Because a few men in leadership continue to favor profitable population growth over sustainable and equitable family planning entitlements – entitlements that better the way we plan families and has the greatest impact, fulfilling the first human right. Instead of fairness, these man urge birth policies that create growth but violate children’s rights, and now millions will die as the climate crisis escalates.
Continuing growth will ensure those least responsible for climate, inequity and other crises suffer their greatest consequences. We can change course by targeting these men, much the way movements in the past focused on choke points to make true change.
Who is an example of someone that could change course, and thus lead as a role mode in funding family planning entitlements and reparations? Men like John T. Raymond.
To avoid scams, see the truth, and identify the choke points you can ask one simple question of any person or group claiming to do good: What have you been doing to deal with the basic connection between children being born, and things like child welfare, the climate crisis, animal rights, or anything else you might claim to care about?
This question helps us spot the #famscam. It’s a scam run by nonprofits, media and businesses – making it seem like we are reducing or refining consumption, and reducing climate emissions, through abstract top-down reforms, while quietly, bottom-up increasing the number of consumers to maintain profits margins.
The pro-growth policies they hid undid roughly 3/4ths of the climate mitigation attempted in the last few decades, and ensured there are more animals in factory farms, less wildlife and nature, and greater inequity, than ever before. That undoing will kill millions.
For all the good progressives’ think Klein did, by the numbers his pronatalism – urging women to have kids to grow the economy – did more harm. Klein is especially known for his promotion of veganism as a form of social justice, especially beneficial to animals. Like Vox, Klein misleads about the impact of food reforms.
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.
Fair Start supporters have interacted with funders and plant-based food investors who wanted to make money on inequity and growth, even when it harmed animals and future generations on balance, and interacted with former animal rights activists who were now invested in or otherwise benefitting from inequitable growth-based markets.
They were willing to greenwash to further veganism, even at cost to animals. They were herding the well intentioned towards buying their products, in the middle of a climate catastrophe.
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 Singer’s focus on animal liberation as an abstract concept accomplished neither liberation for humans or nonhumans.
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.
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.
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.
Real efficiency – Ensuring outcomes, like gross domestic product, are based on the inclusion of others as equals, not exploiting others in disregard of the capacity of all to contribute highly.
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.
Joyce Tischler is rightly regarded by many as key to the flourishing of modern animal law as an area of study, practice, and discipline.
She has this to say about Fair Start, and the idea of getting ahead of the threats animals face by changing our basic family systems:
“I have seen the projection that there will be approximately 9.8 billion human beings on Earth in 2050, followed by the question: how will we feed all of those people? That’s a simplistic question. If our planet is to remain habitable, we need to ask different questions, and develop family planning that limits or reduces the number of humans, in a thoughtful and compassionate way. Fair Start is asking the right questions and developing innovative answers.”
The comment – combined with an assessment of her policies more generally – shows that Boebert does not orient from a sufficiently just and reasonable position, and thus falls outside of the realm of reasonability necessary to be part of a social contract that is the basis of American freedom.
Similarly, nothing in her policies suggests she would ensure minimum levels of social development for each child born. No reasonable person would submit to a democracy where other citizens are not developed to participate in that democracy – to join others as equals in a town hall debate to control the rules under which they should live. They certainly would not submit to millions of others raised with no such levels. Is it hard to define welfare and social development for all of this? The Children’s Convention did the defining, decades ago.
In other words, Boebert’s not constituting a just and free society because she is ignoring the necessary development of its members. She believes it’s ok for peopleyou do not trust to have power over you, or she rejects the idea that governance and obligation to follow laws derives from the people.
Free people will condition their obligation to follow the law and respect property rights on this change, and on being democratically empowered using a simple inversion test, because only these changes ensure they will not be impacted by others – through even subtle things like the climate crisis and bad parenting – against their will. The obligation to follow the law stems from systems being fair and free, and systems start with family policy.
Boebert is preconstitutional, promoting an fantasy world of freedom that ignores actual power relations, and their creation or constituting of their relations.
