Start family policies that require parental readiness, redistribution of wealth for child equity, and a default of smaller families.
Moreover, his approach has bred a generation of “distractivists” who pretend to help animals by selling vegan food products to a growing population, while even pushing for more growth, that on balance is at war with animals. They are using their wealth and power profit by imposing costs on others, disempowering the majority, and in a way that exacerbates acts of violence that are hitting innocent rather than those responsible for pushing unjust systems.
Singer committed the “constitutive fallacy,” or basing one’s obligation to follow the law on top-down instruments like written constitutions rather than bottom-up family reforms that actually empower and liberate people – in terms of their actual relations – and in a measurable way, enabling them to physically constitute – under the Children’s Convention – legitimate power relations between people from whose authority things like written constitutions must derive.
Urge Singer to embrace Fair Start reforms, or a comparably effective approach, here.
The first measure of doing good is not welfare or utility, it is consent, and whether we are constituting – physically – just and liberating societies. Singer, given his position, has the capacity to tell the truth and help change family policies in a way that could save millions of lives. Doing the most good means targeting concentrations of influence, like Singer, and using them to bend the arc of growth towards justice.
Faced with these facts Bryan’s reaction is to double-down, and simply push women to have more kids to further build the unsustainable pyramid schemes that prop up Bryan, Elon Musk and others like them. He makes four obvious mistakes in his opinion piece (framed as an article) which show the fundamental cause of the crises we face today.
He conflates economies with democracies: Per Bryan, “Declining population growth really does pose existential challenges to America, and without more children, the country really does face a future that is less innovative, less wealthy, and less vibrant.” The ideal of the United States is democracy, but inequity, growth and ecocide has degraded that ideal, and traded it for the gross domestic product (probably preference-based utility) that is the base value from which Walsh operates. He’s talking about an America of crowded shopping malls, not town halls in biodiverse nature where people are actually free. That freedom is a value we can test and measure with a simple inversion test. That inversion test – which Bryan’s proposal fails – has survived five positive peer-reviews. Bryan, conversely, has no expertise in population ethics, and his opinions conflict with leaders in this space.
Bryan undercuts all of the values he purports to promote: Per Bryan, “[t]he progressive agenda should be about empowering people to live the lives they desire, to pursue their own path to happiness, and children can and should be part of that. Conservatives are right that a baby bust without end threatens America’s future…” Nowhere does he promote minimum levels of welfare for children, equal opportunities in life for children, restoration of nature and climate restoration, or democracy where citizens actually have influence on systems of governance. These are the basic values that comprise a good life. The United States, like most nations, has used family planning policies throughout the past several decades that treated the act of having children as a matter of parental autonomy, rather than ecosocial child equity (children have the most at stake when it comes to having kids), rather than acting in compliance with the values that underlie the Children’s Rights Convention – which is the standard by which we judge whether we are actually creating democracy. Byran’s writing reflects these mistakes.
People like Bryan Walsh can be useful in this regard, and targeting him and other powerful people publicly to show truth can save millions of lives.
Bryan is using his position to impose costs on others, relative to a democratic baseline. We can make examples of people like Bryan, ensuring they account for their role in the crises we face today, and taking from them the relative wealth and power future generations deserve as we physically constitute true democracies though climate restoration funded by birth equity redistributions of wealth. Bryan only has to address the points above in his work, or to agree to publicly debate them, in order to actually free people. He just have to tell the truth. And while the average citizen does not have the power of a Vox editor, they have the capacity to be activists, and approach Bryan and confront him simply as a citizen who is harming others.
TAKE ACTION: In his article Bryan accepts that “very real suffering that will be unavoidable thanks to warming, especially in poorer countries.”: He is willing to accept the suffering of others – especially children in the global south, while protecting his own children from that suffering, and rather than taking simple steps to prevent it.
Think about that as you engage Bryan in person or online – https://www.linkedin.com/in/bryan-walsh-9881b0/, in a peaceful and lawful way, to admit his mistakes, and to pay for the benefits he and his family received in a system that was imposing costs – ecologically and socially – on others. Use him as a fulcrum to bend the arc of our species away from exploiting children for economic growth, and towards justice.
Leading literature on political theory suggests we can recoup those costs by all means effective because fair creation norms – the ensure climate restoration and birth equity – precede government’s authority to issue property rights to the contrary.
