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.
One Voice Speaks Out for the Only Form of True Inclusivity
As a child, I was famously aware of society’s pressure on females to reproduce. I was gifted baby dolls by countless family members in the hopes that I would begin to foster a need to procreate – just as they had. And as I grew up, the pressures of motherhood were relentless. I’ll never forget the required class in my Georgia middle school that taught girls how to be fit stay-at-home mothers while boys learned business and home repair skills. Not to mention the recurrent phrases that haunted me throughout my young adult years: “how can you not want children,” “you’ll change your mind when you’re older,” and “I didn’t want children either until I had my own, and that changed everything.” Rather than taking these questions to heart and seriously considering my need to reproduce for my family, and society at large, I found myself concerned about how this pressure on females generally would impact humans, nonhuman animals, and the environment long-term.
Consider how our current systems exploit females whether human or nonhuman – and even Mother Earth. For example, in the dairy industry, female cows are artificially inseminated and upon giving birth, their calves are ripped from their side so that their milk may be preserved for the industry itself – all to make a profit. This insidious pattern is repeated throughout a female cow’s life until she is considered no longer useful by the industry and is rewarded for her life-long trauma by being sent to slaughter. Similarly, female human autonomy is under direct attack. State governments are attempting to rip a woman’s abortion right from her to directly benefit the system by producing more bodies for more labor. This pro-natal, pro-capital conviction has generated a world with massive inequities. In both scenarios we see female exploitation for economic gain and supremacy.
Care about the majority of sentient beings? Focus on family reforms.
And concerning Mother Earth, with the largest meat and dairy companies’ impact on the climate now outweighing that of numerous developed nations, no bigger threat to the future of the planet exists than that of factory farming expansion. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency reports that livestock operations make up 25% of all agricultural greenhouse gas emissions, and that manure management operations are responsible for 12% of overall agricultural emissions. (See David Worford, Letter Asks Congress to Give EPA Power to Regulate Livestock Emissions, Environmental Leader (Feb. 18, 2022), https://www.environmentalleader.com/2022/02/letter-asks-congress-to-give-epa-power-to-regulate-livestock-emissions/.)
And factory farming, which almost always goes unnoticed as the climate culprit within the agriculture sector, tears down forests to plant crops for animal feed, releasing carbon into the atmosphere; shatters wildlife habitats; displaces local communities; and profits from the immense suffering of billions of farmed animals each year. (See Jacqueline Mills, Factory Farming: The Real Climate Culprit, World Animal Protection (Oct. 29, 2021), https://www.worldanimalprotection.org/blogs/factory-farming-real-climate-culprit.) And yet the government does not require that factory farms obtain permits under the Clean Air Act, and it has failed to determine how to measure emissions from feedlots, barns, and croplands.
To this climate change point, Fair Start Movement’s Carter Dillard has stated, “[y]oung people are increasingly choosing not to have children, not because they don’t want them, but because they’re worried about how the climate crisis will impact their children’s future.” (See Elena Shao, More Young People Don’t Want Children Because of Climate Change. Has the UN Failed to Protect Them?, Inside Climate News (Nov. 16, 2021), https://insideclimatenews.org/news/16112021/young-people-children-united-nations-climate-change/.) We may not all have the same reasons behind our choice to not have children, but the fate of the planet is an increasingly rooted concern of many. I join both Fair Start Movement and Population Balances’ desire to see the social pressure and bias shift away from reproduction. Much needs to change for the future of all females.
We can go further.
The most effective way to address many impacts on our environment and other species, such as climate change, is to choose sustainable families. Putting the child first when family planning provides a human rights-based solution, ensuring the availability of resources for all. It is both equitable and sustainable and is also reflected in the worldwide trend towards families that can invest more in each child and ensure a safer future. And all of this considered will empower females in the long-term.
Taking matters into our own hands, rather than continually allowing corrupt systems to determine our futures, the future of nonhuman animals, and the future of Mother Earth, is how we will dismantle unjust societal expectations and guarantee a sustainable future for all.
