Today the Fair Start Movement has updated a legal action at the United Nations, originally filed November, 2021, as detailed here.
The filing today adds many new parties from Africa, India and elsewhere – and argues the current common formula for climate reparations and their priority use is based on the same fundamental false assumptions that created the crisis, and sets the awards too low – devaluing harms by trillions of dollars and ensuring millions of deaths of mostly black persons.
The filing solves what is the greatest collective action problem humans have every faced: Bringing children into the world in a way that ensures their measurable self-determination, rather than the massive inequity and ecocide we see today. The authority to govern derives from and is conditional on this, so the update urges action now even short of a formal statement.
The model the filing shows as overriding the current reproductive rights regime need not be ideal. It only has to be be better than than the current system, which is not hard to do given that it offers little in any protection for the values we all share.
This devaluation derives from a system of fundamental entitlement and impact fraud – a charade to protect illegitimate concentrations of wealth and power – begun at the United Nations between 1948 and 1968 that circumvented democratic processes, protecting concentrations of familial and church wealth that should have been directed to women and children. That move – at the most fundamental level – ensured the climate crisis and millions of deaths.
Esther Afolaranmi, the lead attorney on the filing, said this: “Do we all admit we benefitted at horrific cost to others, and saw the good we did set back by inequity? The evidence is overwhelming. If we can admit that we can move forward with mandatory reparations that override the United States and European states authority to protect wealth gathered illegally – in violation of the Children’s Convention – and at deadly cost to others.”
Read our cover letter, and general engagement form, below – and act.
COVER LETTER TO PETITION TO THE UNITED NATIONS: ADDRESSING ENVIRONMENTAL AND SOCIAL DEGRADATION AND ITS IMPACT ON FUTURE GENERATIONS
To:
The Secretary-General of the United Nations
United Nations Headquarters, New York, NY 10017 USA
I. Introduction
We, the Fair Start Movement (FSM), together with our global partners from Africa, China, South America, India, and women’s advocacy groups, present this petition to the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC). We submit this as a continuation of our ongoing efforts to address fundamental legal oversights that allow environmental and social degradation to threaten the rights of future generations. We highlight the inadequacy of current international frameworks in recognizing and protecting these rights.
II. The Problem: Structural Flaws in Human Rights Regimes
Since 2008, FSM has consistently raised concerns about the failure of international human rights regimes to adequately ensure democratic equity and a “fair start” for all children. This failure is rooted in the absence of a standardized approach to public benefit claims and climate-related damage evaluations, allowing for rampant entitlement mismanagement that disproportionately affects the poorest and most vulnerable, particularly people of color.
The wealth amassed by a few, especially in developed nations, was acquired without paying the true social and environmental costs. The rich have amassed wealth at the cost of others’ well-being, including future generations who bear the brunt of environmental destruction. This ongoing crisis is exacerbated by the inequitable allocation of resources, as wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few, while millions are left to suffer the consequences of environmental degradation.
III. The Core Issues: Legal Authority for Fairness
Public Benefit Claims: Current legal frameworks lack standardized mechanisms to prevent fraudulent or inflated claims related to environmental and public benefit initiatives. This results in mismanagement of resources that should be directed toward addressing climate-related damage.
Climate Crisis Loss and Damage Evaluations: The failure to establish proper baselines for evaluating the harm caused by climate change prevents a clear assessment of the true impact on communities. This has allowed for continued environmental harm without adequate legal accountability or compensation mechanisms.
Equity for Future Generations: The right to self-determination for future generations is fundamental to national legitimacy. Governments cannot claim legitimacy if they continue to ignore the rights of children to equal participation in democratic processes. There is an urgent need for legal recognition of these rights, especially as it pertains to their environmental inheritance.
IV. Historical Oversight in International Law
The international human rights regime, established between 1948 and 1968, failed to prioritize democratic equity for future generations. Instead, it embraced a flawed framework that prioritized procreative autonomy—a value that benefited wealthy, often white families, while failing to ensure adequate investment in vulnerable populations. This oversight allowed unsustainable growth models to flourish, exacerbating global inequality and environmental collapse.
The lack of focus on equitable birthrights within the human rights framework has led to a crisis where marginalized populations, particularly in the Global South, suffer the most from a climate crisis they did not create. The legal frameworks of many nations and international bodies must be realigned to prioritize ecological and democratic equity for future generations, as the current systems continue to exacerbate inequality.
V. The Legal Basis for Reform
Under existing international law, including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), there is already a recognized obligation to protect the rights of children and the environment. However, these rights must be extended and strengthened to include a legally enforceable “Fair Start” principle that mandates equitable birth conditions and development opportunities for all children.
Article 24 of the ICCPR emphasizes the protection of children without discrimination. This must be expanded to ensure that all children are given equal access to resources, education, and a healthy environment, starting from birth.
Article 6 of the ICCPR guarantees the right to life, which must be interpreted to include protection from environmental degradation. This protection is not merely a moral obligation but a legal one, requiring the reallocation of resources from wealthy nations to support vulnerable communities disproportionately affected by climate change.
VI. A Fair Start for All Children
To address the climate crisis effectively, we propose integrating the “Fair Start for All Children” model into international legal frameworks. This model emphasizes:
Family Planning and Delayed Parenthood: Encouraging sustainable family planning practices that align with environmental and social equity goals. This includes ensuring that children are born into conditions that support their full development and capacity for self-determination.
Redistributive Justice: Redirecting wealth from those who have accumulated it through unsustainable practices to fund environmental reparations and support vulnerable populations. This can be achieved through the establishment of planning accounts for young parents, ensuring they have the resources necessary to raise children in safe and equitable environments.
Recognition of Collective Rights: Encouraging collective models of family planning and care that move away from individualistic approaches, which have historically benefited the wealthy at the expense of the vulnerable. Such collective efforts would ensure that all communities share the burden and benefits of environmental and social reform.
