The founder of Patagonia, Yvon Chouinard has given away the company to an environmental trust and non-profit. All profits will go to the organizations to fight the climate crisis and pursue other environmental goals.
The act is courageous and begins to break down the barrier that prevents us from talking about what the wealthy owe in light of the climate, inequity, and other crises we face today.
This quote by Patagonia leadership is key:
“The current system of capitalism has made its gains at an enormous cost, including increasing inequality and widescale uncompensated environmental damage. The world is literally on fire,” Charles Conn, chair of the Patagonia board, said in a statement.
TAKE ACTION: Urge @Elonmusk to consider the same moves that Patagonia chose with the companies he oversees, which rose to prominence through the same process.
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.
A recent court case in Germany begins to recognize that nature, or a restored biodiverse ecology, is inseparable from the concepts of liberal democracy and freedom. Our right to nature is what frees us from the power of others.
So what do we do about that right? There are particular men who have, more than others, violated that right and robbed us and our children of freedom. We can target them to pay what they owe, by all means effective.
To move the wealth he made by helping create the climate crisis into the most effective solution to the crisis would be a coup for freedom. Find and engage him, peacefully and lawfully, to pay what he owes, and we will share your story, and help expand the tactic towards others who are also responsible.
We’re reflecting on this July 4th. I’m finding it difficult to celebrate this year as a fundamental liberty has been stripped from half of Americans – autonomy over our bodies. This move has created space for new attacks on women’s autonomy. In more ways than one, the Roe/Dobbs decision narrows the distance in the fights for human rights and animal rights.
The parallels start with the matter of consent over our own physical being, and how that consent aligns with ecocentrism and true nonhuman autonomy.
The decision also has massive repercussions for the non-human world. Many have chosen to remain childfree because of the impact that creating more people puts on animals raised for food, wildlife, the environment, and concern for the world that will be left to the next generation. The ability to choose has now been significantly limited, and for many, eliminated entirely. But we can push back. Our policy advisor, Carter Dillard was again published (with a great assist from GreenFire Law) in The Hill this week on this topic: State abortion bans create new governmental obligations for children.
My fellow animal advocates, I know that you, more than anyone else, grasp the urgency of large scale change in our food systems and beyond. We can’t remain safely in our silos while these intersecting crises hurdle towards an ever-increasingly harmful reality for the most vulnerable, across species.
I urge you, as the courageous game changers that you are, to take a clear position on the right to plan families as being instrumental to animal and environmental advocacy, and to mutual liberation. Planning is a human right.
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?