* This is authored by a mother of one child. The author preferred to remain anonymous.
Small families in America routinely pay insurance premiums, taxes, childcare fees, and other costs that incentivize large and unsustainable families. These costs often masquerade as discounts as families grow, translating into cost savings to add more children to otherwise complete families.
While this may seem benign or even generous to some parents, this archaic “bigger is better” policy is destroying our environment and our quality of life and is unfairly penalizing smaller families.
Here are some examples:
Insurance schemes often offer family plans that favor large and unsustainable families, rather than charging for each person enrolled. Alternatives exist that don’t ask smaller or nontraditional families to subsidize their larger brethren. In my son’s school (yes, I have only one child) and many others, childcare plans often don’t charge per child, but instead offer reduced fees and more openings for larger families.
Do we really want to punish responsible families just so that governments and big businesses can have more taxpayers and cheap labor for the future? Especially when study after study shows that this trend is bad for kids and is destroying our environment and our quality of life?
Instead of incentivizing large and unsustainable families, polices should be based on the first human right: ensuring every child their right to an ecologically and socially fair start in life.
That means incentivizing smaller and more sustainable families who invest more in each child and who can use the resources they save to help improve the conditions into which other families bring their children.
*After this initial post was written another anonymous mother, who works as an executive in one of the largest companies in the United States, came forward and had this to say: “Even in the arts and other places where there is say a single or couple membership, the options often jump to a family membership of 4 kids and sometimes more, without an in-between option if you only have one kid. I’ve seen that a lot and it pisses me off.”
The following post is contributed by Huggable, whom the team at Having Kids applauds for engaging on complex social issues. Having Kids receives no compensation from Huggable.
Here at Huggable, we applaud Having Kids’ mission to create a better and more equitable world by giving all children the best possible start in life. We also believe that research should inform decision-making about important topics such as family planning, child inequality, and climate change.
Another topic that we are deeply interested in is learning about what makes strong, sustainable families thrive, even when presented with difficult circumstances.
Huggable’s COVID-19 Research Report
To find out how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected families with young children, we recently commissioned a survey of hundreds of families. The results of our research provide not only a glimmer of optimism in the midst of the pandemic’s tragic consequences, but also further evidence of the importance of building stable, sustainable families that thrive when given the right resources and opportunities.
Our findings are based on the insights of 538 parents with children under the age of three, collected in April and May 2020. The vast majority of the respondents were mothers, although a number of fathers also took part in the survey.
Key Takeaways From Our Survey
1. Parents Are Spending More Time With Their Children
Arguably, the most important finding of our research is that parents are spending more time with their children than they did before COVID-19. Specifically, mothers are spending an average of 49% more time with their babies and toddlers, which is an additional 3.9 hours per weekday. The increase was particularly apparent among mothers who work full-time, as they reported a 60% increase in time spent with their children.
Specifically, many parents have found unexpected opportunities to help their children with schoolwork, learn new skills, adopt an exercise routine, and get to know their little ones in a way that just wasn’t possible before the pandemic.
2.Mothers Are Feeling Closer to Their Children
Although COVID-19 has undoubtedly made the multifaceted nature of parenthood even more complex, especially for mothers, many relationships between mothers and children have improved. Notably, 63% of mothers in our survey said they felt either slightly or significantly closer to their children as a result of changes related to COVID-19.
Once again, full-time working mothers have experienced the most significant improvement in their relationships, with 67% reporting that they felt either slightly or significantly closer to their children. Several mothers in our survey noted that they were particularly grateful to have been able to breastfeed their babies and toddlers more regularly, as this has helped them develop closer bonds with their littles ones.
3. Parents and Children Have Found Unexpected Opportunities to Thrive
Despite the anxieties and challenges brought on by COVID-19, we were very pleased to discover that many mothers, fathers, and children are using this time to work together more cohesively as a family unit.