The immigration issue she raises does not alter this problem – those children will be born somewhere, and rather than exploiting them Prarthana should be promoting systems that ensure they are born and raised in ecosocial conditions that comply with the Children’s Convention.
TAKE ACTION: Urge Prarthana at her LinkedIn to change course and promote investing in children, not exploiting them for growth.
And urge Fortune’s editor here to run articles that build a better future, not more of the same thinking that created the ecocide and inequity we face today. Fortune has the resources to improve our future, or continue systems that hurt people. They should choose the future.
Don’t get scammed about which issues really matter when it comes to protecting animals. If we take animal personhood seriously their liberation should override political processes as fundamental rights do, for example, favoring a “right to rescue” over waiting for statutory personhood. But that move in isolation may threaten chaos to some who fear change. One solution?
Based on a recent Newsweek whistleblower article, use family and equity reforms to make those processes the inclusive ideal they were meant to be, building a social contract from the zero power baseline of nonhuman autonomy, and investing enough in each child as we go to limit growth in a way that preserves the influence of each law-making / self-determining voice in our democracies.
Summary
Most theories of animal law, rights and liberation focus myopically on immediate relations between humans and animals – like Peter Singer’s focus on diet, or the many large organization’s focus on animal cruelty laws. Few if any focus on fundamental legal or political theories, like theories of intergenerational justice or family law reforms, despite the fact that this area of inquiry and human behavior has the greatest impact on the greatest number of animals and shows clear alignment between human and nonhuman interest that surpass other areas of law. Scan “animal law” casebooks or other materials and you will see this, with no inclusion of basic legal theory concepts like political obligation, including theories that account for basic things like normativity, or that actually empower citizens.
That gap allowed some funders and many organizations (including academic institutes) to focus on less effective work, like food systems reform, because they are less politically risky, much easier to market, and enable profitable investments in growing industries like plant-based foods. Many benefitted from this misplaced focus at cost to animals, in what one Nobel Laureate called a pyramid scheme of growth, often lying (or greenwashing) about their impacts. This went beyond ignorance, with many entities receiving animal rights funding actually urging growth, enabling things like restrictive abortion bans. Or the use of growth-based profits to fund the popularization of growth-based philosophies that undercut nonhuman autonomy and legality at the same time.
The result is a social movement that largely ignores the fundamental driver of nonhuman animal suffering and death – the proliferation of humans over their world – the very thing that also drove the climate crisis, a thing that now threatens to cause more suffering than any human action in the history of the world. While environmental, child-welfare, and human rights and democracy movements experienced the same gap, the impact on nonhumans was the most destructive.
The myopia included blindly accepting massive generational birth inequity that is tantamount to white supremacy, and embracing macro-propertyhood of the nonhuman world which was undoing the micro-personhood benefits that many animal protection organizations routinely use to fundraise. Many calling themselves animal organizations thus chose policy areas that would benefit far fewer animals than the trillions the underlying family policies they simply accepted threatened – a form of deadly fraud.
Ask any organization or funder claiming to benefit animals how they have accounted for the impact of children being born into the world on their claims. Whether they are investing in those children, or exploiting them for growth, matters to animals. Below is a roadmap to close this gap and ensure reparative justice – the payment of actual claims – that actually liberates humans and nonhumans together by 1) inverting the movement from top down control to bottom up empowerment whereby governance is aligned with animal liberation, and 2) by temporalizing the work to account for empathy in future generations, rather than exploiting them for economic growth at cost to nonhumans.
Talking about animals rights while driving them into extinction
There are reasons to question the nature of what we often call animal law, rights, protection, welfare, etc. Just putting the word “animal” in a phrase or sentence does not help animals, and can do more harm than good.
This is a problem that can be corrected by treating animal law as inherently requiring inclusivity, and below I lay out the steps for doing so. The result is a conception of animal law that starts with our becoming, through a focus on autonomy and family reforms, a species consistent with mutual liberation. How?
We begin with the full conception of the nonhuman, liberated complete biodiversity, and the ideal of law – normativity because it is the will of the ruled. That is the genesis of unified animal personhood, and the mutuality between humans and nonhumans, and to think otherwise is to commit a fallacy.
The dominant of law, rights, welfare, protection, etc., because it can coerce results, is animal law. Impact, and for the right reasons, is what matters. Adding billions of people to the world without regard to how they will impact nonhumans, when doing that in the past created the crises we face today, and while touting laws that are riddled with exemptions and rarely enforced, is not a beneficial impact.