Take action: Urge Boebert here to adopt Fair Start modeling in her policies to correct all of this, and to be reasonable in a way that enables democracy, and the freedom it allows.
That consensus is the fundamental source of most animal suffering and death. This is irrefutable.
A specific example of the scam is when civil society organizations knowingly undo the progress they are claiming in fundraising and other materials with outdated growth-based family policies that disempower most people in order to – per one Nobel laureate – grow economies that benefit a few at cost to freedom and democracy.
And even when shown the undoing, many groups have continued on course, opting for downstream “distractivism” projects and upstream growth policies that will continue to undo the claimed progress in their campaigns. That makes the messaging in those campaigns misleading, as on balance the work does not help animals or other categories of subjects, human or nonhuman.
Many are fighting back against that, and for true freedom. And those who benefitted from unsustainable growth policies that did nothing to level the playing field between rich and poor kids know they are in trouble, now coming up with outlandish claims and a fake “underpopulation” crisis to decoy us away from justice.
This scam hides something called the “constitutive fallacy,” basing one’s obligation to follow the law on coercive top-down instruments like written constitutions rather than bottom-up family reforms that actually empower and liberate people – in terms of their actual relations – and in a measurable way, enabling them to physically constitute – under the Children’s Convention – legitimate power relations between people from whose authority things like written constitutions must derive.
Put another way, try to think, say, or do anything that does not derive from some set of theoretical or actual power relations, relations that would have had to derive from whatever norm created the people between whom those relations exist. It’s not possible to do, and for those relations to create obligations between people they must be created fairly and in a way that measurably empowers people. Acts of mass violence may be driven in part because we have failed to empower people.
Resolving the fallacy allows each of us – individually – to orient from a just position, rather than knowingly being part of systems in which some benefit by placing costs on others.
Truly free people will feel obligated to follow the law, including laws that create property rights, when they are empowered.
Please consider the dozens of ways to adopt Fair Start modeling, rather than the Cairo Consensus, as the base of your work and please take part in the #thewholetruth campaign, which allows groups to publicly explain the impact of family policies on their work.
Don’t get scammed about which issues really matter when it comes to protecting animals. If we take animal personhood seriously their liberation should override political processes as fundamental rights do, for example, favoring a “right to rescue” over waiting for statutory personhood. But that move in isolation may threaten chaos to some who fear change. One solution?
Based on a recent Newsweek whistleblower article, use family and equity reforms to make those processes the inclusive ideal they were meant to be, building a social contract from the zero power baseline of nonhuman autonomy, and investing enough in each child as we go to limit growth in a way that preserves the influence of each law-making / self-determining voice in our democracies.
Summary
Most theories of animal law, rights and liberation focus myopically on immediate relations between humans and animals – like Peter Singer’s focus on diet, or the many large organization’s focus on animal cruelty laws. Few if any focus on fundamental legal or political theories, like theories of intergenerational justice or family law reforms, despite the fact that this area of inquiry and human behavior has the greatest impact on the greatest number of animals and shows clear alignment between human and nonhuman interest that surpass other areas of law. Scan “animal law” casebooks or other materials and you will see this, with no inclusion of basic legal theory concepts like political obligation, including theories that account for basic things like normativity, or that actually empower citizens.
That gap allowed some funders and many organizations (including academic institutes) to focus on less effective work, like food systems reform, because they are less politically risky, much easier to market, and enable profitable investments in growing industries like plant-based foods. Many benefitted from this misplaced focus at cost to animals, in what one Nobel Laureate called a pyramid scheme of growth, often lying (or greenwashing) about their impacts. This went beyond ignorance, with many entities receiving animal rights funding actually urging growth, enabling things like restrictive abortion bans. Or the use of growth-based profits to fund the popularization of growth-based philosophies that undercut nonhuman autonomy and legality at the same time.
The result is a social movement that largely ignores the fundamental driver of nonhuman animal suffering and death – the proliferation of humans over their world – the very thing that also drove the climate crisis, a thing that now threatens to cause more suffering than any human action in the history of the world. While environmental, child-welfare, and human rights and democracy movements experienced the same gap, the impact on nonhumans was the most destructive.