The pandemic has resulted in many families taking stock of what really matters and finding ways to cope even in the midst of financial uncertainty. With families valuing time spent together and avoiding unnecessary trips to crowded places, many parents reported that they have found creative ways to make online shopping faster and easier by using money-saving tools such as Wikibuy.
Additionally, with parents and children spending more time at home, there have been extra opportunities for shared family meals, creative play, and spending time in nature. In our survey, we repeatedly heard about how children have been helping their parents with chores, exploring their own interests, and developing skills such as independence, resilience, and empathy.
We were also pleased to learn that fathers have been sharing in childcare and other household responsibilities more regularly and more equitably. This has been especially valuable for fathers of young children who may have missed out on their children’s earliest developmental milestones.
You can find out more about our findings, and discover other research on how children and families are dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic by reading our full research report.
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.
If you wanted to work to liberate both humans and nonhumans, how would you do it?
You might promote diet-focused veganism as a way to eliminate the confinement and suffering that humans inflict on nonhumans in factory farms, and to improve human health and well-being at the same time. Or you might focus on early childhood development programs that build children’s empathy in the hopes that they will end up treating other animals — both human and nonhuman — well.
While effective, neither of those strategies is comprehensive. To be comprehensive, we have to deal with the interactions of future generations of all animals — or what might be called the long-run future — which dwarf the number of interactions occurring today. One way to do that is to apply an accepted ethical framework such as international human rights. To deal with the long-run future within that system, we could combine a forward-looking and child-focused family planning ethic devised around the Children’s Rights Convention, for example, with a nonhuman-focused ecological ethic, in order to minimize the suffering and death that humans impose on animals (which will continue to increase as human population grows), and maximize self-determination for all entities.
Let’s unpack that statement a little: To be comprehensive, we have to account — at the most fundamental and irreducible level —for how all humans and nonhumans first come to exist and interact. We would have to account for who we are as a species, in terms of the quantity, qualities, relative positioning, etc., of the people on the planet, relative to the nonhuman world. Who are the people impacting animals, and who will they be in the next generation and in the generations after that? The first step in animal rights is accounting for the existential relationship, and perhaps the balance, between humans and nonhumans. It’s hard to have rights when you are extinct and hard to prevent extinction without a family planning ethic that requires preservation of the nonhuman world.
Rights Are About Protecting the Most Vulnerable Classes: Future Children and Nonhumans
And to be comprehensive and actually account for the interconnections, we have to deal with the crucial phase between the nonhuman and human world: the time-space in which humans are conceived, born, raised, and developed in particular ways, and the nexus of the nonhuman world, or a restorative baseline for environmental protection, in that process (e.g., the shortening of pregnancies due to the climate crisis). In other words, we have to account for the fundamental power humans have over the most two vulnerable categories of entities though the act of procreation: future children and nonhumans.
We would have to ensure that, relative to the touchstone of the nonhuman world, future generations are free and self-determining and are inherently disposed from the very beginning to treat humans and nonhumans in ways that promote the autonomy and well-being of every individual.
How do we know this is true? The climate crisis provides a helpful example: Study after study has shown that the most comprehensive and effective way to mitigate the climate crisis that is the greatest threat to future generations of humans is also the most effective way to protect animals: Creating and implementing better family planning laws that promote more equitable and sustainable families.
Doing so would not only reduce emissions, but would also create resilient, capable, and cooperative people able to best navigate a degraded ecology.
In other words,the poor family planning laws designed to promote economic growth to benefit elites also ensured countless children were born into poverty, abusive homes, and misery over the past several decades. This, in turn, ensured the extinction of countless species, the creation of factory farming, the onset of the climate crisis, and other examples of nonhuman suffering and death that has only skyrocketed in our lifetimes. Human population growth (which is actually a misnomer for a more complex process), or the act of having kids, was the genesis of it all.
Had we applied a standard of protecting the nonhuman world as part of the liberation of nonhumans, we humans would have evaded the climate crisis and would be much better off.
