The population-driven climate crisis will do more harm to wild big cat populations in the long run than the Act can do good. Although the act protects current species of cats from being unnecessarily overbred and domesticated, it does not address threats that still exist through the interactions humans have with the environment, as shown by the infographic below.
Changing these interactions begins with us. Truly liberating big cats means reversing their slide towards extinction by promoting and funding incentives that create a universal ethic of sustainable and economically equitable human families, loving families that build empathy in children.
Let’s not undo progress for animals with growth-based policies, pushed by some animal advocates. Let’s not trick ourselves – growth is undoing progress.
Don’t confuse chaos with freedom. Truly free people will fundamentally limit and decentralize the power (including subtle power like climate emissions, the impact of bad parenting on communities, massive disparities of wealth, etc.) others have over them, and by all means effective. They will condition their obligation to follow the law on their actually being empowered, assessed via a simple test, in functional democracies.
Not only are there more animals being abused than there were decades ago, in almost every sector of animal rights, but the climate crisis threatens more animal suffering than any other form of human impact. Many leaders in animal rights like Joyce Tischler have spoken out for family reforms.
Animals Do Not Benefit from Human Population Growth. Why Do Their Advocates Promote It?
I have actually talked to funders and the heads of nonprofit groups they support who knew growth-based family policies were doing more harm to animals than things like dietary veganism were doing good, but who were choosing to ignore that because they were making money – selling vegan products – on that growth. I have met with funders and animal advocates who have relatively wealthy children, children who are in the process of inheriting even more wealth or positions of influence they did not earn. Those funders and advocates are now choosing to reject birth equity family entitlements that would not only level the playing field for all kids but also save billions of animals long-run by promoting family planning. They are choosing unearned privilege over the animal protection they claim to support.
How? If we accept that government derives from the people who derive from their creation, there is one clear path: By moving wealth from the top (from the men who took it from women and children) to pay parents to be ready before they have kids, to work to level the start line between rich and poor kids, and to promote a universal ethic of sustainable families.
Help us target those pre-cons – groups like Exxon – blocking these family reforms, and thus threatening our freedom.
Every week parents are arrested for severely abusing their own young children, in some cases torturing them. In news stories, you may never connect that to the fact that scientists have now determined the world has completely failed to reach its goal of avoiding at least a deadly 1.5C temperature rise due to the climate crisis.
But the truth is the stories are connected.
These problems both flow fundamentally from family policies that do not comply with the Children’s Rights Convention, assuring children – especially infants – the eco-social conditions they need to actually constitute just and free communities in the long run. The Convention functionally requires a natural environment and parents who are ready before they have kids. Nations ignored these requirements in family planning policies to make money by exploiting people as economic inputs. And many charities went along with the lie, often because funders pressured them to.
We are fixing that, targeting unjust concentrations of wealth that formed because of the failed family policies, the ones that allowed massive population growth rather than investing more in women and children.
TAKE ACTION: URGE EXXON TO PAY WHAT IT OWES TO SOLVE THE FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEM DRIVING SO MANY CRISES.
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 their rights are as valid as the present generation’s.
In contrast, the Fair Start Movement looks back toward the base cause of the climate crisis (and buttressing crises like deadly inequity): The failure of world leaders in the Twentieth Century to implement the Children’s Rights Convention and zero-baseline modeling as the standard for family policy, and as the first and overriding human right – a right that would override property rights of entities like Exxon, because such property rights can only be legitimately assigned after we have physically constituted functional democracies where people have influential voices through fair family policy.
Being free entails changing the way we create power relations at birth.
We then use a simple test to see who among us is continuing that failure, versus truly free people who are targeting concentrations of wealth and power to limit and decentralize that influence into functional systems of democracy. Limiting and decentralizing how? It involves taking back the costs that were imposed on women and children, described above.
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 simply ensuring that children are born and raised in the eco-social conditions promised to them by the Children’s Convention, so that we can actually constitute just and democratic communities?
Let’s keep this test true and simple: People who support policies that do not include climate restoration and #birthequity are making the climate crisis, and how people experience it, worse. Consensual governance and freedom, where people actually consent to the influence of others, are impossible without these things.
What’s an alternative? Truly free people will fundamentally limit and decentralize the power (including subtle influences like climate emissions, the slow dilution of democracy, the concentration of wealth, power and control in a few, and the impact of bad parenting on communities) others have over them. They will not allow themselves to be subject to political systems, including taking property rights the system may give, where they are not democratically empowered.
These reforms correct something called the constitutive fallacy: Ignoring the way our creation and development does and (assuming we use baselines like the Children’s Rights Convention) should – fundamentally – constitute actual power relations, between humans, and between humans and the nonhuman world or nature upon which freedom is based. Each person chooses to commit or evade the fallacy in every normative (or “should”) claim they make by accepting or rejecting particular forms of fundamental political obligation like written constitutions and choosing to orient from a relatively just or unjust place.
If they did not the idea that governmental authority derives from groups of people, the authority of which depends on the individuals in those groups, would make no sense. This is about the creation of power relations – or constituting – and relative self-determination more than “population.” It’s about treating every child’s right to a Fair Start in life as the first and overriding human right so that we can actually – in terms of our fundamental power relations – be fair and thereby free.
* Special update: After writing this open letter Professor Philip Pettit of Princeton University called the claims in it “home truths” and allowed us to share his good words publicly. Take action below to urge Gerken to admit the fallacy in her work and support Fair Start legislation that moves us towards the first condition of being free.
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 an example).
YLS and its alums will have intimate knowledge of what concentrations of wealth and power – like working on or with the Supreme Court – look like, even when those concentrations are totally attenuated from the citizens over which they have authority. Would YLS take a position on ensuring liberating power relations through family reforms that should precede free speech forums, especially if the changes needed to ensure that would – by empowering people with meaningful voices in participatory democracies – would long-run mitigate the climate crisis?
