Humans are animals, and our birth and development—our creation—are the greatest determinants of nonhuman suffering. Our creation also fundamentally shapes how our legal systems function, particularly through participatory democracy and representation.
However, discussions about altering how we have children—for their benefit and the benefit of animals—are rare. This is because creation ethics raise complex questions about racial equity, climate reparations, personal responsibility in parenting, degrowth, and liability for the charitable fraud that has, for decades, concealed the true drivers of the climate crisis.
It is easier to engage in performative animal rights and law—focusing on how legal language refers to animals or how vegan food reduces a small percentage of animal consumption—while ignoring the fact that growth-driven systems continue to undo these benefits. Many of us still benefit from a system designed around growth-based investments, perpetuating harm.
Critical generational studies, or macro animal rights, begins with the issue of creation—the foundational factor in any meaningful discussion of animal law, rights, policy, or protection.
This approach moves beyond static intersections of human rights that animal rights depend on, such as the right to rescue on a micro level. Instead, it emphasizes fair starts in life for children, reducing the growth and inequity that cause the most harm to animals on a macro level.
Humans are animals. Recognizing this helps shift us away from anthropocentric thinking that drives the climate crisis and leads to mass suffering. Animal law isn’t just about legal protections for nonhumans; it’s about fostering relationships between humans and nonhumans that prevent suffering.
Most acts of animal cruelty go unreported. How do we address that? True animal law starts with inclusive birth and child welfare policies that foster empathy, empower future generations, and protect animals. Human and nonhuman liberation are interconnected, as the way we shape our relationships drives outcomes for both.
The Hidden Undoing of Animal Law
Many organizations promoting animal law ignore how their efforts are undermined by unchecked human growth and the erosion of political equity. They claim progress without acknowledging that expansion in human populations, wealth concentration, and political inequity counteract their efforts. By ignoring these fundamental drivers of animal suffering, these organizations uphold a version of animal law that ultimately harms animals more than it helps them.
This omission is intentional. The organizations rely on assessment and reporting standards that obscure the real impact of human expansion, protecting the interests of wealthy donors rather than the vulnerable beings they claim to defend. They omit the connection between animal protection and just, sustainable human development because it threatens entrenched power structures.
The Fundamental Truth
We have collectively violated children’s right to a fair start in life. We have prioritized economic growth over political equity, allowed unsustainable population expansion, and ignored the needs of marginalized communities. These actions have caused more harm to animals, ecosystems, and human justice than any isolated intervention can remedy.
Animal law isn’t just about legal directives referring to animals; it’s about ensuring legal systems protect nonhumans meaningfully. The best measure of animal law is found in constitutional preambles and the structures that shape human-nonhuman relationships—not just in laws that mention animals.
The Creation Problem
Our birth and development—our creation—is the largest determinant of nonhuman suffering. It outweighs any other human behavior. Our creation also dictates how legal systems function, determining whether they genuinely include and empower the vulnerable or serve only the privileged.
Animal law must begin with the ethical considerations of human creation. Without this foundation, no legal system can meaningfully protect nonhumans. Yet, discussions of creation ethics are avoided because they raise uncomfortable questions about racial equity, climate reparations, parental responsibility, degrowth, and liability for misleading charitable work.
The Wealthy Influence on Animal Law
For decades, wealthy families and funders have shaped animal law to serve their own interests. They support narrow definitions of animal law that ignore the role of population growth and political inequity, ensuring that advocacy remains performative rather than transformative. Many advocates embrace this limited scope because it offers well-compensated work with little real impact.
Growth continues to undo the progress claimed by these organizations. It is easier to engage in performative animal law—discussing legal references to animals while ignoring the broader forces that shape their suffering. Large media budgets promote interventions that favor donors more than animals, drowning out solutions that would have a real impact. But there is no such thing as anthropocentric animal law.
Justice cannot emerge from injustice. We cannot create a just society while violating children’s rights at birth, ensuring inequity from the start. Nations cannot be legitimate if they provide no functional protections for children as they enter the world—or for the nonhuman world they will impact.
The HSUS Example: Monetizing Animal Liberation
In 2003, Fair Start advocates working with the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) framed farmed animals as the most numerous victims of human cruelty. This framing aligned with corporate interests, such as Whole Foods, which profited from growing public outrage over factory farming. The strategy monetized the concept of animal liberation without actually achieving it.
The most numerous class of animals, however, are future animals. HSUS and others ignored this reality, treating future beings the same way growth economists treat future people—as expendable. Rather than promoting small family ethics and policies that would reduce suffering, HSUS focused on food reforms within a growth-based market.
Many advocates profited from the food sector while using sensational campaigns to overshadow the macro-level drivers of suffering. This growth-driven demand, not food choice alone, remains the largest determinant of climate outcomes and animal suffering.
The Corruption of Animal Law
Animal law, as the most demanding form of social justice, serves as a measure of broader justice. It should assess how we include future generations in legal systems, empowering them to protect animals. However, from 2003 to today, most discussions of animal law focus on food and other downstream interventions. Few address family reforms that could benefit both animals and vulnerable humans.