And it’s not just about population growth: Having kids determined things about our qualities (like empathy) and relative inequity that fueled the colonization and destruction of the nonhuman world. It starts, unsurprisingly, with who we are.
Being Comprehensive Means Applying a Duality
How, in practice, do we do reverse this catastrophe? Now we are back to the beginning: We can apply a simple duality. First, we can implement a forward-looking and child-focused family planning ethic, one which recognizes that creating a child is more an act of other-determination than self-determination. That means changing from the current family planning paradigm, focused on what parents want, to a paradigm focused on what children need. We can combine that ethic with a nonhuman-focused ecological ethic — which is not the “world’s environment is a human resource” ethic many mainstream environmentalists use and which precipitated the climate crisis — in order to minimize the suffering humans impose on animals and maximize self-determination for all entities.
That’s comprehensive (as opposed to consumption-based) veganism and animal rights — and the only approach truly consistent with the precautionary principle. Comprehensive animal rights is an ongoing process of constituting free societies for all. The good news is that better family planning is on trend, much more so than consumer-based and less comprehensive veganism.
Having Kids uses the duality described above to help accelerate that trend, through actions like: • our campaign to urge the United Nations to use a human rights-based family planning model • our campaign to reform child-welfare systems to ensure some minimum level of welfare at birth for all kids, and • our support for recent litigation to protect our fundamental human right to the existence of the natural, or nonhuman, world and the restored habitat of countless sentient creatures.
You have a right to nature, children have a right to a fair start in life, and no one has a right to have children in abusive or neglectful conditions. Understanding these moral facts is the key to comprehensive animal rights, true fourth-dimensional (or temporalized) freedom, and a better future for all. And we can implement these truths by speaking truth to power, and transferring the resources necessary to incentivize better family planning and fair starts in life for all.
Nothing Matters More Than Who We Are Becoming
In other words, maximizing impact means first accounting for the volatility in human population growth created by our current family planning systems — or who we will be in the future — and then ensuring that we build future communities where freedom, and the suffering future humans will cause animals, have actually been accounted for. Maximizing impact means working toward a temporalized and comprehensive vision of a human and nonhuman environment — a vision of who we are to be.
This goes well beyond traditional welfarist population ethics. We are trying to liberate future generations by making them self-determining, not just accounting for our impact upon their ecology, for example. If we value agency, self-determination and humans controlling the norms under which they live, we have to create self-ruling communities — rather than archaic nation states — where those values are manifest. We have to create people with what John Rawls called a “sense of justice,” or a community of truly legal persons capable of complying with norms that protect animals, rather than relying exclusively on traditional animal protection laws that — especially when it comes to farmed animals — are often not worth the paper on which they are written.
Comprehensive animal rights would mean intentionally constituting future communities of free and equal people by cooperatively and equitably ensuring the requisite time, love, and energy for each child, so that we are investing in future generations rather than exploiting them.
This is where Peter Singer (who focused on suffering, rather than power) and other prominent animal rights theorists failed to account for the majority of animal subjugation (both human and nonhuman), the interrelation of that subjugation, and the way it is causing the social and ecological crises we are experiencing right now. They ignored the point when the interactions begin: our creation. And they ignored the need for an orienting baseline to constitute our communities. They also ignored that justifying social organization at this level prevents that subjugation, and the crises, and serves as the foundation of comprehensive animal rights. Rights developed as a means of protecting the vulnerable from the powerful. And given that future children and nonhumans are uniquely and inextricably vulnerable, systems of rights must begin with them. Want to protect the vulnerable? Focus on the invariably antecedent, and dominant, factor: the creation of their oppressors.
How Do We Achieve Comprehensive Animal (Including Human) Rights?
