That harm is a violation of the human right to a safe and healthy and sustainable environment and flows from the decisions of people like former Exxon executive Lee Raymond to hide evidence of the emerging climate crisis, preventing policies and other efforts that could have stopped much of the harm we see unfolding today.
People like Lee, and his family, made a fortune by foisting the true costs of their money on the environment, and future generations. They hurt people, for their own benefit.
There is no greater act of justice than recovering the money people like Lee made by harming others and using it to mitigate the crises we face today in the most effective way possible – through Fair Start family planning reforms that restore nature and truly empower children though better conditions of birth and development. There is no way to effectively protect future generations, and the restored ecologies they need to thrive, without policies that improve family planning outcomes, ideally ensuring all birth occur in conditions consistent with the Children’s Convention.
There are many ways to promote a better future. Take action now.
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.
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.
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.
Speaking about an IPCC report, UN Secretary-General Antonio Gutteres revealed “a litany of broken climate promises” by governments and corporations that threaten human lives and will costs governments hundreds of billions to confront. Fossil fuels take the spotlight. But that ignores all other growth driven harms like habitat destruction and water scarcity. We can no longer ignore that the quest endless-growth and profits above all has had catastrophic consequences for all life on our fragile planet. Children have a right to an eco-social fair start. That means restoring nature for the next and future generations. We can do that through Fair Start policies.
In honor of Earth Day 2022, we at the Fair Start Movement encourage ExxonMobil to include every child’s human right to a Fair Start as part of its commitment to meet standards set out in the Paris Agreement.
To the leadership of ExxonMobil,
We members of the Fair Start Movement, on this Earth Day, April 22, 2022, write to inform ExxonMobil of an oversight in your commendable efforts toward sustainability.
You must amend your policy in order to acknowledge the needs and rights of future human generations. Policies that ignore critical factors such as family planning and universal basic human rights will fail. All of us are locked in a global struggle to ensure the existence of our species.
We implore ExxonMobil to take into account the environmental impacts of humankind. Too many children today are born unwanted, into poverty, famine, or war. Our approach to offer a Fair Start to every child born on Earth will ensure that these conditions will be eliminated moving into the future.
We demand that ExxonMobil allocate funds to support restorative ecological policies that acknowledge and actively promote the primary and overriding human right to an ecosocial Fair Start for every child born today and tomorrow.
Fundamental change starts with family policy.
By supporting our and our allies’ initiatives, ExxonMobil will begin to substantively repair damage done by its historical environmental misconduct. You will truly become part of the solution by sustaining and protecting humanity.
Will you commit today, in honor of Earth Day, to right past wrongs? Will you catapult forward the global effort to survive? Will you join our movement’s efforts to ensure every child’s right to a Fair Start?
Earth Day 2022: Exxon Should Pay Reparations for the Climate Crisis That Physically Create Just and Sustainable Communities Through Family Planning Investments
In Exxon’s public commitment to address the climate crisis, the company uses a particular ecological goal or baseline for its risk assessments and climate mitigation strategy that – compliance aside – is at least comparable to the goals of the Paris Climate Accord. While we focus on Exxon in this letter, to be clear, the logic applies to many companies and well beyond the energy sector.
FSM was formed because these goals or baselines are premised on an error. They were developed based on the assumption that nations operate from a place of historical political legitimacy, and can themselves freely define ecological goals, including anthropocentric ones like those of the Paris Accord. That assumption is incorrect. As recent peer-reviewed research shows, nations are constituting, not constituted in the past, and they are either doing so legitimately or not depending on their family policies. Nations cannot simply declare their legitimacy. Legitimacy is a political ideal based relative self-determination that would require, again minimally, that all children enjoy the ecosocial birth and development conditions required by the Children’s Rights Convention.
Resolving this baseline error involves treating legitimacy as contingent on our ongoing fulfillment of our obligations to future generations.
In other words, to properly assess costs and benefits we have to first become groups of people capable of doing so in a way that is actually inclusive and reflective of the group constituents. This is simply the ideal of the “we,” in “We the People.” The ideal political we, meaning fundamental power relations defined by the goals of the Children’s Convention, is the primary baseline. We cannot think of, or describe, an ecological outcome that is not first contingent upon family planning outcomes, on at least five levels.
If we value human self-determination or freedom, we have to begin from an ecocentric – rather than anthropocentric – baseline, because that makes relative self-determination possible, freeing us from the influences of others, including the harmful impacts of even the current rise in global temperature. Humans cannot self-determine when their childhood development is defined by the pollution of others. Moreover, climate goals cannot be limited to ecological outcomes, but should include changes in family policy that maximize the resilience, equity, and democratic cooperability of future generations to thrive despite the crisis. Our creation is the intersection of our values.
In other words, if we correct the error described above, the correct goal or baseline must entail our becoming democratic and legitimate groups of free and equal people, which requires concrete and specific restorative ecological policies much more aggressive than the Paris Accord, redistributive and equalizing family planning reforms that recognize the right to nature and level the playing field for all kids, financially and ecologically. A simple litmus test, given these standards, for our being free and equal persons involves whether we first treat the capacity for each person’s self-determination as directly inverse to population growth, relative to a neutral baseline such as the nonhuman world. This is proof that each person is politically, and equally, empowered. Not treating growth as such calls into question the true role of citizens in their own democracy.
We cannot assign property rights in ways that undercut physically constituting and democratically empowering future generations. Our being, and in this case becoming, positioned to determine costs and benefits in a way that is inclusive of the reasoned views of all, is the first baseline.