VII. Holding Wealthy Nations Accountable
The climate crisis has exposed the deep inequalities embedded in international economic and social systems. Wealthy nations, particularly in the Global North, are primarily responsible for the environmental harm that now disproportionately affects poorer countries. It is imperative that:
Reparations for Climate Damage: Wealthy nations must be held legally accountable for their role in exacerbating climate change. This includes providing financial and technical assistance to developing countries to help mitigate and adapt to the effects of climate change.
Redistribution of Wealth: Wealth accumulated through unsustainable practices must be redirected to support initiatives aimed at reversing the damage caused by climate change. This includes funding sustainable development projects, renewable energy initiatives, and ecological restoration programs in the most affected regions.
Legal Accountability: International and national legal systems must evolve to hold individuals, corporations, and nations accountable for their role in environmental degradation. This includes establishing mechanisms for litigating and compensating for climate-related harms, as well as enforcing stronger environmental regulations.
VIII. The Urgency of Action
The time to act is now. The failure to address these issues threatens not only the survival of future generations but also the legitimacy of political and legal systems worldwide. We urge the United Nations and its member states to:
Implement legal reforms that standardize public benefit and climate damage claims to prevent further fraud and mismanagement.
Prioritize the rights of future generations by incorporating the “Fair Start” principle into international human rights frameworks.
Hold wealthy nations accountable for their disproportionate role in causing the climate crisis and ensure that resources are equitably distributed to mitigate its effects.
IX. Conclusion
This petition calls upon the United Nations to take immediate and decisive action to address the root causes of environmental degradation and social inequity. The rights of future generations must be protected through legal reforms that ensure democratic equity, fair distribution of resources, and accountability for those responsible for climate damage. Only by enacting these changes can we hope to secure a just and sustainable future for all.
USE OUR ENGAGEMENT FORM BELOW TO JOIN THE FAIR START MOVEMENT
[Fill in the name of a person or organization] is doing great work, but to avoid them undoing it they should admit that children entering the world without what their rights promise them is cancelling the benefits of the work for most, driving up the costs of race and climate reparations – the death debt, reversing sustainable development, and ensuring violence as temperatures rise.
[Fact / Value Check: If the person or organization does not back overriding current systems to measurable empower and repay children for climate harms as they enter the world, are they doing more harm than good?]
Many have admitted the undoing – vegans, for example, who know inequity/growth does more harm than dietary change does good and have started to fix the problem by admitting the undoing and instead backing fair starts in life for all children as the preemptive standard for national legitimacy.
This inversion of power systems offsets our positionality, and any false claims we might have made (as many now working with Fair Start previously did), to allow unifying self-determination for all. Rights to wealth are not inherent but contingent on each child in the nation being empowered with equity and thus emancipated in particular ways.
At bottom, if we can’t admit we failed and reorient ourselves, we will be saying that mostly children of color who had nothing to do with climate and related crises should suffer and die, while mostly white families who benefited and, in many cases, perpetuated the crisis by exploiting children rather than creating value should live and profit. These entities generally did not create value so much as create their own audiences and demand by preventing sufficient investments in children to make them self-determining in quantity and civic quality, enough to evade growth-based catastrophe.
He is leading EAAW organization that focuses on animal issues while focusing focuses their hands-on efforts in Makalama and Iramba district,located in Singida Region because of it’s severity in rabies cases, number of less cared animals like dogs, cats, donkeys and low level of awareness on animal welfare in these areas. EAAW is also leading the Cage Free activities for layers in Tanzania while emphasizing and educating communities on plant diet for ethical and health reasons.
Some people with great financial ability, have been helping to develop the business of raising animals for food as part of their prestige, or because they have a great ability to buy food and products derived from animals. This has been done without considering the harm they cause. They may or may not be aware of this, although there are various reports that explain the effects caused by large animal farms, the environment and the effect on humans to a large extent due to its results.
It is saddening to see that animals suffer while others enjoy it. Animal agriculture produces 65% of the world’s nitrous oxide emissions which has a global warming impact 296 times greater than carbon dioxide. It causes harm to many innocent people while the powerful do not suffer from the harm they cause. They have the opportunity to create an alternative or to continue living while their actions cause pain to millions of people, especially the powerless.
Studies show that raising livestock for human consumption generates nearly 15% of total global greenhouse gas emissions, which is greater than all transportation emissions combined. This is the reason why it is important to insist that the majority of people abandon the use of foods and products derived from animals in order to reduce these serious effects on animals and the current and future generations.
According to the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), meat and dairy specifically accounts for around 14.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions. If the world is to meet its target of limiting global warming to well below 2C, some degree of diet shift will be necessary.
Organizations that support animal welfare work have a great responsibility to ensure that the owners of large farms raising animals for food and other products, are responsible for supporting campaigns to eliminate the use of animal products, but they also support animal welfare activities to avoid those great effects that affect the world now and in the future.
The Fair Start Movement is in collaborations with Africa based organizations through the Seeds for the Future projects in Uganda and Tanzania among others. They are trying to bring in the balance where women can get enough food for their families while serving for their children, and through the improved environment, animals can have enough food which is part of their welfare.
The same poor family planning modeling that ensured mass child abuse and neglect, an endless gap between rich and poor, and the ecological crises we face today also diluted each citizen’s role in their political system. Over time that modeling replaced empowered citizens with disempowered consumers. This influential primer spells out how each of our voices matters less as overcrowding worsens.
Current and near universal systems of family planning make no connection between the creation of persons, and their democratic empowerment. This is not necessarily about population, in the traditional sense.
Fact: If the legitimacy of governance derives from the people governed, then consensual governance requires family reforms that would allow the intergenerational and constructive consent of those born, account for how growth reduces the ability of each person to consent to governance by others, and protect an ecological baseline premised on the absence of human power – thereby enabling consent.