Many nonprofit funders manipulate the field by using media, academia, and legal framing to obscure real impacts. Harvard University, for example, claims to improve animal treatment through law but does not address the fundamental driver of suffering: anthropocentric growth. Their policies benefit funders more than animals.
A senior funder associated with Harvard’s program has refused to include abortion access in animal law discussions, despite its disproportionate benefit to animals compared to food reforms. Their metric for impact ignores growth and birth-related impacts, ensuring inequity continues. Many organizations dependent on this funding remain silent, allowing resources meant for animals to sustain human privilege instead.
The Demand for Climate Justice
As climate reparations become a global demand, animal lawyers will face scrutiny. What were they doing during the crucial years of the climate crisis? Did they challenge the systems enabling injustice, or did they serve the interests of the powerful?
Recent direct action movements offer hope that animal law can move toward true liberation rather than performative advocacy. However, if these movements ignore macro-level reforms, they, too, fail to serve nonhumans meaningfully.
Fair Start: Exposing False Claims
The Fair Start Movement exists to expose misleading impact claims and hold institutions accountable. Our Tell the Truth campaign asks key questions:
How do organizations account for children’s rights when claiming beneficial impact?
Are their claimed benefits being undone by growth and inequity?
By challenging these false narratives, we push for policies that prioritize birth equity and sustainable relationships, ensuring that animal law becomes a force for real justice—not a tool of wealth and power.
Conclusion: Be Effective
The commercialization of animal rights as food consumerism is a stark example of how a justice movement can be co-opted. Organizations continue making fraudulent impact claims while inequity and growth undo their efforts daily. Many companies that diverted resources from fundamental reforms ultimately failed.
We can change this. Start by asking: “When you claim to benefit animals, how do you account for children’s rights? Is your work being undone by growth?”
Only by telling the truth can we ensure that animal law serves animals not the wealthy individuals who define it for their own gain.
More here: https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/fair-start-movement-urges-california-attorney-general-to-recognize-full-justice-standard-as-preemptive-of-fraud-claims-1035104323
We are now submitting this with a request to the California Attorney General to intervene in the litigation, using the standard we have identified.
The standard is designed to assess and report values and impacts out of context. It is the single largest driver of the harms we see in the case, and it begins with zero functional protections for the most vulnerable. That’s illegal.
Coke/Fairlife should start fixing this by admitting that they benefitted from an equitywashing system, that through inequitable growth, illegally violated children’s birthright to political equity, and did more harm to their advertised values and impacts than they did to further them. By doing so, the companies can move towards the legitimacy of a neutral standard where some do not benefit at deadly cost to others.
That anthrocentric and unsustainable standard is the largest single variable causing the harm, and it hides harm to infants and animals on at least eight levels. It hides the fact that we have a moral and legal duty to move Coke’s extreme wealth, made at illegal and deadly climatological and other costs to children, or suffer the consequences of continuing to let those kids die.
We can’t use the same fundamentally illegal standard that caused the climate crisis to evade liability for it — that’s fraud.
Equity is a state of empowerment to allow us to accurately and fairly determine what is “green” and “humane.
The standard has been used by many of the public interest entities claiming to oppose destructive industries like animal agriculture, entities that, like those industries, use performative interventions that do more to protect generational wealth for their biggest funders than to accomplish their missions.
Many start their work by discounting the lives of future animals and infants, in contravention of their stated causes. Many animal rights and law organizations have challenged the idea that animals are property at a micro and mostly performative level, but their acceptance of it at a macro level has done way more harm to animals than they have done good, given the way their out-of-context impact and values claims have for decades hidden this larger issue.
The standard ensures inequitable and unsustainable growth, violation of children’s birthrights, and the denial of the ecological, social, and political thresholds children need to thrive. This has done more harm to our values than any of us have done to further them, and hiding that is fraud, or benefitting at deadly and illegal costs by omitting the daily undoing of the value we claim to create.
This is especially so because the growth treats children of color as deserving exponentially fewer resources and more risk, including the violence inherent in unrepresentative government. This is the subversion of racial justice by whites who freeride on their illegal birth positionality, using their wealth to control people’s perception of truth and value. All authority to govern and to own wealth derives from the inclusion of those subject to the governance or wealth as free and equal persons in the political system, with one person/one influential vote. But by 1968, governments had taken equity out of reproductive rights systems so that this crucial, physical inclusion never occurred. Rather, the doctrine of separate but equal was maintained at an existential level. The exploitation of children for economic growth became the standard, and freedom was taken out of context.
Doing so undercuts true obligations to others and ensures violence by making representative governance impossible.
We can ask Coke/Fairlife, the charities they back, as well as the charities that engaged for decades in a charade of opposing entities like Coke/Fairlife, the same questions:
How were you accounting for your work being undone each day by violations of children’s birthrights as they entered the world? Would you be willing to derive wealth and authority back and condition it on ensuring such birthrights? If you could go back and make that change in our political systems decades ago to save millions of lives, would you do it? If you claimed to create value that was being undone by basic inequity, would you not be eager to reform that system and align with your claimed values?
Climate reparations owed by those who used the illegal standard are a form of self-defense, and the obligation to pay them should fall on the adult children of the wealthy until justice is done.