“Animal law” is really human law that happens to refer to animals, while excluding legal and practical protection for the vast majority of nonhumans (animals in factory farms and in research), and designating the vast majority— wildlife—as property, quietly bundled into an anthropocentric concept of the environment as a human resource designated to absorb and be altered by things like greenhouse gas emissions. That concept begins with a companion concept of future children as the property of their would-be parents that simultaneously disregards the autonomy of the nonhuman world.
That bundling is macro-propertyhood, always undoing the micro-personhood that many animal protection organizations routinely use to fundraise.
Any conception of animal law without reforming this – on balance – hurts animals, and does not address the fundamental and existential threat to nonhumans – the fact that we are replacing them.
How might our thinking of “animal law” or other terms that imply a benefit to nonhumans have been different? Were, long ago, humans to have seen themselves as equal parts of a complex ecology rather than a dominant species capable of shaping the world to its needs, we would have been obligated—in family, food, land use, and dozens of other policy areas—to limit ourselves existentially to just such an ecology.
That means smaller families, parenting delay and readiness, and redistribution to wealth to incentivize these things and ensure equal empowerment of children. This is a comprehensively effective model with a 1/2 dozen positive peer-reviews. Simply said, the same nonsense that having kids is a matter of parental autonomy rather than an interpersonal matter of constituting future societies is the same thing that degraded participatory democracy, causes mass animal suffering and extinction, triggered the climate crises, and blew a gulf between rich and the impoverished.
The solution to that, described above in bold, would have required fundamentally challenging the anthropocentric nature of our legal systems, as well as the entitlements of concentrations of wealth and power, something many of the originators of the term “animal law” and other protective terms evaded doing. To the extent Peter Singer evaded these reforms with a misleading focus on farmed animals — rather than all future animals and future persons’ relations with those animals—as the majority for whom we should be concerned if we want to maximize probability of impact, he played a large role in this misdirection. The climatological effects of that misdirection, alone, cannot be overstated, preventing family reforms that could have saved countless animal lives and creating room reforms that exacerbate the situation. Those articulating (or framing) what nature (in the case of Our Children’s Trust) or animal liberation (in the case of Singer) is, are most dangerous because they move the goalposts / cloud the ideal. Singer’s utilitarianism and focus on market preference satisfaction has enabled a humanized world. And now that the climate crisis proves he was wrong under his own standard, by likely reducing overall utility, he’s still not admitting it.
Reversing pronatal family policies now would mean a lot fewer babies being born, immediately, as the entitlements/incentives and other changes kick in (and arguably the only block to massive resource relocation is a lie about the justifiability of current entitlements that benefits us at cost to future generations). The vast majority of those babies would have not only have immediately begun to eat animals, they would have caused all the other ecocide humans cause. In a more concrete sense, the fact that our family norms would have done nothing to halt the creation of children in certain conditions, and that this in turn degrades the ecological conditions they need to survive, just seems nutty. Want to see how this works? Google this: “conviction child abuse biting,” count the stories, and you will see what I mean. If there were no way to halt these things from occurring none of this would matter. But I backing education standards into family planning and funding the process would halt them.
In other words, there is no such thing as anthropocentric animal law, unless you want to disregard the function of law—to protect its subjects. Thinking there is commits the common mistake of trying to magically separate humans from their language and ideation as well as the ecologies in which they live, a mistake with massive consequences given the climate crisis.
The misnomer argument is true for conceptual reasons, in that a fundamentally ecocentric system necessitating smaller populations of prosocial persons would have maintained the capacity to be more reflective of its human subjects, but also practical reasons—because requiring our systems to be actually inclusive of its subjects so that they can meaningfully participate, and hence ecocentric rather than anthropocentric, would have avoided much of the climate crisis which now threatens the system such “law” was meant to protect. Surely there is no concept of law, including positivism, that would not require its obligations to actually relate to and ideally reflect the inclinations of its subjects, something dependent on their actuality, their quantities and qualities. If the core condition of positivism is to treat law as obligatory because it derives from social sources, how can we do that without first accounting for people and their role in the process, e.g. their being subject to democratic attenuation through growth?
The pathway forward is to treat an ecocentric future, and democracy where the average person maintains the quantitative and qualitative capacity to actually have an impact on the outcomes, as the precondition for the legitimacy of any norms and to alter rights and obligations accordingly. This starts with family law and policy oriented around deep ecology and equity, as a pathway towards true animal law and protection. This answers the otherwise open question left by many theorists, of who the people should be that will actually carry animal-benefitting theories into action. That pathway is animal protection in the most comprehensive sense because it actually includes the full biodiversity of nonhumans, as well as the future persons with whom they would interact.