The myopia included blindly accepting massive generational birth inequity that is tantamount to white supremacy, and embracing macro-propertyhood of the nonhuman world which was undoing the micro-personhood benefits that many animal protection organizations routinely use to fundraise. Many calling themselves animal organizations thus chose policy areas that would benefit far fewer animals than the trillions the underlying family policies they simply accepted threatened – a form of deadly fraud.
Ask any organization or funder claiming to benefit animals how they have accounted for the impact of children being born into the world on their claims. Whether they are investing in those children, or exploiting them for growth, matters to animals. Below is a roadmap to close this gap and ensure reparative justice – the payment of actual claims – that actually liberates humans and nonhumans together by 1) inverting the movement from top down control to bottom up empowerment whereby governance is aligned with animal liberation, and 2) by temporalizing the work to account for empathy in future generations, rather than exploiting them for economic growth at cost to nonhumans.
Talking about animals rights while driving them into extinction
There are reasons to question the nature of what we often call animal law, rights, protection, welfare, etc. Just putting the word “animal” in a phrase or sentence does not help animals, and can do more harm than good.
This is a problem that can be corrected by treating animal law as inherently requiring inclusivity, and below I lay out the steps for doing so. The result is a conception of animal law that starts with our becoming, through a focus on autonomy and family reforms, a species consistent with mutual liberation. How?
We begin with the full conception of the nonhuman, liberated complete biodiversity, and the ideal of law – normativity because it is the will of the ruled. That is the genesis of unified animal personhood, and the mutuality between humans and nonhumans, and to think otherwise is to commit a fallacy.
The dominant of law, rights, welfare, protection, etc., because it can coerce results, is animal law. Impact, and for the right reasons, is what matters. Adding billions of people to the world without regard to how they will impact nonhumans, when doing that in the past created the crises we face today, and while touting laws that are riddled with exemptions and rarely enforced, is not a beneficial impact.
“Animal law” is really human law that happens to refer to animals, while excluding legal and practical protection for the vast majority of nonhumans (animals in factory farms and in research), and designating the vast majority— wildlife—as property, quietly bundled into an anthropocentric concept of the environment as a human resource designated to absorb and be altered by things like greenhouse gas emissions. That concept begins with a companion concept of future children as the property of their would-be parents that simultaneously disregards the autonomy of the nonhuman world.
That bundling is macro-propertyhood, always undoing the micro-personhood that many animal protection organizations routinely use to fundraise.
Any conception of animal law without reforming this – on balance – hurts animals, and does not address the fundamental and existential threat to nonhumans – the fact that we are replacing them.
How might our thinking of “animal law” or other terms that imply a benefit to nonhumans have been different? Were, long ago, humans to have seen themselves as equal parts of a complex ecology rather than a dominant species capable of shaping the world to its needs, we would have been obligated—in family, food, land use, and dozens of other policy areas—to limit ourselves existentially to just such an ecology.
That means smaller families, parenting delay and readiness, and redistribution to wealth to incentivize these things and ensure equal empowerment of children. This is a comprehensively effective model with a 1/2 dozen positive peer-reviews. Simply said, the same nonsense that having kids is a matter of parental autonomy rather than an interpersonal matter of constituting future societies is the same thing that degraded participatory democracy, causes mass animal suffering and extinction, triggered the climate crises, and blew a gulf between rich and the impoverished.
The solution to that, described above in bold, would have required fundamentally challenging the anthropocentric nature of our legal systems, as well as the entitlements of concentrations of wealth and power, something many of the originators of the term “animal law” and other protective terms evaded doing. To the extent Peter Singer evaded these reforms with a misleading focus on farmed animals — rather than all future animals and future persons’ relations with those animals—as the majority for whom we should be concerned if we want to maximize probability of impact, he played a large role in this misdirection. The climatological effects of that misdirection, alone, cannot be overstated, preventing family reforms that could have saved countless animal lives and creating room reforms that exacerbate the situation. Those articulating (or framing) what nature (in the case of Our Children’s Trust) or animal liberation (in the case of Singer) is, are most dangerous because they move the goalposts / cloud the ideal. Singer’s utilitarianism and focus on market preference satisfaction has enabled a humanized world. And now that the climate crisis proves he was wrong under his own standard, by likely reducing overall utility, he’s still not admitting it.