Central to the economics literature on climate change is the Social Cost of Carbon. This is a calculation that attempts to assign a price to the wellbeing lost for every ton of Carbon emitted. It has been shown that these estimates are highly sensitive to the discount rate used to model damages. For example, decreasing the discount rate from 5% to 2.5% often increases the estimated damages by a factor of 5.
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Together, we can create lasting change to save the next generations.
How else would we account for unreported and unreportable animal cruelty, which comprises that vast majority of such acts? How else would the law account for avoiding that? What logically would precede ensuring relations likely to prevent it?
There is no universe in which beneficial impacts, taken out of context from their relative position to birth equity, occurred. They are just being stated out of context. Use of such-out-of-context claims hides the fundamental driver for the deaths: Enabling the powerful over the vulnerable
The undoing of their claimed beneficial work, and their masking of growth as the fundamental driver of the climate crisis, was enabled by the assessment and reporting standards that caused the climate crisis, standards that ignore illegal violations of vulnerable children’s birthrights. In other words, leaders at these organizations chose a version of animal law that – at base – excluded animal protection as a factor impacting how we invest in children coming into the world, and on balance this emaciated version of animal law did more harm to animals than these organizations did to benefit them.
We can fix this mess by moving what we claim to value – animal protection and liberation – into our fundamental constitutional regimes. How?
It starts with Telling the Truth:
Facts: We have all collectively violated children’s right to a fair start in life, by allowing unsustainable growth, trading economic growth for loss of political equity, ensuring the degrading of ecosocial birth and development conditions beneath key thresholds, and assuming children of color deserved much fewer resources and much more risk. This has done more to harm our shared values – animal protection and liberation, experiencing moderate temperatures, enjoying access to food and water, etc. – as well as our many of our public interest missions, than we did to further them.
“Animal law” does not mean talking about abstract directives that refer to animals, and relying in good intentions and symbolic acts to achieve animal protection. Yes, advocates may have better intentions than Exxon, but how much do animals care about our intentions, and why not measure justice from an objective standard rather than use bad actors as the standard?
It’s first and foremost about having functionally protective, legal relations with nonhumans, an idea better reflected in the preambles of constitutions than any reference or lack of reference to animals per se.
Background
Humans are animals and our birth and development – our creation – is the largest determinant of nonhuman suffering. It outweighs any other human behavior that impacts nonhumans, exponentially. Our creation also determines how – through participatory democracy and representation, or what is really just political equity or our functional shared in democracy – our legal systems function.
Animal law starts with that issue – the creation of humans – the first necessary condition for something to be animal law and capable of protecting them. It starts at the subject level of our grammar, the “we” in our constitutions, or the creation-accounted-for existence of our relations with them.
AI systems adept at assessing racial injustice can detect equity values at the subject-level of value claims (and those values will alter the human-animal relations), versus the object level of those claims. Consider the need to distinguish between something like equity in hiring decisions versus who is birth-positioned to make those hiring decisions. A goal for permissible climate emissions as the object of a sentence differs greatly from a low emissions standard implicit in the “we” subject of the same claim, with that collective subject implying the ability of all referenced to be free from harmful emissions. Permissible emissions as a goal/object frames the political system as consensual and legitimate (especially from the perspective of nonhumans), which it would not be without restoration as a condition of the collective subject.
But instead, these issues are rarely discussed because creation ethics, unlike food, zoning, shelter, etc. policies, involve big questions of racial equity, climate reparations, personal responsibility in parenting, de-growth and liability for charitable fraud that hid the drivers of the climate crisis.
Creation ethics as a subject, threaten the nepotistic families and funders who for decades have used their wealth to define animal law in a narrow way, relying on advocates eager to get the benefits of well compensated but low-impact charade work, contrary to the interests of nonhumans and vulnerable humans. Every day growth undoes the impacts and benefits animal lawyers and others advocates claim to produce. But few will admit that.
Performative Animal Law
It’s easier to engage in performative animal law where we just talk about how legal language refers to animals, while the actual benefits to animals and vulnerable humans are undone via inequity and growth, and we enjoy the benefits of our growth based investments and institutions. It’ s easier to use wealth made at cost to animals to create interventions that are being undone daily, in ways that benefit those creating the interventions more than animals, using large media budgets to drown out possible interventions that would on balance benefit animals. But there is no such thing as anthrocentric animal law.
You don’t get to justice by starting with injustice, by violating children’s rights in the birth-creation of actual relations. We don’t get to legitimate nations by having zero functional protections for children as they enter the world, and thus for the nonhuman world they will impact.
For example, circa 2003 Fair Start advocates previously working with the Humane Society of the United States (“HSUS”) embarked on a policy to frame farmed animals as the most numerous class of animals subject suffering at the hands of humans. We did this while partnering with Whole Foods and other entities intent on commercializing the growing anger HSUS and others would create by publicizing the treatment of farmed animals. We had found a way to monetize the idea of animal liberation, but not actually accomplish it.
But HSUS and others chose to focus on food reforms, all of which assumed growth-based food markets. While the book Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, by Anand Giridharadas, looked at issues of human justice, that turn – to focus on food sales over fundamental justice – is the greatest example of the phenomenon he saw, once we measure by the numbers of victims impacted.
