Amboseli Love works hard to empower young Maasai women, and now amidst a devastating drought, driven by the climate crisis. But like many groups, Amboseli Love is taking fundamental action, embracing child-centric family planning and other policies that enable them to make overriding calls for things like climate reparations from the nations that mostly created the climate crisis. Fair Start supports their calls, and urges others to as well.
Like most poor women in African nations, the majority of Maasai women in Kenya are destined to live a life of poverty and cultural oppression. Just one generation ago, less than 20 percent of Maasai women in Kenya enrolled in school. Today, even with free primary school education in Kenya since January 2003, only 48 percent of Maasai girls enroll in school, and only 10 percent of girls make it to secondary school.
Dickson at work.
Typically, Maasai girls are circumcised between the ages of 11 to 13 and soon afterwards married to a man chosen by her father in exchange for cattle and cash. A Maasai woman will never be allowed to divorce, except in the most egregious cases of physical abuse, and will never be allowed to marry again, even if the husband her father chooses is an old man who dies when she is still in her teens. Instead, she becomes the property of one of her husband’s brothers. She will be one of multiple wives, and will have many children, regardless of her health or ability to provide for them. She will rise early every day to milk cows and spend her days walking miles to water holes to launder clothes and get water, and to gather heavy loads of firewood to carry back home. If she is lucky, she will have a donkey to share her burden. She will live a life of few physical comforts, dependent on a husband and a family she did not choose. Her life expectancy is 45 years.
If you educate a woman: She will know her rights and have the confidence and independence to stand up for them. She will choose whom to marry and when to marry. She will have fewer children, and they will be healthier and better educated than the previous generation. She will not circumcise her daughters. She will have economic security. She will spend 90 percent of her income on her family, compared to 35 percent that an educated man would spend. She will help support her parents. She will not forget where she came from.
TAKE ACTION: Learn more about Amboseli, Www.amboselilove.com, and please give through our partner organization Rejoice Africa Foundation by simple marking your donation “for Amboseli.”
But their analysis misses the key question: How are we actually empowering people to participate in making the rules under which they must live, and limiting the power others have over them – including the destructive power inflicted by the climate crisis?
That solution could be as simple as steeply redistributive baby bond legislation designed to incentivize family planning that actually gives all children equal opportunities in life, socially and ecologically. There is no need to ignore the long run threat, while dealing with immediate ones.
Take action: Urge @dleonhardt to cover the story that really matters – how we work together to ensure a natural and democratic future.
Treason at an existential level does not rely on positive law conceptions of the crime. It simply could mean acting in a way that substantially degrades the security of free and equal people, especially when done for personal gain.
TAKE ACTION: Musk benefits from the United States, while also threatening it and true democracy, for his personal gain. Urge those close to him, like @Grimezsz, to speak out and ask him to change course, or find and engage him personally and share your story.
Fair Start policies are more effective than hoping poor black kids will make friends with rich white ones, which seems to be the upshot policy implication of the Times article. If we truly care about equity, why not promote it in the most effective way? Why not cover the fuller story of people’s lives, including how they begin?
If the Times can push women to have children to solve an economic “baby bust,” and at massive levels of inequity for the children born, surely it can acknowledge the possibility that systems are not just if they are not constituted fairly.
TAKE ACTION: Urge @DLeonhardt to cover what matters to ensure a better future.
Many nonprofits have been touting the success of energy efficiency or other campaigns designed to limit emissions.
The success of these efforts has been largely undone by overconsumption. This happens as demand for things like emissions-producing animal products, and even whole ecosystems, rises with growth. But it also happens at a much larger scale as that growth exacerbates the climate crisis on dozens of other levels, something that is enabled by many organizations’ anthropocentric and extractive environmental policies, and policies that failed to protect nature / the nonhuman world.
The crisis was fundamentally driven by the family policies – both tacit and explicit – that many nonprofits have simply accepted despite the harm they cause to women and children. These policies often quietly placed more children, animals, and ecosystems in harm’s way than the organizations’ campaigns were saving, and in a way that degraded human rights and democracy and empowered a few. I have spoken with leadership at nonprofits who admitted to me that their position on population growth, and their ignoring the massive child inequity that comes with such growth, was undoing their claimed success in fundraising materials, but these leaders were afraid to speak out for of fear of losing funding by being controversial.
