Fair Start Movement

Category: Conservation & Environmental Justice

Does the UN’s Right to a Healthy Environment Require Restorative Environmentalism? Probably So.

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The United Nation recently accelerated its human rights work by adopting the universal right to a healthy environment.

But what does that mean? Is the Paris Agreement sufficient, or do we have to be more aggressive and pursue a restorative approach that removes greenhouse gasses and prioritizes #fairstart and other family ecocentric reforms that align our species with nature?

The latter. The evidence is mounting that even small shifts in our climate have major implications for our health, and especially the health of the most vulnerable among us – like infants. Even under current climate changes, they are being harmed. Infants and children are already experiencing stunted growth and death – especially in the most impacted regions – because of our inaction.

What’s the solution? The UN should use the right to a healthy environment as a springboard to a more aggressive or restorative approach that restores nature and habitat, for all species.

TAKE ACTION: Urge the UN’s Human Rights Council to adopt #FairStart as the anchoring standard for all human rights. Contact them at infodesk@ohchr.org and share the body of this post.

The best way to compensate young people and future generations for this violation of their environmental rights is by properly interpreting Article 16 via Fair Start modeling, which encourages birth equity-level transfers of resources as Fair Start family planning incentives/entitlements, using an ecocentric standard as the environmental baseline. This is forward-facing climate reparations at their best. Given the special foundational nature of Article 16, and when properly interpreted its peremptory status as the grundnorm overriding even state-created property rights, younger persons have the right to take the Fair Start resources they need and we will encourage them to do, including those that will ensure future children’s enjoyment of their rights under the Children’s Rights Convention.

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November 2, 2021
NEW COALITION OF ORGANIZATIONS CALLS FOR SUSTAINABLE FAMILY PLANNING IN FACE OF CLIMATE CRISIS
National organizations urge COP26 leaders to protect most vulnerable

San Francisco, CA – Dozens of leading NGOs are calling on the President and Delegates of the COP26 in this open letter to take an urgent and clear public position recommending just and sustainable family planning as the most effective solution to address the climate crisis, and rising global inequality, including gender inequity.

The global community has failed to inform and support a universal effort towards just and sustainable family planning, which:
- Is human-rights centered
- Ensures sustainable and equitable resources for greater investment in each child
- Enables communities and governments to protect children and future generations while upholding reproductive rights
On the contrary, pressures to increase births, or to obstruct family planning programs, are driving our biggest crises and putting the health, safety, and welfare of current and future generations in peril. Unsustainable population growth, a documented threat multiplier, is contributing to catastrophic climate change, unprecedented flooding, pandemics, ecosystem destruction, groundwater depletion, mass extinctions, and environmental degradation. Worsening inequality, in large part driven by our growing population, is also a grave threat to democracy and political stability across the globe.

Better family planning is the best way to reduce inequality. Other interventions alone are simply too late.

Nandita Bajaj, Executive Director of Population Balance says, “Our growth-driven policies are not only a cause of immense suffering for marginalized human and ecological communities, present and future, but they are premised upon oppressive power structures. Not only are reproductive, intergenerational, and ecological justice under attack, our current unsustainable growth-centred family planning policies are threatening all life on earth. We collectively need to acknowledge and address the urgency of this predicament.”

Fair Start Movement is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization dedicated to reforming family planning by replacing growth-centered family planning models with the human rights-based and child-first Fair Start model.

Population Balance is a 501(c) 3 nonprofit organization that provides education and solutions to address the impacts of human overpopulation and overconsumption on the planet, people, and animals.
October 27, 2021
Justice Without a Fair Start in Life? Don’t Fall for It. Help us Target Companies Greenwashing and Hurting Our Kids.

Welcome to the Tell the Truth Campaign

Which corporations and nonprofits are benefitting from unsustainable and inequitable family planning – the biggest driver of the climate and inequality crises – while pretending to further environmental and social justice? Federal Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) disclosure requirements provide an opportunity to find out and act. Support Fair Start’s campaign for an executive order to require disclosure of policies and advocacy around the biggest factor of all – families – so that we can hold bad actors accountable.

Why not be effective?

We are urging the Biden Administration to do what should be painfully obvious by now – actually account for the greatest driver of the climate and other crises that gave need for a new ESG disclosure framework: Our family and population growth policies.

Nothing has a greater impact. Full stop.

Why report at all if we do not account for the underlying driver/multiplier, and the volatility inherent in it?

We need to know who, among us, promotes putting an unlimited number of children, without any guaranteed levels of preparation, equity, or influential role in their democracy, into an increasingly degraded ecological future. And in terms of the past, we need to know which groups said they were making progress, knowing the growth they supported was undoing that progress the whole time and moving wealth away from effective investments in children and into the hands of people at the top of the wealth pyramid.

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TAKE ACTION:

Read our letter urging Biden to issue an executive order here, and urge any organizations you work with or support to join our call for the order.

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Support the Truth. Support Fair Start.

Governments are failing children’s right to an eco social fair start in life. We know that early childhood experience is pivotal to lifetime outcomes. Why are we waiting for adverse childhood experiences to occur before acting?