Many of the funders, legal advocates and activists working on these issues at the time would go on to make a lot of money in the food sector, in the years to follow, having used sensational campaigns centered on granular/micro issues of animal suffering that overshadowed the macro forces – like growth-driven demand – undoing the work. That growth driving more and more animals into suffering and acting as the largest diver of climate outcomes.
How does this relate to animal law specifically? Animal law is arguably the most demanding form of social justice, and thus a good measure for how systems fare in being just or unjust. It purports, in referring to a legal system capable of actually protecting nonhumans, to be inclusive of the vulnerable in a measurable way.
Animal law goes beyond impacts, and requires assessments about how we are including future children into legal systems in ways that empower those children and legitimate the systems. Look closely at all of the content being created and framed as “animal law,” from 2003 until today. You will see a lot of focus on food and similar downstream-only interventions. Look then for comparable work on family reforms that would have benefitted nonhumans, and vulnerable humans, alike. You will be surprised to find little if any, and with some of the organizations actually encouraging growth that ignores children’s rights in favor of economic growth.
In many cases the funding of animal nonprofits exemplifies a next-level expansion of the corruption that is well documented in philanthropy: The use of well-funded messaging, media, academia, etc. to limit the ability of audiences to use accurate criteria to judge the truth and value of claims and impact.
In one case, those designing programming at Harvard University define the scope of their work in an inaccurate way that implies a beneficial overall impact on animals that is totally unsupported by their work. When political equity is factored in, the scope privileges those funding the work more than the animals they claim to protect. The site refers to the program as “Committed to analyzing and improving the treatment of animals through the legal system,” and yet nothing in their policies or work addresses the fundamental driver of animal suffering and death because that driver—anthrocentric growth—benefits the school and their funders.
One senior funder, associated with the program, is known for creating digests of animal law developments. That funder has refused requests to cover developments in abortion access precedent as “animal law” because, according to their representative at the time, the idea of “animal law” required legal developments that discussed animals. They ignore legal reforms around abortion access as a benefit to animals, despite the disproportionate benefit abortion access has for animals, relative to food. They define animal law in ways that ignore the largest determinants for animals, things like the notion of black birth equity as an overriding human right.
That standard – which is the same one used by a notorious milk brand – is key for the funder, because their entity is highly nepotistic, spending more on family members compensation than on policies capable of actually benefitting animals. Many of the entities relying on funds from funder avoid talking about this issue for obvious, but unethical, reasons. That silence ensures funds meant to benefit animals don’t – on balance – have that effect, while deadly inequity between humans grows.
In fact, many animal lawyers have continued to double down, explicitly embracing anthropocentric systems that have benefitted their funders more than animals. Why does all of this matter? Demands for climate reparations are growing, and many will be wondering what those attorneys and advocates working under the mantle of protecting the most vulnerable were doing during the most crucial years of us all knowing the climate crisis was unfolding, years when we were able to do something about it.
Animal lawyers, more than most, will have questions to answer for their role.
Were they advocating for performative behavior-changing standards without changing the fundamental relations being created, focusing on micro propertyhood, while hiding a much more lethal form of macro propertyhood? What role did funders making money on the latter, those who did not want to question their or their kids’ birth-based national, intergenerational, racial, etc. positionality, have in that fallacy?
If we have account for way inequity and growth undoes our claimed good work for animals, in which fantasy world were we actually benefitting animals? Some recent direct action efforts give promise that animal law can move towards animal liberation, and not just talking about it while living in ways – fundamental ways – that hypocritically undo it. But unless direct action animal liberation movements also include macro animal liberation reforms, they too are not serving nonhumans on balance.
Fair Start: Fundamental Fact and Value Checking
The Fair Start Movement was formed to engage in fundamental fact checking, scanning for use of the same fundamentally illegal standard of entitlements that caused the crisis by those who would use it to avoid liability for the crisis, and for life-saving and legitimating climate reparations.
Under the Fair Start Tell The Truth campaign, we ask questions to bifurcate key influencers into the fair and unfair, and in the latter identify key barriers who should disclose how much of the value they claimed to create has been undone when we factor in growth, and the violations of children’s’ birthrights that enabled that growth. In this process we contrast impact claims with actual harm, relative to a zero-harm baseline, or the neutral standard necessary for a coherent understanding of freedom.
We then urge those key barriers to admit the undoing, and shift some percentage of their resources to incentivize fair starts in life for all kids as the most just and effective solution to the problems we face today. Legitimate nations begin with – or constitute through – rights-based relations, and Tell the Truth identifies “nonconstitutive” targets blocking that process, often by creating a fantasy world of inaccurate impacts.
The Fair Start Movement formed because of the common use, in U.S. companies, nonprofits, media, universities, etc. of an illegal assessment and reporting standard to hide climate damage liability, a standard based on the same fundamentally Illegal metrics that caused the climate crisis and millions of deaths. The standard – deriving from Twentieth Century power grab efforts to subvert civil rights movements – siloes justice away from birth equity into downstream issue areas that act as decoys, hiding a growing lack of birth-based political equity.
