Here is a simple test for whether any particular person, corporation, nonprofit, politician, etc. is making the climate crisis worse by adopting misleading climate policies, especially as we account for how people will actually experience the crisis:
Do you or they support simply ensuring that children are born and raised in the eco-social conditions promised to them by the Children’s Convention, so that we can actually constitute just and democratic communities?
Let’s keep this test true and simple: People who support policies that do not include climate restoration and #birthequity are making the climate crisis, and how people experience it, worse. Consensual governance and freedom, where people actually consent to the influence of others, are impossible without these things.
What’s an alternative? Truly free people will fundamentally limit and decentralize the power (including subtle influences like climate emissions, the slow dilution of democracy, the concentration of wealth, power and control in a few, and the impact of bad parenting on communities) others have over them. They will not allow themselves to be subject to political systems, including taking property rights the system may give, where they are not democratically empowered.
These reforms correct something called the constitutive fallacy: Ignoring the way our creation and development does and (assuming we use baselines like the Children’s Rights Convention) should – fundamentally – constitute actual power relations, between humans, and between humans and the nonhuman world or nature upon which freedom is based. Each person chooses to commit or evade the fallacy in every normative (or “should”) claim they make by accepting or rejecting particular forms of fundamental political obligation like written constitutions and choosing to orient from a relatively just or unjust place.
If they did not the idea that governmental authority derives from groups of people, the authority of which depends on the individuals in those groups, would make no sense. This is about the creation of power relations – or constituting – and relative self-determination more than “population.” It’s about treating every child’s right to a Fair Start in life as the first and overriding human right so that we can actually – in terms of our fundamental power relations – be fair and thereby free.
Climate loss and damage payments are now being approved by governments. RAFUG, Amboseli, Fair Start, and others are all partnering and quickly scaling up because the questions remain what the true amount of compensation should be, and how that money should be spent. Given that not ensuring family planning pegged to the Children’s Rights Convention, or what is called child-centrism, is what helped create the crisis, we are interceding to urge the funding to go to climate restoration and child-centric policies. We are asking donors to lead by example.
We are asking them to give for that purpose with the understanding that child-centrism overrides other policies.
TAKE ACTION NOW: DONATE TO THE AMBOSELI LOVE EFFORTS THROUGH RAFUG’S DONATE OPTIONS BELOW, AND URGE THE NEW YORK TIMES TO CORRECT ITS REPORTING ON THE CLIMATE CRISIS TO REFLECT THE NEED FOR CHILD-CENTRIC POLICIES.
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The reporting is based on a false assumption, and thus misinforms readers in a way that exacerbates the crisis and its impact on the most vulnerable people.
The reporting assumes the funding is contingent on the decision-making authority of current governments, like the Biden Administration. That is incorrect. There is a fundamental and existential human right to a safe environment now understood to require climate restoration, and such rights override governmental authority and authorize direct demands for payments – citizen to citizen if used to further the right.
Ignoring that right will lead to children being born into conditions in which they will needlessly suffer, while a handful of wealthy companies – many of whom advertise in the New York Times – profit from the status quo.
By hiding this fact, the reporters place excessive control in the hands of the leaders who caused the crisis and ignore the fundamental driver – power relations between people. Thus, these leaders are not properly held responsible, and the role power relations play in climate injustice is unrecognized. This is especially true given that family reforms and the correctly constructed right to have children (born into a healthy environment) precede and override competing rights and interests, like the property rights that prevent funding for effective family planning incentives/entitlements.
The existence and implications of that right are a fact, a much more important one than many of the facts covered in that article.
Lee Raymond may have done more to exacerbate the climate crisis than any other one person on the planet. His active burying of the truth of the emerging crisis and how Exxon was responsible stands out among those who have done the greatest harm to our environment.
Using concentrations of wealth and power to fund family reforms is the most just and effective way to respond to the climate crisis, restoring our environment and building resilience in children at the same time. This would also help guarantee the right to a healthy environment, now recognized by the UN. An ecosocial Fair Start in life for all children is the first human right, and we can ensure it by all means effective. Why? We are before we do, so true justice comes in creation; it is existential.
As the climate crisis unfolds it should be obvious to everyone that the many large environmental organizations who claimed to be protecting our environment have failed.