Reversing pronatal family policies now would mean a lot fewer babies being born, immediately, as the entitlements/incentives and other changes kick in (and arguably the only block to massive resource relocation is a lie about the justifiability of current entitlements that benefits us at cost to future generations). The vast majority of those babies would have not only have immediately begun to eat animals, they would have caused all the other ecocide humans cause. In a more concrete sense, the fact that our family norms would have done nothing to halt the creation of children in certain conditions, and that this in turn degrades the ecological conditions they need to survive, just seems nutty. Want to see how this works? Google this: “conviction child abuse biting,” count the stories, and you will see what I mean. If there were no way to halt these things from occurring none of this would matter. But I backing education standards into family planning and funding the process would halt them.
In other words, there is no such thing as anthropocentric animal law, unless you want to disregard the function of law—to protect its subjects. Thinking there is commits the common mistake of trying to magically separate humans from their language and ideation as well as the ecologies in which they live, a mistake with massive consequences given the climate crisis.
The misnomer argument is true for conceptual reasons, in that a fundamentally ecocentric system necessitating smaller populations of prosocial persons would have maintained the capacity to be more reflective of its human subjects, but also practical reasons—because requiring our systems to be actually inclusive of its subjects so that they can meaningfully participate, and hence ecocentric rather than anthropocentric, would have avoided much of the climate crisis which now threatens the system such “law” was meant to protect. Surely there is no concept of law, including positivism, that would not require its obligations to actually relate to and ideally reflect the inclinations of its subjects, something dependent on their actuality, their quantities and qualities. If the core condition of positivism is to treat law as obligatory because it derives from social sources, how can we do that without first accounting for people and their role in the process, e.g. their being subject to democratic attenuation through growth?
The pathway forward is to treat an ecocentric future, and democracy where the average person maintains the quantitative and qualitative capacity to actually have an impact on the outcomes, as the precondition for the legitimacy of any norms and to alter rights and obligations accordingly. This starts with family law and policy oriented around deep ecology and equity, as a pathway towards true animal law and protection. This answers the otherwise open question left by many theorists, of who the people should be that will actually carry animal-benefitting theories into action. That pathway is animal protection in the most comprehensive sense because it actually includes the full biodiversity of nonhumans, as well as the future persons with whom they would interact.
This is a pathway that could be bricked by an untold number of activists creating compelling narratives about the next big social movement, bottom up, limiting and decentralizing human power, rather than simply waiting for institutional change to come from the top down. Bottom line? We should not take a concept like law, reasonably seen as something that is the product of participatory democracies reflective of the will their constituents, which is itself a concept consistent with animal liberation when you look at the family policies necessary to achieve such systems, and pervert it to serve neither ideal.
In my almost two decades of working in “animal law” I saw the concept become a commodity organizations would use to fundraise – regardless of whether it was on balance helping animals, as if the proliferation of people using the these two words together was what we value. It should not be. Impact, and for the right reasons, is what matters. Adding billions of people to the world without regard to how they will impact nonhumans, when doing that in the past created the crises we face today, and while touting laws that are riddled with exemptions and rarely enforced, is not a beneficial impact.
When I left the Animal Legal Defense Fund in 2022 we were potentially doing more harm to animals than good, promoting the idea of effective animal cruelty laws while rarely if ever prosecuting the companies engaged in the vast majority of cruelty, undercutting direct action activists while fundraising using their hard-earned content and high-risk work, opting for family and ecological baseline policies that would put many more animals in harms way than we were taking out, and alienating the crucial social justice movements we needed in order to de-silo animal rights by ignoring the need for DEIJ reforms, changes in employment policies, and unionization.