And from your work on democracy, I will assume you want those relations to be formed bottom-up, in which case there seems to be only one pathway:
Free people will fundamentally limit and decentralize the power (including subtle influences like climate emissions, the slow dilution of democracy, the concentration of wealth, power and control in a few, and the impact of bad parenting on communities) others have over them. They will not allow themselves to be subject to political systems where they are not actually empowered. How do they do this? Fair Start family reforms, like climate restoration and #birthequity baby bonds to physically constitute democracy and consensual governance using an inversion test, ensure that people are actually empowered long-run – in places like town halls – to make the ultimate rules under which all must live.
This evades the undemocratic concentrations of power that – as Robert Tsai saw – prevent people from constituting true legalities by creating relationships between people that are more empowering than disempowering, relative to a neutral point, like Rawl’s original position. It evades the aborted version of freedom Joseph Raz exposed.
These reforms correct something called the constitutive fallacy: Ignoring the way our creation and development does and (assuming we use baselines like the Children’s Rights Convention) should – fundamentally – constitute actual power relations, between humans, and between humans and the nonhuman world or nature upon which freedom is based. Each person chooses to commit or evade the fallacy in every normative claim they make by accepting or rejecting particular forms of supreme political obligation like written constitutions and choosing to orient from a relatively just or unjust place. If they did not the idea that governmental authority derives from groups of people, the authority of which depends on the individuals in those groups, would make no sense. This is about the creation of power relations and relative self-determination more than “population.”
From your work I will assume you see the U.S. Constitution as supreme, perhaps limited by some form of international law. Could a more supreme norm exist in the form of whatever norm would best account for creating the people from whose authority these other norms derive?
One can imagine this process simply as using good democratic representative ratios to move toward what many see as optimal world population ranges. If government is to derive from the people, there must be a first election in which the people decide who is in their polity. Immigration/emigration might have determined that “first election” at one point, but how can we ignore family policy as a more primary form? We cannot and remain in a preconstitutional modes, choosing things like the creation of large populations in the hopes of geniuses magically emerging rather than seeing the genesis of efficiency as actually developing each child to their full capability, as long as we make that mistake.
Fair Start family reparations override because being just in who we are precedes being just in what we do. And we cannot assign things like property rights that derogate from our being (or constituting the fundamental power relations so that we are) free and equal people. Wealthy people, and the unscrupulous politicians and charities that shill for them, will hide the fallacy, and its overriding nature.
But without these reforms people will continue to try to wrongly empower themselves through acts of violence., and against the wrong targets rather than the people responsible for or who benefitted from the family policies that externalized the costs of their wealth and refuse to change course. They will harm innocents, rather than those extracting personal power from collective freedom by crowding people (including the future majority) out of town halls and into the shopping malls, the move that fundamentally created the climate and other deadly crises we face today.
Freedom requires forums of speech, like democracies, be bounded by objective norms of human rights, the first of which is the right to have children.
Help us make that right ecosocially fair, to decolonize the future and become sufficiently other-regarding to actually constitute just communities.
But that process was designed before the climate crisis, surely a threat to human freedom as it represents the imposition of others influence upon the natural (or nonhuman) background world that buffered us from one another for millennia.
Can we do more than family planning interventions designed decades ago? Yes – we can use this crisis as a chance to become – existentially – free.
These reforms correct something called the constitutive fallacy: Ignoring the way our creation and development do and (assuming we use baselines like the Children’s Rights Convention) should – fundamentally – constitute actual power relations, between humans, and between humans and the nonhuman world or nature upon which freedom is based.
Family reparations override because being just in who we are precedes being just in what we do. And we cannot assign things like property rights that derogate from our being (or constituting the fundamental power relations so that we are) free and equal people.
Without these things people will try to wrongly empower themselves, and against the wrong targets rather than the people responsible for or who benefitted from the family policies that externalized the costs of wealth by crowding people out of town halls and into shopping malls, through acts of violence.
TAKE ACTION: URGE CALDER, @vanessabcalder, AND CATO TO TAKE FREEDOM TO THE EXISTENTIAL LEVEL, APPLYING THE INVERSION TEST TO MAKE FAMILY POLICY FAIR AND LIBERATING.
Climate loss and damage payments are now being approved by governments. RAFUG, Amboseli, Fair Start, and others are all partnering and quickly scaling up because the questions remain what the true amount of compensation should be, and how that money should be spent. Given that not ensuring family planning pegged to the Children’s Rights Convention, or what is called child-centrism, is what helped create the crisis, we are interceding to urge the funding to go to climate restoration and child-centric policies. We are asking donors to lead by example.
We are asking them to give for that purpose with the understanding that child-centrism overrides other policies.
TAKE ACTION NOW: DONATE TO THE AMBOSELI LOVE EFFORTS THROUGH RAFUG’S DONATE OPTIONS BELOW, AND URGE THE NEW YORK TIMES TO CORRECT ITS REPORTING ON THE CLIMATE CRISIS TO REFLECT THE NEED FOR CHILD-CENTRIC POLICIES.
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Please follow this form when disbursing donation to Rejoice Africa foundation. This form must guide you in doing international wire transfer and any inquiry you reach us info@rafug.org or robertmwesigye1990@gmail.com
The Council for the District of Columbia made history recently by moving towards #birthequity with baby bonds. Why should only rich kids get trust funds? Isn’t freedom about equality of opportunity?
TALE ACTION: Urge the Council to adopt Fair Start, and you can also work from the bottom up – urging relatively wealthy residents of the Washington D.C. area to lead by example and support Fair Start moves by donating in ways that all children get a fair start in life.