What is the fundamental source of the climate crisis?
These are the facts:
More sustainable families are the most effective way to reduce the impact on the climate and animals. Read more.
Fair Start family planning is the most effective way to simultaneously: reduce intergenerational inequalities, strengthen democracy, and preserve a healthy planet.
The proven impacts are 10 to 20 times higher than traditional downstream attempts to protect kids, animals, and the environment. The model converts poor and unsustainable family planning into equality, opportunity, democracy, and nature.
Peter Singer is regarded by many as a founder of contemporary animal rights, largely based on his book Animal Liberation. But few realize that he has also taken public and influential stances on family and population policies, in this 2018 public lecture, for example. He avoids making concrete conclusions about population policies in this lecture and elsewhere,
Nowhere has he advocated for effective interventions – like overriding property rights to wealth in order to fund Fair Start family planning incentives/entitlements – and other peremptory norm measures would have bent the arc of unsustainable growth downwards towards what many see as optimal world population ranges. Those ranges, like all population matters, actually involve people – and the fundamental creation of power relations between them. And power and population ethics begin with human rights, the objective frame that after WW2 should cabin utility, Effective Altruism, and all other lesser and more subjective forms of policy Singer normally employs.
How is animal liberation possible in the face of a wave of human population growth causing massive extinction? How is promoting veganism for what is effectively a small percentage of a growing human population that mostly exploits, tortures, and kills nonhumans true animal rights? How does that growth further human rights when the growth enriched relatively few people, at cost to equality and the political stability it brings?
Singer’s work is based on an error called the constitutive fallacy, or ignoring the way our creation and development do and (assuming we use baselines like the Children’s Rights Convention) should – fundamentally – constitute actual power relations, between humans, and between humans and nonhumans. Who we are might be different mixes of nurture, or nature, or influential power relations, but all flow (and among self-determining peoples should flow) from our creation. We cannot separate values like nature and equity from who we are and our power relations with others, which stem from our creation.
For example, our economic birth position mostly determines whether we are rich or poor as adults. Another example would be that it is impossible to ensure the empathy people need to treat nonhumans well without addressing the conditions in which people are born and develop because empathy largely depends on years zero to three in childhood maturation.
Another example would be that if we assume we ought to treat nonumans well, we would have to structure an effective legal system that would obligate that. But because there is such massive attenuation (caused by the growth that is eradicating the nonhuman world) between people and their representatives, we cannot do this. Another example would be world leaders attempting to determine the costs and benefits associated with Anthropocentric environmental baselines like the Paris Agreement, a mistake that only accelerated ecocide, rather than using an organic baseline like beingrelatively self-determining people and the conditioning of wealth on equitable family planning investments that make that possible. (This last example gels with the constitutive fallacy as political adherence to national constitutions, or even international law, as basic and overriding norms, as opposed to adherence the obviously antecedent and more basic family planning norms that create us, the people.)
In other words, in Singer’s prescriptions for animal liberation come from outside of who people ought to actually be, in terms of the creation of the fundamental power relations that define them.
Some have argued that it’s unfair to say that Singer’s population comments (or lack of comments) have “undone” his work for animals, given that virtually no one knows what his views on population are. Per this argument, there are probably zero policy-makers who’ve done anything based on Singer’s population views. Perhaps few or none have decided to procreate or not procreate based on Singer’s silence on the issue.
This response treats population as something, an issue, that we can separate from what we do. But how can we do anything, or suggest that others should do something, without first determining the acceptable power relations that determine who we are, and should be? We cannot separate what we narrowly think of as population – or who we are – from what we do. The former is always a factor and precedes the latter.
Singer’s claim that “we should help animals by not eating them” is wrong on its face because the “we” in his claim – the fundamental creation of power relations that permit growth, relations he accepts – does more harm to animals than changing diets does good. That’s the constitutive fallacy at play. And that mistake – not requiring things like the Children’s Convention standard in family planning policies to improve those relations, which would physically constitute just communities – does more than just harm animals. It fundamentally permits anthropocentric changes that cause irrefutable harm to all, against an absolute standard like infant health.