Not only were many nonprofits embracing outdated family policies that let their wealthy funders pass massive privileges to their children while other children were being born and raised in horrific conditions, but now those vulnerable children will disproportionately suffer the impacts – long into the future – of the climate crisis.
This is not pure theory. I’ve worked in and with nonprofits in which leadership chose climate and population policies that hid the possibility of things like climate reparations, while also benefitting them personally at cost to the organizations’ stated missions. I have talked with prominent advocates of biodiversity who knew their Anthropocentric family policies were quietly causing extinction that undid their public claims, but who were terrified to change course. I have personally met with funders who for years held themselves out to the public as philanthropists protecting animals, in part by investing in vegan products, though they knew the population growth policies they tacitly or expressly supported and profited from were doing much more to harm animals than their investments were doing to help them. I’ve spoken with public officials who understood that growth policies were akin to a Ponzi pyramid scheme (per one Nobel Laureate) that degraded their own representative capacities while exacerbating inequity and the climate crisis, but who chose to do nothing about it.
Investing more in children, right from the start, in the beginning of justice.
It’s time to break this dynamic of fundamental injustice, and to constitute ourselves – through just family planning – as free and equal people.
TAKE ACTION NOW:
First, understand – based on arguments that now have five positive peer-reviews – that because every child’s right to a Fair Start in life is the first and overriding human right, we have the right and obligation to recover the costs these lies have imposed on future generations, and by all means effective, if we actually use the funds and other resources to protect children. It is impossible to derive fundamental political obligations (like property rights) in ways that derogate from the actual/physical relations of consensual governance, which first depends on how we are created.
If you support a nonprofit that claims to protect children, the environment, animals, or human rights and democracy, urge them to disclose their current family policies. Are they opting for policies that could bring more children into horrific conditions than the number of children the group is actually serving? Are they opting for policies that could place more animals in harm’s way than the group is saving? Are the groups accounting for how growth is driving a climate crisis that is undoing local environmental efforts, or degrading democracy in relationships between people irrespective of formal changes in political systems? Urge them to instead adopt more ethical models like Fair Start or comparable options.
Florida continues to see tens of thousands of children abused each year, with many of them dying in the process. And the state care system, despite changes, continues to fail them.
Fair Start Movement’s mission is to replace parent-centric subjective family planning systems with a child-centric model that ensures children are born and raised in conditions consistent – minimally – with the Children’s Rights Convention, a move enabled via effective family planning incentives/entitlements. We partner with organizations around the world, like the wonderful Rejoice Africa Foundation (formerly Kibengo Youth Care Activists), on Fair Start and other initiatives.
Thank you for being a leader in the efforts to assure family planning needs are being met worldwide. Given recent discussions of your foundations possibly funding a world children’s savings bank, if these reports are true, we urge one simple guideline for such a plan. That guideline would correct the baseline error, or the act of trying to assess costs and benefits without orienting from a position of consensual governance, described further below. We urge that the gift recognize that much of the wealth was built on a system of unsustainable growth and illegitimately externalized costs, per one Nobel Laurate, that included billions having and raising children in conditions that did not satisfy the standards children and their parents deserve, the standards that were eventually codified in the Children’s Rights Convention.
Is there evidence that we see children as economic inputs, rather than citizens, and not deserving of minimum levels of welfare, equity, restored ecologies, and an influential voice in their democracies? The ubiquitous bemoaning of falling fertility rates as a “baby bust” economic crisis, with no plans to assure children the things described as various policies are offered to reverse the crisis, is ample proof.
Our work establishing this fundamental baseline for assessing costs and benefits, and the human rights nature of child-centric planning as oriented to protect the vulnerable parties at stake, has been subject to almost half-a-dozen peer reviews. And the claim that a fair start in life logically precedes governmental authority to issue the property rights on which the wealth was built – because we are before we do – seems irrefutable. How could we be self-determining or free in an anthropocentric world dominated by a singularly human-centric viewpoint, rather than a natural or nonhuman one – built into family planning – that allow humans to consent to the power of others? Without that primacy we never constitute fair, or free and equal, societies. We never create the consensual, inclusive, and participatory town halls necessary to actually regulate the wealth-building economies. Free people will condition their political obligations on their capacity, as equals, to change those obligations. Fair Start enables this.