At this point, in many democracies, the average individual voice and vote have been diluted to meaningless by growth. In many democracies, like the United States, it is so crowded that it’s actually irrational to vote.
Here is a recent study on the issue. Imagine trying to assemble a constitutional convention in the United States today. Our size alone would preclude a functional system, and yet the legitimacy of our political system is premised on that capacity. One of the best attempts to refute the rule that democracy is inverse to population size proved the rule because the authors had to define democracy so narrowly (as the reduced chance of a faction taking power) to the point of undercutting its fundamental value to try to even make the argument.
Fact: Each member’s role in a democracy is, cetus paribus, inverse to the size of that democracy. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Social Contract 50-51 (Donald A. Cress ed. & trans., Hackett 1987) (1762);
Our current family planning policies, which encourage economic growth irrespective of individual levels of child welfare, fair starts in life, and environmental consequences, have made things worse. The United States is a largely unrepresentative democracy where family planning policies are designed to create large future populations of consumers, workers, and taxpayers, rather than a sustainable number citizens capable of collective self rule. They create people for shopping malls, not town halls.
Fact: To bring the United States representative ratio in line with that which existed at the country’s founding, the House of Representatives would need to balloon to a whopping 5,697 members, or nearly double that of the largest national legislature in the world: China’s National People’s Congress, with 2,980 members. DeSilver, D. (2018).
Is there a solution?
Functional democracies require highly developed citizens, which requires improving birth conditions and seriously investing time, love, and resources into every child born.
There is no way around this. The Children’s Rights Convention was designed to protect human rights that are specific to children, and ensure children’s development. But there have been no serious efforts to link the Convention to better family planning, and actually ensure the Convention’s intended outcomes. We do not apply the Convention upstream, to ensure children are born in sufficient conditions. Because we never never accounted for the role poor family planning plays in creating massive inequality and differences in opportunities in life, we failed to ensure human rights and minimum standards of welfare and equality for children. And as a result, we never ensured that adults become sufficiently developed to engage in the self-rule of true democracy. Without the requisite safeguard of ensuring serious childhood development, world population has exploded and created a negative feedback loop making it harder and harder to create systems of human rights and democracy. Today the average individual has little or no power over the government, their voices are lost in the crowd, and wealthy persons and corporations have significant control over our lives.
We can fix these mistakes.
We can apply serious child welfare requirements, like the Convention, to family planning systems by making those systems more cooperative, with parents working with their communities to bring children into the best conditions possible. That sort of working together embodies a real social contract, one that brings reasonable people on the left and right together, and ensures every child gets a fair start in life and a chance to become an empowered and accountable citizen. This is a social contract that eliminates unearned benefits and undemocratic influence, which reasonable people on both sides should oppose.
By starting at the source, and using Fair Start family planning to decentralize concentrations of power, including governments, large corporations, and wealthy families and individuals, we can shift resources to empower and free future children.
Our being free and equal persons involves whether we first treat the capacity for each person’s self-determination as directly inverse to population growth to the addition of other equally empowered people, relative to a neutral baseline such as the nonhuman world. In other words, while many would reasonably trade off the relative self-determination of living alone in the wilds and accept societies with growing populations because of the benefits they bring, they would only do so up to point, rather than losing one’s role in the democratic control of their society. Free people will always act to preserve their equal role, their mattering politically, in the process. In such a dynamic, each person is politically empowered, and empowered equally, such that all groups are arcing down towards optimal and ecocentric population sizes. If people are empowered equally and thus matter politically this direct inversion, relative to neutral position that makes the concept of self-determination coherent, is inevitable. This inversion is crucial, and consistent with the need to invest equitably in each child so that they are empowered parts of functional democracies.
The first reason persons would be obligated to follow laws is if the legal system intentionally includes, and reflects the will, of its constituents. This test determines whether systems are doing that.
Wealthy and powerful thought leaders support growth because they also know their power is not going to be offset by the addition of new empowered citizens who matter equally. If anything, the average person born today is likely to simply become a consumer, worker, taxpayer, soldier, etc. in systems over which they have no democratic control, and which mostly benefit others. These top-down economic systems are backed by the coercive power of the state, the threat of violence, that defends state-created property rights. Under our test above such people are not living freely and equally, because they are not politically empowered.
Contrasting such claims with relevant facts can avoid the hiding of liability for mounting deaths as the climate crisis escalates, and can incentivize life-saving changes in messaging and behavior. It can avoid misinformation that drives the fantasy world of accurate costs and benefits that ensured the crisis and now minimizes climate reparations.
Many involved in the Fair Start movement had to, in prior employments at nonprofits, governments, media corporations, and universities, omit crucial facts about inequitable growth impacts that were actually undoing the public benefits the organizations claimed to create, and as such helped illegally enrich mostly white children at deadly cost to millions of children of color – hiding massive liability and skewing the baseline for crucial climate reparations.
In one case a member of a prominent and wealthy family funding animal and environmental law projects insisted on omitting the role inequity and growth on their charitable impacts claims, knowing these omissions were hiding drivers doing more harm to animals than the funder’s work has done good. They feared how full-spectrum evaluations of claims, costs and benefits, around the climate and related crises, would impact the family’s wealth.
These organizations show prioritization of growth over equity, exploiting children’s birth positionality – including race positionality – in ways that are killing millions, and could kill hundreds of millions of persons and untold numbers of animals.
There is a difference between those who choose a system of inequitable and exploitative birth and developmental positionality, which is the largest driver of nonhuman suffering, and those who do not. Those who choose the former, often oblivious rich kids who want to performatively help animals while ignoring that on balance they harm them, is the nonsense that created the climate crisis.
Why It Matters
How can we ask those like Exxon to admit full impacts, back true liberty via degrowth, and change course towards restoration and measurable legitimacy/equity, if the most key social justice movements – the ethos of which demands the change – does not?