Don’t confuse chaos with freedom. Truly free people will fundamentally limit and decentralize the power (including subtle power like climate emissions, the impact of bad parenting on communities, massive disparities of wealth, etc.) others have over them, and by all means effective. They will condition their obligation to follow the law on their actually being empowered, assessed via a simple test, in functional democracies.
Singer never seriously addresses this issue, through redistributive birth entitlements that empower us in terms of who we are before turning to what we should do, for example. That mistake of ignoring the primacy of who we should be (and the best answer is fair), given his position of influence and the crucial time for mitigating the climate crisis in which he was working, harmed future generations.
And as a result his work does not effectively protect nonhumans, promote equity, restore democracy, or even protect considered parental desire. An alternative approach which does not make the error would value each person born, and the value of self-determination, above the growth Singer never seriously opposed.
Is this type of fairness a threat to the ongoing processes of decolonization. antiracism, and other forms of anti-oppression? Eliminating the massive birth inequity caused by colonization – the one that disempowers the majority of people, those who will live in the future – and doing so while restoring nonhuman autonomy is the height of anti-oppression. Though admittedly, all of this argument flows from Eurocentric framing and should also be done from more indigenous frames.
It would treat ensuring minimum levels of welfare, and freedom, as more important than total welfare indictors like gross domestic product. It would elevate ethics in the creation of people – and the conditioning of political obligation on family planning policies that ensure people will matter – over the constitutions and governments whose authority to assign property and other rights derive from such people, again something Singer never considered.
TAKE ACTION: Urge Singer to #tellthetruth and admit that his family and population ethics undid his animal liberation ethics. Urge him to support a pivot from parent-centric family planning to child-centric planning. He should admit that before we can engage in Effective Altruism we are politically obligated to constitute just communities – and total liberation – through socially and ecologically regenerative family reforms like Fair Start.
Without this, his work could in the end do more to protect concentrations of wealth and power than nonhumans.
He should not allow his work on animal ethics to mislead people from the truth that we are committing ecocide through poor family planning, and should support paying back the costs to freedom that population growth has imposed on future generations. Also urge him to lead by example and treat property claims – like the extreme wealth he helped create in the plant-based industry – as conditional on our fulfilling every child’s right to a fair start in life.That wealth, and the power disparity it represents, is defended by the threat of state violence, not the true justification possible amid fair power relations.
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.”
To say patriarchy, or anthropocentrism, or exploitation, would all be correct. But is there something antecedent, something lurking upstream, that precedes these words? Perhaps it is simply the failure to take a base condition like human rights and democracy seriously, seriously enough to let it dictate our fundamental social relations, or the power structures that flow from how we are created or more specifically, pro-created.
If we took human rights and democracy in any particular nation seriously, we would start all laws, policies, and practices with one rule: We would first treat the capacity for each person’s political self-determination as directly inverse to the creation and emancipation of each child in that nation, relative to a neutral baseline such as the nonhuman world. And that would have meant that we would have been investing a lot more into family planning and child development, what the Children’s Rights Convention requires at a bare minimum.
One reason we don’t do this is that most nations live under an international consensus (called the Cairo Consensus) controlled by wealthy white people who decades ago chose to privilege their children over poor kids. Under its guidance we wrongly treat the act of having children as more self-determining for the parents rather than other-determining for the children born.
An effort in Amboseli Kenya to move to child-centric planning.
If we imagine a town hall where you were empowered to influence the rules you would have to live, each person would have less time to speak and influence the outcome as more people are added. If we believed in freedom, consensual governance and political self-determination, we would aim – through family reforms – for optimally ranged populations of people who would be relatively self-determining per the formula above. In practice polities/legalities like nation states would use the inversion to know when to divide off into a new entity. While fluid division is unusual in geopolitical affairs, it is actually quite common if we think about other forms of social organization that share power with nation states, like corporations and social movements. And we would start all laws, policies, and practices with such a requirement because who we should be precedes what we should do, and the former is best accounted for by the norms that create us.
As a practical matter this inversion, and optimal world population ranges, could have been achieved in the 20th Century with progressive scaled family planning obligations/entitlements meant to ensure ecocentrism and equal opportunities in life.
But that would have only happened if we wish for people to be actually empowered.