This power grab effectively skipped children’s rights in the logic of human rights regimes, applying them only after children were born into conditions that violated the rights. This was a way to shift costs, evade hard checks on growth, avoid racial equity, and ensure status quo in the direction of power. The illegal; standard centers on using top-down, abstract, and arbitrary measures for social justice and public interest outcomes, rather than zeroing out harm in the actual creation of relations.
Any most of the companies that diverted funds away from successful reforms actually failed.
We can all start to change this, and with easy conversations that begin with questions like: “We noticed you said this about your work and impact. We worry this refers to the use of the same fundamental assessment and reporting standard that caused the climate crisis – the one that does not require child-rights based family planning. How were you accounting for children’s rights as they entered the world when you claimed to have a beneficial impact? Were your impacts being undone?”
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Humans are animals and our birth and development – our creation – is the largest determinant of nonhuman suffering. Our creation also determines at the most basic level how – through participatory democracy and representation – how our legal systems function.
But altering how we have children, for their benefit and the benefit of animals, is rarely discussed because creation ethics involve big questions of racial equity, climate reparations, personal responsibility in parenting, de-growth and liability for the charitable fraud that for decades hid the drivers of the climate crisis.
It’s easier to engage in performative animal rights and law, where we just talk about how legal language refers to animals or how vegan food reduces a small percentage of animals consumed, while the actual benefits to animals and vulnerable humans are undone via growth, and we benefit from a system designed around growth-based investments.
Critical generational studies, or macro animal rights, starts with the issue of creation – the first necessary condition for something to accurately or comprehensively refer to animal law, rights, lives, policy, etc.
This work goes beyond static intersections of the human rights that animal rights need, like the right to rescue on a micro level, towards fair starts in life for children that reduce the growth and inequity doing the most harm to animals, on a macro level.
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This year Fairstartmovement.org will engage in the Tell the Truth campaign, urging prominent social justice figures to admit failure as the climate crisis accelerates and kills millions.
At the base of all of the failures is their not having accounted for children entering the world, or the actual creation of power relations, when they urged reforms. That factor was undoing, every day, the benefits their reforms would have ensured. Instead, that factor resulted in the enrichment of a small percentage of mostly white families at deadly cost to countless families of color.
I and many others were encouraged to ignore that issue in our activism, for decades, so that the wealthy funders could take advantage of the growth and inequity driving the crisis.
This is not a debate. Tell the Truth means just urging key figures to disclose how the values they championed were undone – over the last three years – as children entered the world without the resources they need, and in ways that degraded their ecologies and disenfranchised them politically.
For example, we can urge Peter Singer to disclose how his animal liberation work, from the numbers of animals suffering and general impacts on welfare to daily violations of rights, was undone in the last three years by growth that benefitted his backers.
Ask him to relate the numbers to zero baselines that account for actual harm including the value of self-determination, like these, and not projections for food investments.
If we account for the climate crisis the numbers – in both fields he championed – will show him enriching vegan food and other investors, not benefitting animals or vulnerable humans. It’s not about intent. Yes, Exxon and others’ supply-side work drove emissions, but only in response to the same growth-based demand that Singer and others enabled (even if done so simply as a matter of negligence). And Exxon never claimed to be liberating animals.
Animal rights claims are the most falsifiable when we run the numbers. Is hype and a questionable legacy more important than staving off deaths in the crisis?
This goes beyond greenwashing towards fraud, and as deaths mount legal systems are evolving to prohibit drivers of the crisis like moving wealth in deadly ways through omissive messaging.
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If you comb through coverage on the Vox news site regarding a variety of issues – including the environment, population, democracy, animal rights, etc. – you will see something odd.
They never trace all of these problems back to the source: Unsustainable and inequitable family models that exploit future children for economic growth. Each day those models make the problems being covered worse. Like most concentrations of wealth and power the news outlet’s values do not outweigh their desire to exploit growth and their own birth positionality, even when that exploitation drives a deadly climate crisis. And even when doing so makes their coverage hypocritical.
Fact: Our collectively violating children’s right to a fair start in life, and assuming children of color deserve fewer resources and more risk, has done more to harm our values and missions than we have done to further them.
Wealth in the world today was made through growth and at cost to children’s rights, in what some call the #famscam. In the scheme, nations illegally evaded their obligation to only bring children into birth and development conditions compliant with children’s rights and the political equity from which legitimate governance derives.
They chose a form of unsustainable reproductive autonomy that was akin to the racist separate but equal scams, but one which will kill far more persons. Governments said we were equal and then ensured some children had nothing and others everything under the lie that parental autonomy could exist outside of political equity.
Anything that starts with less is inherently oppressive and non-inclusive. People, rather than documents, constitute nations as they are born, raised, and emancipated. What we think of as growth is actually political inequity. We have an overriding or preemptive right to take the wealth that was stolen and use it to fund family reforms, or the constituting of a just future.
Those who subverted the civil rights movements decades ago, by ignoring children’s rights in the idea of reproductive autonomy, were avoiding the override – the fact that political equity always comes first and would allow the needy to take the correct resources by all means. National borders, rules and entitlements derive from the sovereignty or self-determination of constituents, and that derives from relations developed in birth, development and emancipation.
The many funders that framed and defined social justice over the last several decades never created real value in their vast wealth, relative to an objective standard like a healthy climate. Instead they first used inequitable family planning to create their own audiences and artificial demand by ensuring dismal standards for child development and education, violating their own professed values (like animal protection and children’s rights) and treating people as economic inputs rather than citizens.