How is it not racist to back a system of birth entitlements where children of color get a tenth or less of the wealth as white kids, are largely excluded from the political system, and bear the deadly cost of an ecocide they did not create? We would and should ostracize anyone who refused to hire black people. Why not identify, reform or if they cannot be reformed, ostracize anyone backing largely old white make billionaires whose wealth is being made at deadly cost to millions of black children, wealth that could be moved to still save lives? There is a bright line test for this sort of racist, based on whether one supports universal birth equity or not, now pending before the United Nations.
Take action: Ensure the organizations you work with specifically account for the impact of growth, and growth-over-equity policies, on animals and the environment, wherever making claims about specific beneficial impacts achieved through targeted interventions, and in claims using the term “sustainable” or comparable standards.
Leaders and organizations either support accurate claims that include the key contexts and standards, as well as fundamental fairness where we we all move towards not benefitting at cost to the welfare and self-determination of others, or they do not.
Decoy nonprofits do this by making claims that hide key factors, like inequity and growth.
Greenwashing is generally when someone conveys a false impression or misleading information about how a company’s products or services are environmentally sound. Often it involves using terms like green, sustainable, humane, safe, or regenerative, etc. when those making the claim are on balance harming the environment.
One of the worst forms of greenwashing is called growthwashing, or hiding the impact of population growth when making a claim. When a company or nonprofit makes any claim related to the environment, check to see if they are accounting for the way outdated family policy, and the growth it creates, is undoing that progress. The claims usually omit the fact that population growth is undoing the what is being claimed, increasing demand and consumption in a way that is causing ecocide.
That means those making the claims chose family policies that put more animals in factory farms, research labs, and puppy mills, ensured more children would be born and raised in conditions of abuse, suffering and deprivation, and policies that also ensured each person had less of a voice in their political systems – the systems many groups point to as the best source of change.
The growth many claims hid (and sometimes promoted) undid roughly three-quarters of the reductions in carbon emissions achieved since 1990 by increased efficiency and alternative energy production.
Many involved in the Fair Start movement had to, in prior employments at nonprofits, governments, media corporations, and universities, omit crucial facts about inequitable growth impacts that were actually undoing the public benefits the organizations claimed to create, and as such helped illegally enrich mostly white children at deadly cost to millions of children of color – hiding massive liability and skewing the baseline for crucial climate reparations.
In one case a member of a prominent and wealthy family funding animal law projects insisted on omitting the role inequity and growth on their charitable impacts claims, knowing these omissions were hiding drivers doing more harm to animals than the funder’s work has done good. They feared how full-spectrum evaluations of claims, costs and benefits, around the climate and related crises, would impact the family’s wealth.
Grist is a nonprofit media organization that makes this claim:
Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to highlighting climate solutions and uncovering environmental injustices.
Facts:
On any given day Grist made claims about someone or some action creating benefits in terms of ecological protection, those claims were being undone as children entered the world under without entitlements to minimum levels of welfare, share equity in their democracies (equity, like equity in a company, where you have a measurably equal and influential role in outcomes) or entitlements to the legitimate political systems that derive from the share equity of their members.
To further values like ecological protection, entities like Grist would need to include those values in the first premise of who humans should be and become in terms of the creation of basic power relations, and entities undo the values if they do not include them. While including those values in the premise is not popular with funders or seemingly progressive media whose wealth derives from inequity, that does not change the reality of the impacts – including suffering and death – and the justice owed for those impacts.
An entity either starts with a measurably inclusive and thus liberating system that accounts for the birth, developmental and emancipatory positionality of its members, and relative costs and benefits, or they do not.
There is no evidence Grist factors in equity in its coverage, and much evidence that they omit the impacts of inequity.
Many involved in the Fair Start movement had to, in prior employments at nonprofits, governments, media corporations, and universities, omit crucial facts about inequitable growth impacts that were actually undoing the public benefits the organizations claimed to create, and as such helped illegally enrich mostly white children at deadly cost to millions of children of color – hiding massive liability and skewing the baseline for crucial climate reparations.
In one case a member of a prominent and wealthy family funding animal law projects insisted on omitting the role inequity and growth on their charitable impacts claims, knowing these omissions were hiding drivers doing more harm to animals than the funder’s work has done good. They feared how full-spectrum evaluations of claims, costs and benefits, around the climate and related crises, would impact the family’s wealth.
Not orienting from equity risks millions of lives as well as trillions of dollars in climate reparations, and illegitimates political systems by treating subjects as means bound in inequity, rather than empowered ends from whom governance derives. If one wanted to decolonize wealth and the future, one would have to start from a position of not punching down on children and animals – and that requires a constitutive threshold.
Many involved in the Fair Start movement had to, in prior employments at nonprofits, governments, media corporations, and universities, omit crucial facts about inequitable growth impacts that were actually undoing the public benefits the organizations claimed to create, and as such helped illegally enrich mostly white children at deadly cost to millions of children of color – hiding massive liability and skewing the baseline for crucial climate reparations.
In one case a member of a prominent and wealthy family funding animal rights projects insisted on omitting the role inequity and growth on their charitable impacts claims, knowing these omissions were hiding drivers doing more harm to animals than the funder’s work has done good. They feared how full-spectrum evaluations of claims, costs and benefits, around the climate and related crises, would impact the family’s wealth.
TAKE ACTION: URGE THE LEAD AT GRIST TO COVER ISSUES AND STORIES IN A WAY THAT INCLUDES EQUITY AND ITS ROLE IN DETERMINING OUTCOMES.