There is a way forward that aligns the rights of all animals, using the nonhuman world — or the wild — as a baseline for the unified conception of a dynamic social and ecological, or human and non-human, environment. This is what that conception, which goes beyond descriptions toward a normative account of human power properly oriented from its absence, looks like: Families that invest more in each child and can create sustainable and deliberately inclusive communities; a greater voice for each person in their systems of governance as we reorient social organizations around town halls instead of shopping malls; more time off for parents; smaller impacts on the planet, wildlife, and farmed animals as we restore the wild; better outcomes for each child; and more resources to share among families so that everyone can get a fair start in life.
It’s a win-win for all animals. It’s the freedom of opportunities to do things in life balanced with the freedom from the unwanted influence of others. There is simply no coherent conception of freedom, or rights, that does not account for this dynamic alignment. In this sense, while nonhumans were unlucky in the power dynamic relative to humans, they are lucky in that their liberated world is a necessary condition for humans to be the best people they can be.
Having Kids works to move the world in this direction through what we call the Fair Start family planning model, which orients from a zero-baseline, or the nonhuman world. The work is not purely theoretical but involves very specific real-world policy changes.We can advance family planning to improve lives and our planet’s future through many avenues. Here are just a few:
Fighting for the fundamental right to nature, or a nonhuman ethic of environmentalism, which is the anchor point for any coherent conception of freedom and the intersection of human and animal rights. This can include direct action to transfer resources in ways that promote and incentivize Fair Start family planning, and other tactics, given the peremptory status of the right.
Using expressive and noncoercive approaches to prioritize child welfare and to accelerate a change in family planning culture, highlighting shocking child welfare crises to illustrate the urgent need for reform. Being free means celebrating our right to nature in tandem with responsible family planning — not allowing kids to be born with no minimum guaranteed level of welfare, e.g., into abusive and neglectful conditions. That warped conception of freedom only feeds into growth economics, the consumption of nature, and the exploitation of future generations. It’s not freedom — it’s the powerful using the powerless.
Tax policies that encourage large families can be reformed to encourage delaying parenthood, investing more in each child and transferring resources to ensure that every child gets a fair start in life. This would include guaranteed minimum incomes for all children, pegged to better family planning policies.
Fully funding the development and availability of new male long-acting contraceptives. These should have been on the markets decades ago — and would have been, were it not for sexist and pronatal policies.
Urging public figures to speak out, given the massive impact that role modeling better and more sustainable family planning can have. Meghan Markle and Prince Harry’s recent statement about their intent to keep their family small was exemplary.
If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to plan for a child. Please consider promoting a universal ethic of cooperative Fair Start family planning and sustainable, more equitable families. It’s the most effective and comprehensive way to achieve a socially and ecologically regenerative society for all animals, or making sure we are becoming sufficiently other-regarding and socialized enough to actually constitute free societies. Of course, many alive today will resist doing what’s right. But in the end, it’s not about them: It’s about pushing past them toward the next frontier of social justice to save the most vulnerable and numerous category of entities, future children and nonhumans, from the intergenerational hegemony of a small minority of oppressors.
The case is straightforward: The Declaration of Independence,
parts of the Constitution, and the Supreme Court have made clear that there is
a fundamental human right to be let alone, or free from others. The
Declaration, in particular, talks about freedom as based on Nature. Being
in nature, or wilderness more specifically, is the height of that experience,
and given that climate change is the greatest threat to nature, climate change
is the greatest threat to that right. How can you be free of others without
nature? If climate change is a bad thing, what’s the state of affairs we are
changing from, and don’t we have a right to that healthy and natural world? Nature is the buffer
between us and others – the thing that individuates us.
And the right to nature is not just part of our legal system. It’s fundamental to the concept of liberty, a necessary condition for any legitimate form of social contract. The right to nature, conceived specifically as a wilderness or regenerative ecological standard, is the highest environmental baseline possible. It’s the gold standard against which any environmental protection efforts must be judged. We are facing the climate crisis and other ecological catastrophes because we’ve failed to protect this right.
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/
Justice begins with the fair creation – or procreation – of power relations, but those at the top of our political systems have historically refused to cede (or “constitute”) their power and influence into future generations.