They did this while benefiting from the appearance of inclusive and functional democracies where the average vote was actually being diluted to uselessness. A system of fundamental entitlements likely to kill millions of innocent persons, and which could instead have achieved better outcomes by actually investing in children, is generally considered a failure.
The baseline those like Vox uses has subverted the civil rights and anti-apartheid movements by undoing with family inequity upstream the good they seem to be doing downstream – a move that exponentially catalyzes the climate and related crises, while aiming the harm of the crises towards the least responsible for it, and most vulnerable to it.
If the Three-Fifths Compromise in U.S. history fractionalized the worth of persons of color, the one-tenth and greater illegal disparities in generational wealth that violate legally enforceable children’s rights regimes will now mean the death of millions of children of color in a climate crisis caused primarily by white wealth.
Wealthy, mostly white, families and other entities are now funding charities, media, politicians and academics who silo social justice issues away from birth equity, and use omissive messaging – a form of entitlement and impact, or equity, fraud – that hides their liability and the illegal macro entitlement systems ensuring the death of millions as the climate crisis accelerates. Fraud is intentionally benefitting at harm to others based on misinformation, including omissions.
Exploiting mothers’ vulnerability to ensure growth, and not first ensuring reparative family reforms that assure children birth and development conditions consistent with the Children’s Condition, does more harm to all of our missions than we are doing good, because the power dynamics that choice creates is degrading the ecological capacity of the planet to ensure infant health – the first and only measure of value.
Take Action:
Contact Swati, a key lead at Vox, and urge her to report in a way that covers the real driver of the problems we face. Ask her if she thinks all kids deserve a fair start in life.
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The field of animal law, rights, and protection has been around for a long time. It is one of the most aspirational areas of justice, aiming to protect and liberate nonhumans from the horrors humans inflict upon them. But as the climate crisis unfolds, and more animals are harmed each day by humans, we should look for what must have gone wrong in the field to bring us to today.
Brad Goldberg has been one of the most influential figures in the field of animal rights and law, having used his wealth to in a definitive way, funding and advising organizations, academics and activists for decades. He seeded animal law programs at some of the leading schools in the nation, and has written extensively about funding and activism for animals.
But if one closely analyzes his public statements, his giving, and the results of his giving, something foundational is missing. He never seems to account for how children entering the world, and the very different resources they have when they do, impact the lives of animals.
That’s not ideal, given that is the largest determinant of animals’ lives. Claims of animal protection, in the face of the growth and inequity driving the climate crisis, are some of the most falsifiable impact claims being made in philanthropy. Growth and inequity has done more to harm animals than those working in the field have done to save them.
Is there a more macro way to think about animals?
Humans are animals. Seeing ourselves as such moves us away from anthrocentric thinking that ensured the climate crisis, and will kill millions. So, what we refer to as animal rights and law would focus on nonhumans not because of their species, but because of their unique vulnerability. In other words, animal law cannot merely be law that happens to refers to animals.
The base – and in this case the base of what Brad assumed as a legitimate legal system – treated children of color as worth exponentially less investment in birth and development, and by fundamentally enabling growth, triggered a climate crisis killing some while enriching others.
Fact: When impacts are correctly measured, not prioritizing a measurably fair start in life for all children did exponentially more harm to most stated missions of organizations than those organizations did good.
Intergenerational justice legitimates nations, making them capable of representing their constituents. We all do this together, by ensuring no child is born beneath a threshold of investment that would give them an influential equity stake in their democracies. Not having done this to date has condemned millions to die in a climate crisis, while the children of the wealthy families who benefited from illegitimacy have been enriched.
Why Fair Start?
Funding that ensures no child is born beneath a set level of entitlement, consistent with the Children’s Rights Convention and Right to a Healthy Environment,is exponentially the most just and effective way to protect our future and free all of us. The creation of power relations – through birth, development, and emancipation – is usually the biggest driver of social justice outcomes because it operates on many levels, compounding impacts simultaneously.
Fair Start’s recent action before the United Nations asks anyone relying on any legal authority to derive back to the most preemptive source of legitimacy, an exercise that inevitably ends with the need to prioritize entitlements that would measurably empower all children through improved birth and development conditions, ensuring them a fair start in life and share equity in democracy.
Under the universally preemptive standard that ensures fair starts in life for all kids, we can remove extractive 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.
In this effort Fair Start is urging officials to contrast the claims of beneficial public impact being made by many entities and those they fund with actual harms to women and infants – correctly measured relative to a neutral position rather than the fictitious standards that created the climate and related crises.
Not omitting the impacts of children entering the world, admitting the use of failed and fraudulent standards, and inverting our obligation from the powerful to first women and children, can save both human and nonhuman lives.
TAKE ACTION: Urge Brad here to assess how children entering the world over the last several decades impacts his claims about the field of animal law, rights and protection, how that impact alters his legacy, and to consider how – in light of this factor – he would alter his advice to those he funded.
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Fact: More animals are suffering and dying because of growth, our failure to develop empathy in children, climate change and other related factors, than the ASPCA is saving with their current suite of interventions.