Again, we can refer to this helpful summary of the baseline problem. All of the solutions to the problem Professor Solum gives jump to what we should do rather than who we should be, and thus ignore the need to be fair people, in terms of the physical power relations determined by our creation, before we can be positioned/empowered to make fair rules/laws. Ideally we would be created/grouped to look like a functional Rawlsian constitutional convention before fundamentally assessing costs and benefits, hence our being an ideal “We the People,” is the first baseline. And for that, the minimal guidelines that would apply to family planning would be the standards we hold up for extant persons, like parental fitness, the Children’s Convention, equality of opportunity, restoration-based climate sequestration targets, biodiversity restoration targets, historic voter-representative ratios, etc. Those point us towards the UN low-variant population, something aggressive family planning incentives – funded with claims to wealth at the top of the economic pyramid – could practically help achieve.
We are writing in the spirit of Earth Day 2022 to urge Exxon to embrace the specific restorative ecological policies described above as the part of the first and overriding human right to a Fair Start in life, and to commit some share of its wealth and resources as Fair Start planning reparations to offset the harm it has done to future generations, relative to baseline discussed above. Exxon could easily practice this change by supporting the child tax credit reforms linked above, while treating them as a fundamental human right.
This is not about liberal or conservative politics. Family planning redistributions – as primary obligations – can replace wasteful tax obligations that would simply create larger governments which do not reflect the will of the people. This is about a commitment to human freedom and equality of opportunity, enabled by policies that ensure children can develop and physically comprise communities that liberate them from the threats they face today. This is something we all should value. Correcting the baseline error described above enables such a future.
Please let us know if Exxon will commit to these changes.
Factory farming and every other animal and environmental crisis is fundamentally driven by human population growth. While Peter Singer is often credited with advancing the philosophy of animal rights, Paul Ehrlich probably did more to actually mitigate animal suffering and extinction through his influential work to slow population growth. Animal liberation, ours and nonhuman, begins with a family planning ethic that promotes sustainable and more equitable families who build empathy and fluid democracy in future generations. It’s not whether we talk about animal rights — it’s how we actually influence nonhumans and their worlds.
Learn more about why social justice for all starts with family planning reform and urge Editor Lauren Williams (@laurenwilliams) and Ezra Klein (@ezraklein) to support Fair Start sustainable family planning policies, and to stop pushing women to have kids.
Despite the continued unsustainable growth, which is the underlying driver of climate change, poverty, and social instability, many media outlets are reporting that women are not having enough kids. This example, from Fortune magazine, is telling. The headline literally misstates a government report’s findings on the subject. Things can be more subtle – like a list of solutions to climate change that omit the most effective one – sustainable families.
What gives? Modern systems of economic growth were built on population growth – which meant a constant supply of cheap labor, voracious consumers, and compliant taxpayers. Be clear what this means. People pushing arbitrary population growth are pushing for the exacerbation of climate change and other environmental crises, children being born into poverty and unimaginable conditions, and revolution ready-sized gap between rich and poor – because those kids are vital fuel for their growth-backed investments, job security, low tax rates, etc. in an unsustainable pyramid Ponzi scheme. See these people for who they are.
Our Unsustainable Reality
That system of constant growth was never sustainable. That is why we are now faced with the incomparable threat of climate change, crowded cities with unaffordable housing, extreme poverty and inequality. But the people that designed that system left it for future generations to find a better way. Can we?
The Green New Deal
The Green New Deal presents an opportunity. It represents an attempt to address the intersecting issues of environmental crisis and inequality with an ambitious, centralized plan for massive public infrastructure investments and new jobs, all themed around sustainability. Here’s the problem. It does not address family planning.
What’s Missing
How can we address things like climate change and inequality without addressing their underlying driver, and most effective solutions? The Green New Deal also needs to reform our family planning system, and change the focus to ensure sustainable families that work together – yes, transfer significant resources – in order to give every child a fair start in life. The Green New Deal needs to include a transition from parent-focused to child-focused family planning, using something like the Fair Start model. That will mean more effective outcomes, avoiding the inefficiency of centralization and big government, and address a variety of other problems we face today.
We can find a better way, but not without change at the most fundamental level.
Is there a way to make the deal nonpartisan?
Can we use it to eliminate the big businesses that liberals oppose, and big government that conservatives oppose, at the same time? A healthy, safe and natural environment, and an economic system free of big government and big business, one that is comprised of relatively equal players, starts at the same place: With a family planning system that creates a population of highly prepared people, people who got a fair start, and a shot at equal opportunities, in life. Specifically, that means targeting big businesses with an antitrust reform to distribute their market share to future generations, and big government with tax reform to reduce its size, with both reforms designed to fund a cooperative family planning system that maximizes investments in future children, through a variety of mechanisms like delay and relocation incentives, early childhood development programming, and heavy investments in international family planning systems.
Unless the Green New Deal integrates and addresses the source of the problem, it is neither Green nor New. Including family planning reform would integrate the Deal with the overarching and universal human rights regime from which it should derive, a regime that itself derives from the fundamental human right – the right to a fair start in life.
TAKE ACTION: Tweet Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Sunrise Movement, urging them to include sustainable family planning in the Green New Deal. Copy/paste below into a Tweet.
.@aoc @sunrisemvmt the #GreenNewDeal won’t succeed without a plan to reform #familyplanning to encourage more equitable, sustainable families. It’s the most effective way to reduce inequality AND climate impact. https://fairstartmovement.org/whats-missing-green-new-deal/