All of this suggests the need for a certain matrix when thinking about animal law, which in its ideal form may simply be a perfectionist view of law itself, which is necessary if we are to actually account for the physical and day-to-day relations between powerful humans and vulnerable nonhumans. How do we maximize consent in those relations? (And yes, consent can be measured and quantified, much like utility, but unlike utility consent is primary, necessary to justify the governance that makes systems of utility – like economies – possible). Town halls precede shopping malls if actually take democracy seriously.
The matrix would have two axes. The first, 1) where personhood as consensual relations bookends one end of a continuum, would be 2) bookended on the other end by propertyhood (the total control of animals in a CAFO, unlimited procreative “autonomy” that appropriates future children, and anthropocentric approaches to environmentalism for example).
To be specific, there are specific actions that could further the many forms of social justice, benefitting humans and nonhumans alike: Open rescues at factory farms in extremely oppressed communities timed with Fair Start resource-demand occupations targeting the concentrations of wealth and power that own the farms; climate reparation interventions targeting pro-growth interests to pay climate restoration-level amounts to ensure birth equity; flash-mob demands that executive directors at large nonprofits who shilled for concentrations of wealth and power tell the #wholetruth about what they did.
Many advocates choose to orient from and reify unjust systems that exploit animals, rather than confronting and overcoming those systems even in simple and incremental ways. But protest and other direct action movements can be more effective than the best charities, a truism that – in the context of animals – relies on the incredible transparency activists can create.
All of this is to say that if we are going to fight for animals we owe them an examination of all assumptions, and a backing out from those assumptions to assessing raw power in its naked form, and how to limit it – for their sake and ours.
“The Legal Theory Bookworm recommends Justice as a Fair Start in Life: Understanding the Right to Have Children by Carter Dillard. Here is a description:
“Heidegger wants us to recapture the sense of people as unique and valuable, and this seems like the central argument of Dillard’s book.”
How did we ever come to believe in the myth of intentional, just and legitimate systems of social organization – like states and families – without actually accounting for the fair creation, development and consensual inclusion of future generations – the majority of persons – into those systems? How is consent, or self-determination, possible without that account? What norm could possibly precede that account? These articles – several peer-reviewed and originally published by Yale, Duke, Northwestern and other universities – will argue that, abstraction aside, there is no real justice without ensuring all children a fair start in life, both socially and ecologically. We first move towards justice by reforming the moral and legal right to have children, and the family planning systems the right creates, around zero baseline – or Fair Start – modeling that through collective child-centric planning enables consent to power and thus relative self-determination against the true baseline of nonpolity. Without it, we never orient our actions from a just, or inclusive and reflective, position.
Fair Start moves the discussion away from population and toward people, away from counting people and toward making people count. If we care about freedom, we first care about people because in democratic systems they – ultimately – have political authority over us. A just creation norm makes God fair, our systems consensual, and frees us from one another.
This book thus seeks to correct what we might call the constitutive or grundnorm fallacy: The mistake of trying to derive inclusive systems of justice, and freedom, downstream of our creation rather than going to the source – just family planning. Correcting that mistake, and understanding the right to have children, resolves a corruption at the heart of human rights which makes a system designed to protect the most vulnerable, like future persons, fundamentally exploitative of them. The creation norm is what most accounts, and should most account, for the lives we experience. Making that norm fair brings us to optimal world populations. It is also the most effective solution to the ecosocial crises we face today, with the weight of evidence showing ten to twenty times the impact, via redistributive Fair Start family planning entitlements/incentives, on things like the climate crisis and economic inequality relative to downstream measures.
“Justice is not abstract, but created in the constant and fundamental formation – or procreation – of power relations.”
Fair Start joins Zero Hour, actor Mark Ruffalo, and dozens of other groups filing amicus brief in support of lawsuit arguing for a constitutional right to nature, which would prompt federal climate action
The Fair Start Movement has joined dozens of organizations together to file an amicus curiae (“friend of the court”) brief in support of a groundbreaking lawsuit brought by the Animal Legal Defense Fund and Seeding Sovereignty, a project of Earth Island Institute, that aims to compel federal government action on climate change based on a constitutional right to nature and wilderness. There is no freedom without nature. It sets the spectrum for autonomy from other persons, the buffer between us and their impacts upon us. The climate crisis is the erosion of the that buffer.