What Is Fairness at Base? Preemptive Discourses and Reparations That Change Birth and Development Conditions to Ensure Real Freedom, and Not the Freedom to Harm Causing the Climate and Other Crises Killing So Many
Under the International Bill of Human Rights anyone can use any means effective to assist moving wealth at the top to young women in order to plan to save the next generation because constitutive entitlements always come first. Ask anyone or any organization who made a claim of creating some beneficial impact for how they accounted for the impact of children entering the world on the day the claims were made. You will find zero actual or functional protections for infants and animals almost universally. Ask anyone what policy they are using to functionally protect children as they would enter the world – using a metric like share equity for example, and thus indirectly protect the animals humans would otherwise consume.
Ask anyone what policy they are using to functionally protect children as they would enter the world – using a metric like equity for example, and thus indirectly protect the animals and nonhuman habitat humans would otherwise consume. They will have no real answer because to ensure that protection would require obligating would-be parents to plan in specific ways, something that is widely considered forbidden because of an obscure policy mistake by the United Nations between 1948 and 1968.
How could there be a constitutive process enabling the use of collective pronouns in constitutions and covenants if each person could not choose to orient from such a norm, rather than from the directives of those claiming to represent? Had Micah Johnson, or Ashli Babbitt, known this they might have done other than they did. The world today is in crisis because we created many who could not understand what you are reading here.
Regardless, we can fix it.
Member states to the human rights regime have no authority to protect concentrations of wealth and power holding entitlements, when that money is owed to young women who are the only ones who can have and raise kids with share equity, such that governments can actually be sovereign, actually represent the constituents born and raised by the mothers, and have actual/legitimate authority to enforce any entitlements at all. Where else would government get authority?
Through this standard and process we will avoid impact scams that threaten to cut reparations by trillions, and increase the death count by tens of millions. The borders of human power are not lines on a map, but an ecosocial threshold/line of share equity – the only irreducible obligation. To exist is to be in a seamless web of benefit and cost with countless others. Freedom means bending those so that all make choices for themselves, not others.
We all have to work to get all children over the line as they enter the world so they can constitute their own borders, and that line is being seen as the tradition and enforced isolation of would-be parents being broken every day in favor of collective work in care groups around the world, and as activists ready to target the adult children of concentrations of wealth and power who owe the most. How could there be a “We the people ….” obligating us without a collective decision-making process? It would be physically possible. The threshold/line is the true border of human power and freedom. Fair Start is not everything, but it is the first step to all things,
This not about population – this is relational power, on eight levels, that inverts from would-be parents lording over future generations toward measurable and legally entitled empowerment and inclusion of the vulnerable before they arrive. The wealthy can pay, or poor children will die. Those we ask to choose can either say their benefitting at deadly cost to others was correct, or refute the system at based and assist in correcting. Our UN effort inverts the system to help ensure the right result, by all means effective.
History
Critical legal errors made between 1948 and 1968 began a series of events leading to the climate, inequity, and democracy crises killing so many today. The errors involved letting false assumptions about existing entitlements take root, ones that centered in family law and policy.
They included a narrow conception of power that focused on the use of violence by the state and its derivatives, rather than things like the power of parents over their kids, our power over the environment, how wealth lets some control others, etc. This narrowing – of human freedom – was done to protect the entitlements of wealthy families from scrutiny as the human rights regime was being formed, and at base cut the values that comprise self-determination out of the premise of who we should be.
The assumptions bypassed ensuring democratic share equity – where each person has a minimum and measurable level of self-determination, as well as the necessary critical children’s / environmental rights, in reproductive rights systems. Instead, having children was deemed a matter personal to the parents, with no functional obligations to others – a move that allowed the mostly white officials and wealthy families that designed this standard to privilege their children and benefit from investments in unsustainable growth.
Because having kids was wrongly assumed to be more self-determining for the parents than other-determining for the kids and community, freedom was – at an existential level – wrongly seen doing what one wished, not actually being positioned relative to others and one’s environment, to be free. The errors created chaos – which accounts for the sense that something unfixable is at work.
This seeded a fundamental form of political illegitimacy. Rather than ensure that national sovereignty derived from the individual sovereignty of each constituent, the entitlements – through ensuring growth, vast inequity, and sub self-determination standards of child development – slowly converted broad political freedom into an attempt at economic freedom, as subjects began to crowd, distrust, disempower, and pollute each other out of town halls and into factories and shopping malls. There is no theory of law or legitimacy that can get around the basic need for share equity.
Key theorists, from Raz, to Dworkin, to Finnis, and even Kelsen – all made the same mistakes, mistaking bodily autonomy for share equity, which is now ensuring the death of millions. To think governments have authority to defend wealth made at deadly cost, when it could be used to save the lives of those it risked, is a fallacy and those engaged in it fall outside the protection of the social contract for obvious reasons.
Thus, demand, market valuation, legality and legitimacy, etc. – the many benchmarking values we use today – all were artificially manufactured to avoid costs that would have evaded the climate crisis, through a process of not investing enough in persons to empower them with real choice. All oughts or values derive from the idea of who – as free persons – we should be, and that begins with children’s birth and development standards pegged to concrete thresholds, like greenhouse gas emissions standards below 280 ppm. There is an objective morality marked by our relation to nature, and through it and our backgrounds, our relations to others.
It is a false premise that there is a obligatory “we” from which to live our lives until we change these facts because without a change we start by exploiting and thereby harming, rather than empowering in a way that is measurable with clear benchmarks, others. It is a false premise that there is a obligatory “we” if we start with zero actual protections for infants and animals, and zero actual protections is the case in our legal system today, almost universally. Ask anyone what policy they are using to functionally protect children as they would enter the world – using a metric like equity for example, and thus indirectly protect the animals humans would otherwise consume.