This is a pathway that could be bricked by an untold number of activists creating compelling narratives about the next big social movement, bottom up, limiting and decentralizing human power, rather than simply waiting for institutional change to come from the top down. Bottom line? We should not take a concept like law, reasonably seen as something that is the product of participatory democracies reflective of the will their constituents, which is itself a concept consistent with animal liberation when you look at the family policies necessary to achieve such systems, and pervert it to serve neither ideal.
In my almost two decades of working in “animal law” I saw the concept become a commodity organizations would use to fundraise – regardless of whether it was on balance helping animals, as if the proliferation of people using the these two words together was what we value. It should not be. Impact, and for the right reasons, is what matters. Adding billions of people to the world without regard to how they will impact nonhumans, when doing that in the past created the crises we face today, and while touting laws that are riddled with exemptions and rarely enforced, is not a beneficial impact.
When I left the Animal Legal Defense Fund in 2022 we were potentially doing more harm to animals than good, promoting the idea of effective animal cruelty laws while rarely if ever prosecuting the companies engaged in the vast majority of cruelty, undercutting direct action activists while fundraising using their hard-earned content and high-risk work, opting for family and ecological baseline policies that would put many more animals in harms way than we were taking out, and alienating the crucial social justice movements we needed in order to de-silo animal rights by ignoring the need for DEIJ reforms, changes in employment policies, and unionization.
All of this suggests the need for a certain matrix when thinking about animal law, which in its ideal form may simply be a perfectionist view of law itself, which is necessary if we are to actually account for the physical and day-to-day relations between powerful humans and vulnerable nonhumans. How do we maximize consent in those relations? (And yes, consent can be measured and quantified, much like utility, but unlike utility consent is primary, necessary to justify the governance that makes systems of utility – like economies – possible). Town halls precede shopping malls if actually take democracy seriously.
The matrix would have two axes. The first, 1) where personhood as consensual relations bookends one end of a continuum, would be 2) bookended on the other end by propertyhood (the total control of animals in a CAFO, unlimited procreative “autonomy” that appropriates future children, and anthropocentric approaches to environmentalism for example).
To be specific, there are specific actions that could further the many forms of social justice, benefitting humans and nonhumans alike: Open rescues at factory farms in extremely oppressed communities timed with Fair Start resource-demand occupations targeting the concentrations of wealth and power that own the farms; climate reparation interventions targeting pro-growth interests to pay climate restoration-level amounts to ensure birth equity; flash-mob demands that executive directors at large nonprofits who shilled for concentrations of wealth and power tell the #wholetruth about what they did.
Many advocates choose to orient from and reify unjust systems that exploit animals, rather than confronting and overcoming those systems even in simple and incremental ways. But protest and other direct action movements can be more effective than the best charities, a truism that – in the context of animals – relies on the incredible transparency activists can create.
All of this is to say that if we are going to fight for animals we owe them an examination of all assumptions, and a backing out from those assumptions to assessing raw power in its naked form, and how to limit it – for their sake and ours.
Professor Philip Alston at NY is a leader in the field the field of international human rights. But like many in the field, he has relied on a failing system has put parental autonomy over child equity when it comes to family and family planning law and policy. That has fundamentally caused the climate and inequity crises we face today.
The Children’s Rights Convention sets out what children need to physically constitute just, sustainable and legitimate democracies, and it was designed to address the fundamental or familial political relations that make up the systems we all support (through taxes and otherwise), benefit from, are responsible for, and from which we cannot separate. What we often think of as population is really a matter of fundamental power relations.
And yet the current and almost universal paradigm for family and population policy does nothing to ensure all children are born and raised in conditions that comply with the Convention. That paradigm is based on what is called the constitutive fallacy: Basing our individual obligation to follow the law on things like top down written constitutions rather than just and sustainable family policies that actually empower people bottom up to constitute just and legitimate nations, and do and should account for our actual relations and lived experiences. Law and policy derive from basic systems of rights, which are mandatory obligations.
The powerful do not need those obligations; the vulnerable, including nonhumans and future generations, do.
Philip Alston is influential. Getting him to admit that he UN knowingly used family planning policies that were illegitimate, and harmed people, would go a long way towards fixing the problem.