Children deserve equitable conditions, right from the beginning. A fair start in life is the first human right – it overrides all others. It is what children are entitled to under the Children’s Rights Convention, and what allows them to eventually be free from the power of others, and truly self-determining. Because legitimate governance derives from people, who derive from the norms that create them, there are no such things as just societies, political legitimacy and freedom without the sort of Fair Start reforms discussed in this site. Without them we are always proceeding from, or reconstituting our political societies, from an unjust position.

Ensuring an eco-social #fairstart in life for all kids can have ten to twenty times the long run impact on the key social and ecological crises we are facing today relative to other interventions.

It is the most effective and just thing we can do. And there is no justice without it.

October 6, 2021
World Population Day: Young Women, Sustainable Families, and Our Right to Take the Wealth Our Kids Deserve

The climate and nature crises that our planet faces are rooted in both population and consumption. We cannot waste precious time by pointing fingers between consumption and population – we need to talk about both in tandem, as our survival and quality of life, and those of our children, depend on it.

On the heels of Independence Day demands from people like Cassie King for the resources all kids deserve to ensure their eco-social Fair Start in life, and others who see their future child’s entitlement to birth equity as a sustainable family planning incentive, dozens of young women have come forward to speak out for more sustainable families. It’s a message for every young person’s future on planet earth.

On World Population Day, July 11, 2021, GirlPlanet.Earth will launch as an informal forum for global dialogue by women and teenage girls from around the world on population, consumption, planetary boundaries, and personal choices. Featuring the voices of women from Africa, Europe, North America, Central America, and Asia, GirlPlanet.Earth will enable honest, authentic, lively conversations between women and girls about our future.

Courtesy of the Urban Institute.

Join the conversation.

In addition to young voices pushing back on unsustainable population growth, this Sunday – World Population Day – key experts will make clear the pathway to an optimal world population, at this special event.

Having one fewer child actually reduces your carbon footprint more than any other single move you can make. We owe it to future generations to ignore advertiser-bound media pushing women to have kids to grow their economies. Instead, those intending to have small and sustainable families should approach concentrations of power for the wealth – and birth equity – their child has a fundamental right to under the Children’s Rights Convention and other human rights instruments.

This is the time to restart the conversation about family sizes, resources, population, personal choice, climate change and the future of our planet. The science is clear – we get the best outcomes, for everyone, when families plan for and invest more love, time, and attention in each child.

Stabilizing our human population, even through the most fundamental educational and economic advancement of women, has been taboo for too long. Humanity has made terrible mistakes through coercive practices and policies, and stabilizing our population needs to be instead profoundly rooted in improved justice, education, and economic opportunity, especially for women and girls.

July 8, 2021
Open Letter to the UN Environmental Program: The Cost of Not Adopting Fair Start Reproductive Justice Is Mounting
Dear Director Andersen,

World Environment Day 2021 provided a crucial opportunity for the United Nations to make good on its promise to reset humanity’s relationship with nature. But by continuing to adhere to a family planning model that allows unfettered growth, despite every opportunity to simply issue statements that would initiate reform, it has failed to honor its pledge at the most fundamental and impactful level.

Our relationship with nature is fundamentally defined by the laws that shape family planning and drive population size, and whether – in those laws – nature or the nonhuman world is seen as a resource for population growth, or instead a check on it.

That is the fundamental question.
- The current model promoted by the United Nations, which allows limitless growth and does nothing to ensure birth equity or even parental readiness, answers the question incorrectly. And it has no basis in law. It is a blatant misinterpretation of the moral and legal right to have children designed to enable the exploitation of future generations, rather than require collective and equitable investment in each future child. The above-linked peer-reviewed paper explains this in depth, and there are dozens of policy and culture-shifting pathways – including Fair Start baby bond incentives and Royal Family role modeling – to remodel family policies.
- By adhering to the isolation modeling the UN is enabling a false idea of autonomy and is perpetuating inequity that benefits white colonizing nations. (That colonialism is reflected in the current 1/10 wealth gap between black and white children in the U.S.) Instead the UN should promote birth equity to achieve true autonomy and as a reparations to future generations.
- Various advocates have notified UN leadership of its failure to correct modeling over the past several years, including the authors of the leading peer-reviewed research on the matter. One such attempt occurred in 2007 around a paper published by Yale University.
- The UN has not taken action. It has failed to link its outdated modeling to the overcrowding and poor public health that helped drive the COVID-19 pandemic. It has failed to condemn China’s new pronatal family planning regime, which is intended to create a baby boom among a population that – because of its size – already poses the greatest threat to the world’s ecologies. Instead the UN has focused on downstream efforts while at the same time profiting, politically, from population-based GDP growth.
- Inaction threatens the UN’s credibility. Pronatal policies being rolled out in response to a perceived economic “baby bust” show that our current systems of governance are fundamentally illegitimate. If we are willing to create lots of people in whom we invest relatively little in order to satisfy markets and economies, instead of fewer people in whom we invest more in order to build the democracies that must precede, justify and regulate those markets and economies, we are admitting fundamental illegitimacy, or as the peer-reviewed work shows, the preconstitutionality, of our political systems. This is especially true when doing so exacerbates the climate crisis. In that case, all effective measures to correct this inversion are just.
- The costs of ignoring reproductive justice legal reforms are mounting. These include the costs of the relevant climate emissions that could have been avoided since at least 2007, and the role the failure to require equitable family planning has played in driving the massive and growing gap between rich and poor across the globe. The Fair Start Movement is calculating those costs as harms, and believes world leadership must – and one day will – be held fully accountable for them.
- Because Fair Start and comparable “creation norm” models are peremptory norms that precede other national and international processes and rights (including property rights), the Fair Start Movement is urging young activists to target concentrations of wealth and power to pay for these eco-social harms, derived fundamentally from poor family planning models, by funding Fair Start efforts and incentives.
Will you join that call? Nothing would have a greater long-run impact on restoring our environment than simultaneously compensating future generations, while helping them become parts of legitimate democracies, via Fair Start investments in their empowerment and resilience.