Urge their lead to include Fair Start reforms in their programming.
Why Fair Start?
Funding that ensures no child is born beneath a set level of entitlement, consistent with the Children’s Rights Convention and Right to a Healthy Environment,is exponentially the most just and effective way to protect our future and free all of us. The creation of power relations is usually the biggest driver of social justice outcomes because it operates on many levels, simultaneously.
We can ensure that funding by using the extreme wealth in the world today that was made by not paying the costs of avoiding climate, autocratic and other harms to future generations. The legitimate and reparative standard – being fair – will save millions of lives, and trillions of dollars.
This is not a choice, but an obligation.
Every entity in the United States is and should be forced to comply with civil rights laws prohibiting discrimination in hiring, housing, education, etc. But not extending protections to infants who would suffer the consequences of historic injustice – maintaining the separate but equal doctrine in reproductive rights, child welfare and family law – was a horrific mistake killing many. Infants should not pay the price of our mistakes, and world leaders should not be able to evade facing the lies and failures that fundamentally caused the climate crisis.
Being fundamentally illegitimate, or non-inclusive, seeded in our brains the idea that our birth and developmental positionality was organic, rather than the result of short-sighted policy. As described below, the solution involves a defiance, truth and reconciliation process, akin to anti-apartheid movements, where we all admit we benefitted at cost to others based on injustice, and we turn to now honor our obligations to the victims through legal, organizational and grassroots reforms.
The Key Barrier: Deadly Omissions
However there are entities now funding charities, media, politicians and academics who silo social justice issues away from birth equity, and use omissive and fraudulent messaging that hides their liability and the entitlement systems ensuring the death of millions as the climate crisis accelerates.
As described below Fair Start is urging officials to contrast the claims of beneficial public impact being made by these entities and those they fund with actual harms to women and infants – correctly measured relative to a neutral position rather than the fictitious standards that created the climate and related crises – as these things accelerate. Not omitting the impacts of children entering the world, admitting the use of failed and fraudulent standards, and inverting our obligation from the powerful to first women and children, can save lives.
If those Fair Start engages truly value the things (like biodiversity) they took credit for protecting, they will be eager to now cover the costs to others of not having previously included the value in our basic systems of constitution and obligation, and to include the things they claim to value as we constitute relations going forward.
Fact: When impacts are correctly measured, not prioritizing a measurably fair start in life for all children did exponentially more harm to most stated missions of organizations than those organizations did good. In many cases they will have spent more on lavish travel and events, or other incidentals, than actually furthering their mission.
Intergenerational justice legitimates nations, making them capable of representing their constituents. We all do this together, by ensuring no child is born beneath a threshold of investment that would give them an influential equity stake in their democracies. Not having done this to date has condemned millions to die in a climate crisis, while the children of the wealthy families who benefited from illegitimacy have been enriched.
This hid the overriding nature of the upstream creation of power relations behind the downstream subject area of population, and conflated a false view of bodily autonomy, one based on inequity and a capacity to harm others, with true autonomy or measurable self-determination through positioning in one’s democracy.
The former would enable a woman to terminate her pregnancy only to die months later in a heat wave because she was born with the inherited wealth inequity that comes with being black, could not afford air conditioning, and had little influence over her political system to challenge all of that.
Neither business nor government has been historically tasked with defining the ideals of social justice. The wealthy families behind philanthropy generally did that, and in avant-garde movements like animal rights and liberation. But by simultaneously individualizing the idea of reproductive autonomy to isolate women, evade child equity, and ensure unsustainable growth, they created a false reference point for self-determination. It treated children of color as worth exponentially less investment in birth and development, and by fundamentally enabling growth, triggered a climate crisis killing some while enriching others.
This created a fictitious baseline for cost and benefit analysis and national legitimacy in which we never first account for our own positionality, situating our autonomy with regard to the need for others to have equitable shares in democracy, and relative to key, real world markers like ecological carrying capacities or resources for early childhood development guaranteed by the Children’s Rights Convention. This has fundamentally driven and exacerbated the climate crisis by exploiting rather than including and measurable empowering, children as they entered the world. The claims of public benefit that arise from it maintain a fantasy world that enriches mostly white children at deadly cost to millions of children of color.
These wealthy families and other entities are now funding charities, media, politicians and academics who silo social justice issues away from birth equity, and use omissive messaging – a form of entitlement and impact, or equity fraud – that hides their liability as well as illegal macro entitlement systems ensuring the death of millions as the climate crisis accelerates. Fraud is intentionally benefitting at harm to others based on misinformation, including omissions. If you ask the right questions, those engaged in it become obvious: They start by assuming entitlements that contradict the impact they claim, and by enabling the industries they claim to fight.
Ensuring Truth and Justice for All: Zero Baseline Accounting
That baseline represents an objective and inclusive valuation of freedom, one that includes the key perspective of full context, including impacts on the most vulnerable. Focusing there, on things like what Dr. Breeze Harper called the primacy of Black Birth Equity, accounts for the creation of power disparities in birth, development, and emancipation.