This is our challenge: If your plans are to give as reported, please designate at least part of the funds – by COP 27 – as human rights entitlements designed to move us towards the fundamental baseline discussed above, one which actually complies with the requirements of the international human rights regime. Surely, as things like the threat of climate-driven mass famine in the Horn of Africa unfold, it’s clear that our current, anthropocentric, isolating, and inequitable system of family planning was a terrible mistake. Fair incentives/entitlements, designed to build the town halls that liberate us, could have prevented that. If children deserve the funds, they deserve the efficacy putting the funds into bending the arc of planning and growth would produce through things like allowing delay and preparation, creating changes in family size, ensuring opportunities for co-investment, encouraging relocation etc. If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to plan for one and there is a test for whether we are doing that consistent with human rights and democracy.
The entitlements are not paying for people. They are paying to convert – at the most fundamental or creative level – commercial relations into empowering democratic/normative relations, or the sort of town hall relations needed to regulate the second-order forms of shopping malls. If we value democracy it will be unreasonable for intending parents to refuse the empowering funds, and unreasonable for concentrations of wealth and power to refuse to give them. Whether we are part of groups of free and equal people first depends on whether we correct the baseline error described above (reiterated in the Cairo Consensus which wrongly treats the act of having kids as more self-determining for the parents than other-determining for the children born) and are part of efforts to ensure people are relatively self-determining through collective child-centric planning, or we are not part of such efforts. There is no obligation that can proceed this – becoming a just people.
Legal systems, markets, customs, etc., can only do so much to guide human behavior. The gaps depend on – and in government by the people should depend upon – the circumstances in which we are born and develop and which lead to our emancipation. The value of democracy – the “We the People” – includes the high quality of life sharing the world with people prepared for such systems – with a common core of objective values, prosocial dispositions, high levels of education and equity, etc. – would entail. The antecedent “we,” that proceeds all action, is actually a reference to power relations between people, and between people and their environment, that for self-governing people should arise from birth and development. Collective child-centric planning can get us there, but because group legitimacy derives from individual choice, each person must choose whether they support or reject fundamental fairness and choose to be part of just or unjust systems.
Without this change in entitlements, we risk a future – as the climate crisis deepens – where the system by which we made our wealth does more harm to future generations than our philanthropy can do to help them. We risk choosing not to constitute ourselves as free and equal people. and remaining part of an unjust and exploitative system. Instead, we can follow the lead of others choosing to reorient entitlements, and through that discourse and action, choose to be part of consensual systems of governance.
Thanks for considering, and for your work to date.
Please Fund Children’s Bonds Because Children Deserve Them
Dear Warren,
Fair Start Movement’s mission is to replace parent-centric subjective family planning systems with a child-centric model that ensures children are born and raised in conditions consistent – minimally – with the Children’s Rights Convention. Thank you for being a leader in the efforts to assure family planning needs are being met worldwide.
Given recent discussions of your possibly funding a world children’s savings bank, if these reports are true, we urge one simple guideline for such a plan. We urge that the gift recognize that the wealth of many was built on a system of unsustainable growth, per one Nobel Laurate, that included billions of persons having and raising children in conditions that did not satisfy the standards children and their parents deserve, the standards eventually codified in the Children’s Rights Convention. That explosive and unsustainable growth – at increasing cost to children as the climate worsens – enabled the wealth. Because that wealth was produced under a system that externalized its costs, disadvantaged children have moral and legal claim to part of the wealth as a form of restorative justice.
If your plans are to give as reported, please say it is because the children are entitled to it, and as part of a fair system of ecosocial family planning, one which actually complies with the requirements of the international human rights regime.
Without this change, we risk a future where the system by which we made our wealth does more harm to future generations than our philanthropy can do to help them.
Thanks for considering, and for your work to date.
Rich nations are refusing to pay for the harm they caused poor nations through systems that created the climate crisis. But nations and the rich families they are protecting have a baseline problem. They cannot assign and defend property rights while simultaneously violating the right of all to be free. We have the right to take back the wealth and use it to offset the harms, through things like equitable family planning, by all means effective. Help us target the Raymond family, one of the worst violators, to pay what they owe. Contact Ashley@FairStartMovement.org.