Sincerely,

Ashley Berke, Co-Director at Fair Start
June 7, 2021
WaPo and the Population v. Consumption Debate: Three Questions to Move Forward on What Is Destroying Our Environment

Kudos to Sarah Kaplan for covering the ongoing debate over whether population growth, or things like inequity, technology, and patterns of consumption, are to blame for the climate and other ecological crises.

Is it wrong to blame overpopulation for the climate crisis? Perhaps it’s better to reframe the question: Is it wrong to blame overpopulation alone for the climate crisis?

Of course.

There are always multiple factors at play, from the growth that fundamentally creates demand to the inequity that’s driving overconsumption and the colonization of nature. The key to success is not to take any of the relevant factors out of our policy reforms, including the fundamental source of the Anthropocene: Treating the planet as a human resource in the design of our systems, from the economy to family planning. Doing so would replicate the mistakes that lead to the crisis. Instead let’s work together to give all kids a #fairstart in life.

Here are three questions to help tie all of the relevant factors together, and move forward.

May 26, 2021
Alexandra Paul is Speaking Truth to the Power of Unsustainable Growth

Kudos to Alexandra Paul for pushing back against the constant media messaging – often promoted by their advertisers – that falling fertility rates are a bad thing. Her recent letter, published in the LA Times, points out what should be obvious: Growth is not sustainable. She is speaking that truth to the powerful – media and corporate conglomerates – who would exploit future generations as cheap labor, and the Earth with them, to continue growth-fueled profits.

The move towards better planned families is 1) the product of decades of intentional interventions to stave off disaster, 2) emblematic of the liberation of women, and 3) the most effective tool – on a scale of 20x the impact – we have to fight the climate crisis.

But the fight is hardly over. Fair Start is one such approach to implement this.

May 24, 2021
The Rights Of and To Nature – What They Mean for Future Generations. Apr 7, 2021 09:00 AM in Pacific Time (US and Canada)

Join the International Animal Law Committee of the American Bar Association’s International Law Section for a great discussion.

Register here.

As the rights both of and to nature emerge and solidify in the minds of the public, and in law and policy, they will entail greater investment in and empowerment of future generations. This panel will explain why.

It begins with the lead attorney, Jessica Blome, in a case currently pending before the Ninth Circuit that argues the Constitution implies a right to nature, including a regenerative standard for environmental policies, under the liberty doctrine. That right aligns with the international rights of nature groups like Earth Law Center promote, and it would help further them, legislatively and otherwise.

Tony Zelle, will present on those rights, from an international perspective, detailing their history and future. Cat Hughey, will explain what the rights to/of nature entail for reforming our family planning systems, from the United Nations to state ballot initiatives. And finally, Michael Swistara and Max Broad will discuss the local implications of these movements for the District of Columbia, where efforts to promote legislation that would ensure every child a socially and ecologically fair start in life might begin.

April 6, 2021
Meghan Markle: What You Need to Know

Meghan Markle and Prince Harry are not afraid to break taboos and do what’s right. Recently, they talked about their fears and hopes for their son Archie’s future, given the way humans are destroying the planet and our kids’ futures. They took a bold step last year, promoting the idea of smaller families as the most effective way by far to protect the future.

They are opening a conversation and laying the pathway for polices that promote sustinable and equitable family planning. Environmental organizations should be leading the charge but have been hesitant to do so, fearing backlash from donors. Urge them to stand up and support the most effective long-term solution to our biggest social and ecological crises.

Contact the heads of these key organziations and urge them to support Fair Start family planning or other models that are as effective:

Tweet:
• Carter Roberts, @Carter_Roberts, president and CEO of the World Wildlife Fund
• Annie Leonard, @AnnieMLeonard, executive director of Greenpeace USA
• Michael Brune, @bruneski, executive director of the Sierra Club
and urge them to take a stand on the most effective way to protect our future: policies that promote sustainable and equitable family planning.

March 10, 2021