They will have no real answer because to ensure that protection would require obligating would-be parents to plan in specific ways, something that is widely considered forbidden because if the mistakes described above,
The result of the above is massive white wealth supremacy today and an accepted paradigm of colonizing future generations with our costs, with those least benefiting from the crisis suffering deadly costs. How is it not racist to back a system of birth entitlements where children of color get a tenth or less of the wealth as white kids, are largely excluded from the political system, and bear the deadly cost of an ecocide they did not create? We would and should ostracize anyone who refused to hire black people. Why not identify, reform or if they cannot be reformed, ostracize anyone backing largely old, white, male billionaires whose wealth is being made at deadly cost to millions of black children, wealth that could be moved to still save lives? The inequity/unsustainability standard is still in wide use, millions are dying, and this is just the beginning.
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There are identity politics rising because member states sold away the democratic voice of their subjects, and national identity with it. There can’t be a meritocracy if we never included persons in a way that allowed them to assess and determine what merit means, and the climate crisis hints whatever criteria were used were way off.
We have to revise all cost/benefit models now ensuring inaccurate results because they are used an underlying democratic standard to obligate people to follow laws, but never actually included them as democratic constituents, but rather exploited them as economic means for growth. We now owe the difference to avoid children dying in heat waves we created, and then put them in. In other words, leaders defined terms like “sustainable” and “green” based on ensuring growth-based profits for their rich, and normally white, kids. They did not benchmark them based on the actual harm, on eight levels, killing millions of black infants.
This is the fox guarding the henhouse. Leaders today are assuming legitimacy to hide actual harm with low legal standards, the legitimacy of which was based on actually avoiding the harm. Legal institutions can use legal fictions after they have authority – they cannot use them to get authority, and imagine self-determination and inclusion/empowerment when the values are simply not there.
What is equity and self-determination?
Yes a woman needs the autonomy of terminating a fetus that would otherwise come to rule her life, but if she then dies in a heatwave because she has insufficient resources she was never really free, and anything that said or suggested it was “green” without actually having done what was necessary to avoid her death – using at least eight metrics – is greenwashing, and one way the metrics add together is to assess whether she had an equal and influential role in determining the rules that would have limited the power others had over her. Here, it seems, not much.
Everything we think, say, or do, begins with a collective orientation that is hidden behind the illusion of human bodily autonomy that created the climate crisis, and if we are to be free, in that orientation the addition of new constituents must offset the influence of each constituent by one, relative to a restored nonhuman world. That requires a threshold beneath which children should not be born, and above which any may be born with a collective exchange in care model collective planning that ensure offset via the threshold or line. Fair Start will soon be suing to fund accounts that would fund the thresholds
Humans can only constitute the future through the language of obligation and the accurate linguistic creation of power relations. The fundamental mistake we all seem to be making is that our obligation is inverted: It would be physically impossible to be free unless we see ourselves as first obligated to persons who will parent, rather than first ruled by those at the top of the influence pyramid, e.g. officials, the wealthy, CEOs, celebs, etc., because all entitlement to influence derives from the governed and their primary equitable positioning.
Young women would have more justification to use coercion to get the resources they need, if to constitute, than the unrepresentative officers with guns defending wealth have to use it. This primacy of a discourse and the 1, and process inverting the direction of power, allows us to name high profile individuals that should be engaged. They are treated as members of a democracy, which is only constituted of individuals, and not as members of something that makes them beyond reach. And leaders of media urging racist and genocidal pronatalism in the climate crisis deserve what they get.
Using the old standard and recreating the fantasy world of self-determination – even in the most basic language of impact we see everyday – that caused the climate crisis interferes with measuring actual harm for the crisis who owes what to whom.
The risk of retaliatory violence is growing as temperatures rise and the wealth – the deadly costs of which fell on others – is denied the victims. In fact, much of the violence – including mass shootings – are misreported, with media omitting the political drivers of the acts. In terms of bearing the correct legal (inclusion in one’s democracy in a measurably empowering way) burdens and barriers, it should be more likely that leaders of concentrations of wealth and power die for not saving children, than children die for not being saved. But violence can be evaded.
The solution is clear and many are moving towards it: Measurable share equity, or having an equal and influential role in limiting the climatological, social and other forms of influence others have over you, and that harm your self-determination.
There is precedent for crossing lines to ensure the wealth is moved, like the Defiance work of the African National Congress. The key to this move is disabling current illegitimate entitlements – which drive everything – through the revelation of the fraud they create, and the death debt that encumber them and can be collected any anyone, anywhere.
An Inescapable Binary
The inequity/unsustainability standard, versus the fairness/legitimacy standard that should have been used by 1968, represents an unavoidable binary distinction. It differentiates along at least eight concrete values/metrics that measure the space between self v. other determining persons, (permissible emissions, political representative ratios, children’s wealth, etc.) and would result in trillions of dollars difference in reparations, and millions of lives saved.
The UN and related domestic legal actions implementing the preemption – dozens – would 1) standardize public benefit claims to avoid deadly and fundamental impact fraud 2) standardize climate and related crises loss and damage evaluations to account for all actual harm relative to real world baselines necessary for legitimate political systems and entitlements, 3) recognize the partial preemption of any conflicting entitlements with this process, and 4) recognize the right to entitle future generations with self-determination and share equity in their democracies as the basis of national legitimacy, and by all means effective.
This standardizes around actual harm (under 280 parts per million), rather than using the same standard – under pressure from the same wealthy families funding greenwashing – that caused the crisis (over 400). That’s the fox guarding the henhouse. Under this standard, every child born beneath the line creates a death debt the children of the wealthy carry. And to make some beg for charity when the thing is owed as a human right violates human dignity, and invites direct justice.
The threshold (which is the first point of political relativity for everything) is operationalized via a debt/savings account and a more collective form of family planning, and uses investments in a wide variety of resources including delay, time, cash, corporate shares, obligations that preempt taxes, time commitments, training and aid internships, etc., as well as parenting delay towards readiness, relocation, education and training, co-investments, etc.