We are asking these and other officials to then 2) contrast these impacts with current and historic (ten years back, as a minimum but in many cases with disclosures needed to 2003) sustainability, legitimate entitlement and authority, equity and other public benefit claims, and the use of fundamentally unsustainable and fraudulent family entitlements, used by prominent leaders and organizations within their jurisdictions. This tracking enables preemptive reparations, structured to prevent harm to future generations and to ensure their right to self-determine. The effort is being launched in tandem with filings before the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACPHR), setting demands for reparations that can be carried by activists in the United States whose children are also dying from the crisis.
Simply put, we are asking officials to assess public benefit impact claims from the accurate baseline for self-determination, relative to real world markers, rather than from the fictitious baseline that assumes black lives are worth less and uses omission to hide white wealth as a driver of the deaths of countless children of color.
This fraudulent standard of entitlement, impact, and legitimacy allows many to benefit at deadly cost to others by claiming beneficial public impacts that are actually being undone each day.
What are the metrics and moves – different facets of the threshold for self, as opposed to other, determination – exemplified in action here?
Funding would-be mothers delay, readiness and safe locating so that no child is born beneath a concrete line of what their rights guarantee them, without abuse or neglect, and what trust-based (democratic) communities require including not exploiting children’s positionality. Read more here.
Restoring, not mitigating, climate emissions to natural levels. Read more here.
Taking the exact resources needed to ensure equality of opportunity for children of color, competitive with white kids. Read more here.
Conditioning political and economic authority on their moving towards truly representative ratios between officials and their constituents, and recognizing the need for those in positions of influence to carry the risk of any violence not doing so creates. Read more here.
Benchmarking efficiency to equity measures around the high capacity for humans through equitable development and empowerment, rather than the exploitation that created a climate crisis killing millions of innocents. Read more here.
Equity Fraud
The failed models have used a fictitious baseline and false premise that hid the upstream antecedent language that entailed the creation of power relations, often behind downstream subjects like population, environment, animal rights, human rights, etc. To constitute, as in national constitutions, means to be obligated. Our debt to children is a chance to actually constitute a just society, and to do so because of shared obligations, not because a bunch of white men with guns (or money backed by guns) are forcing you to. This moves from the bottom upwards – governance contingent on the measurable emancipation of youth – not inherently authorized top down.
The families and concentrations of wealth and power driving the fundamentally unfair systems never really created value, relative to an objective standard like a healthy climate or the unity of value we find in mutual self-determination. Instead they first used poor family planning to create their own audiences and artificial ever-increasing overall demand by treating children as means rather than ends, ensuring dismal standards for child development, education and critical thinking. This slowly converted democratic relations into commercial ones.
This violated children’s rights by treating people as economic inputs rather than citizens, and in systems where the average vote was actually being diluted to uselessness, while wealthier families benefited from the appearance of inclusive and functional democracies. A system of fundamental entitlements likely to – through unsustainable growth – kill millions of innocent persons is generally considered a value failure.
Those who use the latter are choosing that the least responsible for the climate crisis suffer its greatest cost, with no justification, increasing climate deaths by millions and costs by trillions.
The Fundamental Fix
However, the disparity between what we think and say, and the reality of what we do to children and animals relative to objective measures, opens a doorway to legitimacy and freedom.
Again, to constitute, as in national constitutions, means to be obligated. Our debt to children is a chance to actually constitute a just society, and from the base, rather than under the standards of those who act as if they are above us. Covering these child development costs as an obligation liberates more than oppresses.
But this true control of who has influence over us requires measuring from zero. And that would be impossible without the admission of the specific harm we have caused and the changing of our obligation from those in power instead towards infants and animals. We thus ask all to admit benefit at deadly cost to others, and to back reparations.
Where else would liberating / obligatory relations come from? As shown above this “truth and reconciliation” process of removing birth apartheid requires reprioritizing wealth to incentivize and entitle would-be mothers so that no child is born beneath a measurable threshold of self-determination.
It is physically impossible to be free, as in self-determining, if we cannot ask and then assure that persons are created, developed and emaciated in ways that offset equally their capacity to influence political systems equally, relative to a neutral position or objective standard for evaluation. Those entering the world are either not empowered, or we all have no choice but to be subjected to their power and influence – including the degradation of the environment around us. We should instead empower the governed, not the government and the wealthy. And it’s very hard to change a future child’s prospects once they are born, so justice should focus on thresholds beneath which children should not be born.
Instead of funding those thresholds, those engaged in equity fraud have continued to assume exponential (and very deadly) wealth and resilience disparities are natural – that their and their children’s birthright privileges are just a given – when calculating things like permissible climate emissions.
Fair Start’s action before the United Nations enables liberation from this nonsense. It simply asks anyone relying on any legal authority to derive back to the most preemptive source of legitimacy, an exercise that inevitably ends with the need to prioritize entitlements that would measurably empower all children through improved birth and development conditions, ensuring them a fair start in life and share equity in democracy.
Under the universally preemptive standard that ensures fair starts in life for all kids, we can remove extractive 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. Again, if those Fair Start chooses to engage truly value the things they took credit for protecting, they will be eager to now cover the costs to others of not having previously included the value in our basic systems of obligation, and to include the things they claim to value as we constitute relations going forward.
Please consider making a contribution through Donate. Together, we can create lasting change to save next generation