The case is currently pending before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The case is based simply on the plain meaning of the liberty right “to be let alone,” a constitutional right promised by the Supreme Court and enforced in a variety of contexts, but none as important as this case. While the government routinely protects our right to be let alone in terms of being free from surveillance or intrusion into our homes, it is this version of the right – protecting the ecological baseline of nature in which we can be free from others and thrive – that matters most.
Cat Hughey, Director at Fair Start, had this to say:
“The sacredness of all human life and the more than human life culminates at a moment that we hold space and protections for all equally. The Fair Start Movement holds that the full-fledged experience of humanity exists when we embark on fighting the climate and ecological crisis by ensuring that every child can restore nature and value its health. By environing wilderness and its right, we in turn protect our future generations’ ability to exercise freedom, democracy and, most importantly, keep at bay ecological and social catastrophe.”
The right to be let alone, applied in this case to require the federal government to take the greatest measures possible to stop the climate crisis and restore nature, would ensure our children enjoy the natural world generations past have enjoyed. The Constitution guarantees that.
Nature, like equity and democracy, is part of every child’s right to an ecosocial Fair Start in life, and we have a right to ensure that right by all means effective. No government that fails to ensure that right is legitimate. The Fair Start Movement knows future parents will do what it takes to protect their children’s right to an ecosocial #fairstart in life.
What’s next? The Fair Start Movement intends to file federal litigation challenging a state abortion ban not as a violation of personal privacy, but because such bans interfere with the first and most fundamental human right: Every child’s right to a Fair Start in life.
Sharon Helene Robinson and Bradley Dwight Hill of Tennessee have been accused of criminal child neglect after their severely autistic child was found naked, and covered in both human and dog feces, which he was eating. Excrement was also found in the child’s bed. The police reported: “Ms. Robinson stated that she is a meth user and this also contributed to her not caring for her autistic son.”
Having Kids is petitioning state authorities to seek a Fair Start court order, in the event the couple are convicted, temporarily prohibiting them from having additional children during the pendency of any probation in order to facilitate the couple’s rehabilitation and recovery, and also to prevent the neglect of any future children. Having Kids will eventually also call for specific legislation to authorize Fair Start orders in Tennessee. Having Kids is targeting Tennessee because the state is currently considering legislation HB 2520 / SB2133, regarding coercive family planning and sentencing. The model Fair Start order is noncoercive and seeks to strike a balance between the rights of parents and the needs of future children and the community. The charges against Robinson and Hill show a clear need for that balance, and Fair Start orders can make clear the state’s compelling interest in the welfare of future children, counteracting any dangerous and inadvertent signal HB 2520 / SB2133 might send.
Learn more about Fair Start orders and why they can help us change a dysfunctional family planning model based solely on what parents want, to a better family planning model based on what all children need.
National statistics, despite underreporting, estimate that 1,670 to 1740 children die from parental or caregiver abuse and neglect in the U.S. annually. And many of the perpetrators continue to have and abuse additional children. The recent opioid crisis in the U.S. has only accelerated the problem. State child protection systems around the country are in crisis, with multiple state systems failing and clear linkages to increased child abuse. Foster care cases involving drug-using parents have hit the highest point in more than three decades of record-keeping, accounting for 92,000 children entering the system in 2016, according to data by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
“If even one fewer child is abused, that represents a better world,” said Anne Green, Executive Director of Having Kids. “We can do so much more to protect the most vulnerable.”
UPDATE: Having Kids has already received a response from Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam. After review of our letter, he forwarded it to Commissioner Hommrich and the Department of Children’s Services. Therefore, Having Kids is now urging supporters to contact Commissioner Hommrich Department of Children’s Services only to respectfully request that action be taken to ensure better family planning that protects parents, children, and the community.