If people are empowered equally and thus matter politically – the hallmark of human rights and democracy – this direct inversion relative to a neutral position that makes the concept of self-determination coherent, is inevitable. We would offset each other, politically, and a first order of business before we do anything as a legitimate and inclusive group. Our creation would limit and decentralize the power others have over us. Representative government does not change this, given that we would have to be empowered – to have meaningful time at the podium – to participate in the election of representatives. And while many would argue that massive population growth enabled markets that produced true value – like mass advertising – these arguments miss the point: That to know what’s a benefit and what’s a cost first requires being a group of people capable of assessing such things. Democracy precedes and regulates economy. But because of the Ponzi scheme Chu notes above, these decisions were made for us, not by us.
If we think that creating lots of people results in innovation, like modern medicine, we should instead realize that actually educating and developing the children who are here now – through things like a college education – does so much more effectively. We will make that investment when we see past the myths: That rich children were just fortunate to be privileged, that some children are just “gifted,” that white children deserve their massive head start in life, etc. If we invest in people, right from the start, rather than exploiting them, we will start to see the things we value align.
We will ignore this inversion if we are just faking human rights and democracy, because people won’t really need to matter politically. And if you Google the term “baby bust” you will see that most media in the United States (like the New York Times) do not engage in the inversion. Instead, they choose what Nobel Laureate Steve Chu called a Ponzi fraud scheme. The policies they promote seek to pump more people into the system to create profits for a few at the top. They do not account for justice in the actual creation of power relations, or the need to invest in children, but instead choose to exploit children – and their impoverished birth position – as cheap labor and drivers of consumption/demand. They chose policies that created people for shopping malls, not town halls. And that move fundamentally created the climate crisis.
But do we really have to respect rules, like the property “rights” of people like Elon Musk, if we played no meaningful role – and could play no such role – in creating such rules? People who value freedom – and the value of relative self-determination – will not.
This photograph captures interconnection, crucial social bonds that are strained as groups grow for the benefit of a few at the top.
The best reason persons would be obligated to follow laws is if their legal system intentionally includes, and reflects the will, of its constituents. That is what makes us free, and the inversion test determines whether we are being equitably empowered – or taking human rights and democracy seriously – and thus included, and thus freed. Refusal to empower people equitably means one is preconstituting (a “precon”), or refusing to constitute just communities. Free people will condition their political obligations on their capacity, as equals, to change those obligations.
While nations are apt to go to war, perhaps a sea change in our political evolution comes when we use the inversion test to determine who is free, and who is preconstituting, and use discourse (or other means?) to solve this hidden conundrum – the one that lies at the first border of human power, our creation. There is a unity of values if we start justice at the very beginning, in our creation.
Also at a macro level, urge anyone making a claims about what a policy should be to account for the actual people in their claim, for the actual power relations that are being fundamentally created by the claimant’s family planning norm. In many cases you will find that the person making the claim is misleading you, undoing the value they claim to be creating – like reducing climate emissions, and instead concentrating power in the hands of a few.
While the Black Lives Matter movement focused on systemic racism in police violence, that violence was more direct than indirect. A more subtle form of violence involves the combination of massive economic inequity inflicted on black families that has been passed generation to generation, which combines with the climate crisis to disproportionally impact black women and infants.
One of the worst ways to exacerbate the climate crisis is by forcing people to have children they don’t want, expanding the human footprint on the planet. The costs fall on women and children, while rich men at the top benefit from the growth such moves create. That is why you hear people like Elon Musk whining about the “baby bust.”
That is also why people like Marco Rubio are pushing abortion bans. Rubio is the same politician that promoted an equally misogynistic Scarlet Letter law in Florida, which required single mothers to publish their sexual histories in the newspaper in order to place their babies up for adoption.
But Rubio has a big problem. Abortion bans go beyond assaulting women’s freedom.
Do you trust and relate to the people around you? Can you cooperate with them in a democratic fashion? If not, consider how past family planning policies created the situation, and how they robbed you – and your children – of truly functional communities where people – not corporations and politicians – have the power. This is the fundamental assault on freedom, and Rubio is part of it.
Urge Graham Brink, gbrink@tampabay.com, editor of Florida’s largest paper, to cover this issue and the threat Rubio poses to democracy and freedom.