The threshold, through debt and savings, can incentivize both the wealthy and vulnerable to change family planning, covering one’s debt before having kids, or alternatively, adding co-payments to the accounts before having kids. Accounts for particular collectives, care groups, fund kids only over the line, and also determine how actions can unwittingly move the line up, making it harder to get kids over.
The threshold is not a human choice. It is an objective measure of actual harm created by a fragile ecosystem and human needs that determine the impacts of birth, developmental and emancipatory conditions. The threshold is that, from which deviation caused massive harm. It is the antithesis of the fantasy world of “sustainability” created by wealthy persons who seek to now use it to minimize justice.
This process begins and centers on a discourse of intergenerational truth and reconciliation and mirrors the African National Congress Defiance anti-apartheid model of inverting illegitimacy and illegal entitlements. It uses a one question language test referred to as the constitutive discourse which converts the abstract preambles of constitutive legal instruments, which are needed to legitimate our power relations, to functional and inclusive processes.
A discourse to accelerate the change
The old social contract went something like men with money and guns writing rules for all others to follow, and drawing borders around themselves. This version sets a line – or border between freedom and power – beneath which children should not be born, and uses collective family planning discussions to get all kids over the line. Those kids can then write and follow their own rules.
The line or threshold is a full-dimensional border that can be used comparable to other apartheid-dismantling efforts.
There is a concrete discourse that urges target audiences to factor in the impact of children entering the world on any day the members of the audience made inaccurate social benefit claims publicly using the unsustainability standard which inevitably (we start everything we do with a decision, on the binary, about who we should be) contradicts the values of the speaker, and then ensuring the target audiences investing in young women using the fairness metrics as compensation for the fraud, and benefit at cost, that led to the crises.
The test lets anyone know which side of the binary someone falls – the inequity/unsustainability standard, versus the fairness/legitimacy standard. It lets us know who is punching down on the most vulnerable, in a universal circle of accountability, inclusion, and listening. And it ensures future generations will understand issue like what is covered here – which is not the case for most persons living today.
Many concentrations of wealth are retaliating, and taking extreme measures to hide the errors, avoid climate and other liability, and minimize or scuttle reparations. Defensive litigation is coming. Given the stakes as temperatures rise and inequity grows, there is the serious risk of violence. We need to make sure entitlements minimize that risk, not exacerbate it.
Future actions will test the model:
If a poor family needs access to air conditioning to survive, we will ensure the trespass laws defending the homes of the wealthy who benefited from the climate crisis cost-externalization scheme are preempted, and those in need get access. We will also ensure the death debt of concentrations of wealth attach to the adult children of the debtors, and will eventually be collected.
This is the binary choice, and every day we lose by letting debtors hide and avoid it: We can leave illegitimate wealth where it is or move it and save innocent lives as we invert the political system from top down coercion by non-representatives in what amounts to spamocacy, to bottom up investment and measurable inclusion.
Truth and reconciliation can mitigate the risk and unify around the value of measurable self-determination. Nothing has a more just, beneficial and liberating impact on children, animals, and the environment.
This is not intersectionality. Think of the values below all together as different sides of what it means to be free. Many children die every day because they are born without these entitlements, and all are inseparable and determined when we have children above or below the specific line of ecosocial inclusivity.
The framework standards – moving towards fluid borders, and functional constitutional conventions
Welfare – ensuring things like health, nutritional and educational outcomes that are measured based on the world as it would have been had the United Nations in1948 actually used self-determination – rather than reproductive isolation of families – as the standard for who we should be. Google terms like “conviction” with terms “child abuse” and “child torture.” Those refusing a threshold benefitted from the suffering your are reading about to make money on things like growth-driven investments.
Nature/environment (e.g., measurable emissions) – limiting emissions to levels that would not have caused the crisis, generally less than 280 ppm, and requiring the restoration of full biodiversity towards optimal ranges consistent with low-end UN growth projections. Current growth and wealth-based high emissions standards have already dilled millions. How should we treat those willing to choose a standard from which they benefit, but that kills others? How should we treat those that defined “green” to allow wealthy, white families to make money on growth-based investments, rather than a green that would have saved black infants’ lives.
Having an equal and influential share to determine all laws, including constitutional provisions – limiting representative ratios to those fitting with low-end UN growth projections. When some choose to other-determine rather than self-determine, by choosing economic families over democratic ones, it robs you of your freedom. How do free persons deal with such threats, and how have they in the past?
Self-determination, or share equity, to limit the influence others have over you – Whether you are free requires an amalgamation of the other metrics above. How could your self-determination not be limited by those entering the world? In this value, It would not seem to be limited if the average person were not really being empowered at birth, but being exploited by others. Intergenerational justice is hard because humans – even the greatest social justice warriors – often want to privilege their children and use it as an excuse to harm others.
Measuring Loss and Damage:
There are efforts underway to measure and award loss and damage for climate change.But all fundamentally recreate the error that drove much of the crisis after 1948: The absence of sufficient environmental protections in family planning regimes, both to limit emissions well below 300 ppm and to ensure minimum levels of welfare and resources for all children to deal with adversity, like rising temperatures.
The current loss and damage evaluations ignore this fundamental error, and would award based on arbitrary baselines that minimize the awards. Moreover, they ignore irrefutable arguments regarding any national legitimacy and political obligation deriving from the measurable self-determination of its constituents, that would treat high-evaluation reparations as preemptive of any conflicting laws and policies. The action before UN seeks to standardize this evaluation, and avoid “the fox guarding the henhouse” with the concentrations of wealth and power, including governments, that caused the crisis dealing with it in a way that benefits them at deadly cost to others.
In Walden we learn that a basket weaver could not expect tosucceed in the “free” markets being created by those colonizing his lands. But even Thoreau missed the fundamental value of nature in constituting power relations towards equity and freedom. To the extent thebeadworkers of Amboseliface the same threat from the likes of Elon Musk and his sort, we can make harsh examples of moving their illegitimate wealth as a fundamental act of liberation. To use god’s standard, nature, to entitle justice is the avenging hand of a higher power. The beadworkers offerings are inherently valuable, as we ensure we treat others as ends, not means.
Why then engage the UN, or member states at all, if there is an authority higher binding them? They become instrumental, and useful, but without the withering lie of having the last word, and as demands for intergenerational justice stretch into decades of action that view will lift those demanding share equity.
TAKE ACTION: Use the discourse and truth and reconciliation above to bifurcate concentrations of wealth and power, whether an individual or institution, into free persons and unfree barriers. Rank the latter by their ability to make the change you know is needed, and scale up influence on the most influential barriers until they break. This work deals with the first border between you, any kids you have or care about, and freedom.
The National Park Foundation has announced great news:
The National Park Foundation (NPF) today announced a historic $100 million grant from Lilly Endowment Inc. This transformative grant — the largest ever received by NPF and the largest grant benefitting national parks — celebrates a pivotal moment in safeguarding the future of America’s treasured national parks.
We can’t really become ourselves, and live authentic lives where we self-determine rather than determine the lives of others, without ensuring all children a fair start in life as the first human right.
Without this right in place, we have been able to exploit race/wealth based birth positionality and growth to benefit ourselves at deadly climatological other costs to others.
The current systems of family entitlements allows us to benefit while impacting the future majority in a way that will kill millions because each of us is not forced to account for the birth, developmental, and emancipatory positionality that gives some – mostly whites – a massive head start in life, and everyone living today the ability to make choices for others in the future instead of similarly making choices for themselves.
If we want to run life as a race, we should try doing it without a head start. We should do it with rules that are based on the values we all live, and rules that don’t immediately position some over others, that don’t exclude most from rulemaking and access to accurate criteria for assessing truth and value, or that ruin the track for future runners such that they die by the millions.
We should be runners, and not choosing for others in ways that don’t allow them to run.
We should understand that there is a difference between being popular, and being right. Millions dying from a climate crisis suggests we were not right, and should start all we do assessing why. Growth creating demand at cost to freedom, and even access to the criteria to accurately asses truth and value, suggest culprits.
By the numbers, most least lives that are anything but self-determining, or free. Why? Because this most basic rules was never in place: Young would-be parents have a first and overriding claim to societal resources if used to parent us into a better future, using metrics that combine to create a threshold above which children may be born, but beneath which no child should be born.
Without this it would be physically impossible to be free because we could not limit who has authority, power and influence over us. We could only try to limit who represents us – not who actually has – day to day – influence and power over us.
Free persons will see themselves as first obligated to persons who will parent and empower their children into emancipation, rather than first ruled by those at the top of the influence pyramid, e.g. officials, the wealthy, CEOs, celebs, etc., because all entitlement to influence derives from the governed and their primary and equitable positioning to self-determine, rather than government and current influencers, which have no inherent authority.
Would-be mothers who will physically constitute the future have the first right to use the most effective means to obtain the resources they need, to ensure freedom for all, and more of a right than the men with guns in government who masquerade as their representatives because there is no coherent, and necessarily primary, “we” without this override function. Those who wish to die orienting their lives from a position of freedom should consider this.
Here are eight metrics, and how then can be used to assured share equity entitlements, including reparations for climate harms. We cannot evade impacting all these values when we have children, hence
Welfare standards for birth, development, and emancipation – ensuring things like health, nutritional and educational outcomes that are measured based on the world as it would have been had the United Nations in1948 actually used self-determination – rather than the right to determine the lives of others with the entitlements they assumed – as the standard for who we should be. An example might be flexible savings accounts containing ten thousand dollars, in place before any child is born, to ensure everyone can have at least one child safely if they choose to.
Nature/environment (e.g., measurable emissions) – limiting emissions to levels that would not have caused the crisis, generally less than 280 ppm, and requiring the restoration of full biodiversity towards optimal ranges consistent with low-end UN growth projections.
Successful parenting – ensuring that parents do no regret having children, including eliminating cases of neglect of abuse, through successful planning. Would-be parents contributing twenty-five percent to the savings and debt accounts, including through credit earned by parental readiness training, would further this goal.
Having an equal and influential share to determine all laws, including constitutional provisions – limiting representative ratios to those fitting with low-end UN growth projections.
Democratic, not economic, levels of trust – Metrics for trust among citizens must show their willingness to trust each other with legislation, and all lesser included forms of trust that implies.
Self-determination, or share equity, to limit the influence others have over you – Whether you are free requires an amalgamation of the other metrics above.
They helped ensure rules for the game, and most importantly the first rule of who we should be in terms of the creation of power relations, to move the key costs on to others, and to create deadly criteria for truth and value (like demand created by not investing in birth and development conditions) by ensuring the average person could not patriciate in the rulemaking. Their wealth is owed back, and the demand overrides any government’s right to block it because the process of investing in equitable birth and development positionality is what makes governance inclusive, capable of representation, and hence legitimate.
National legitimacy, and the ability of nations to assign entitlements to wealth and to protect the lives and property of the wealthy, is contingent on human rights that empower subjects as political equals. This is the first human right, the right to share equity – or an equal and influential role in self-determining limitation of the power and influence others have over you.
Whether nations are assuring the right can be measured with discrete metrics – metrics that were hidden by those structuring human rights in favor of using arbitrary standards, like market demand manufactured through low standards for child welfare and development. The sovereignty and legitimacy of nations derives from the sovereignty – or self-determination – of its subjects, and an easy measure is whether each new child born into the world is seen as capable of offsetting or countermanding the vote and voice of existing persons, relative to a neutral threshold.
That would show they are truly empowered as political equals, and we would invest heavily in them – starting with a reproductive rights model actually based on children’s rights to conditions of birth and development that ensured inclusion – to ensure they used that power responsibly.