The Lie
Older generations lied to themselves and others by treating the most interpersonal act – having kids – as a matter personal and private to the parents (often just the father), isolating those parents in the decision-making process from the impact their decision would have on the children born, on our communities and on our world. Families would have no obligation to others’ children, rich or poor. If the state sought to protect children, it would have to wait for them to be harmed.
That isolationism, in family planning, prevented the social contract – which includes the limitation of one person’s power over another, including would-be parents’ power over future children, rich kids’ power into their adulthood over poor kids, humans’ power to overrun the nonhuman world and create a climate crisis where freedom from others’ influence became impossible – from ever forming.
But the act of creating others is more other-determining – for the children born and the societies they will comprise – than self-determining for the parents. The move of older generations, to ignore the impact we have on others, evaded collective obligations to invest in children and preserved and expanded existing power structures via population growth. What appeared to be social justice movements – for equity and the environment – were always being undone upstream by family policies that would eventually bring us to the place of` massive inequality in failing ecosystems in which we live today.
Elites and those they controlled, throughout the Twentieth Century, did not want to pay their fair share to give all kids a fair start in life, a healthy environment, and a meaningful role in their democracies. Instead, they pretended that fortune, or some magical god, simply made it so that some kids were born poor, and others rich. They assumed nature, as a resource, was infinite and growth infinitely sustainable. Elites gave their own children a massive head start in life, contravening basic principles of democracy like the requirement that there be equal opportunities for all.
They made money with policies that prioritized population growth over investing in women in children, turning democracies into massive economies of scale filled with consumers rather than influential citizens, and functional constitutional conventions. Lost in a sea of others elites could exploit, the average person became voiceless, with the choice of what to buy but not to help steer the polity around them. Elites made their wealth by simply evading paying the costs necessary to maintain nations of free people – people free from things like the anthropocentric climate crisis. And they have historically been assisted by media and unethical journalists, as they are today with constant stories of “baby busts” and underpopulation, who shill for their advertisers and the need for more and more consumers.
That is the lie – that the generation of our societies, the base “we” from which all our language proceeds – should be determined by subjective autonomy rather than values and objective justice. That lie preserved fundamentally exploitative power structures and drove the crises causing immense suffering today, and the suffering – of the most vulnerable – that will occur in the future. And those who pushed and are pushing the lie are fundamentally responsible for the outcomes.
They also sought to evade an obvious truth: The obligations we have to future generations come first, and override other obligations, like property rights. Why? Governments derive from people who derive from their creation, so a just creation norm precedes other rules. That norm represents the only opportunity to ensure consensual power relations, from the moment those relations are created. Maintaining an optimal world population range, in terms of the creation and continuation of power relations between people, and between people and their ecologies, is always the first question of ethics because we are before we do. Existential justice precedes and overrides other forms, like property allocation.
We always have to ensure justice, in creation, first.
But instead, under the isolation or privacy paradigm men, and especially rich ones, kept control of their castles. And governments were more than happy to go along with the lie and the subversion of human rights – backed by the excuse of the cold war – as long as they received their cut in taxes, and otherwise benefitted from the growth.
That lie, the idea that what is interpersonal is really personal, fundamentally created the key crises – climate and inequity – we face today by driving the anthropocene over a more ecocentric world, and ensuring the massive inequality we now inherit at birth. It was assisted by religion – if we are made by gods rather than men, then the act is not really interpersonal, or subject to the demands of justice.
The curve represents the opportunity to promote values like child welfare, parental readiness, the restoration of nature, and democracies where each person plays a greater role, or alternatively, to continue to exploit people as consumers, workers, and taxpayers in a world filled with inequity, political voicelessness, and degraded ecologies.
We should choose the former, and arc down.
People are not numbers. They are entities that exert power over one another. We see this when we 1) understand power as any form of human influence (emissions, bad parenting, using language to exclude others, etc.) rather than focusing on the coercive (or official) power of the state, and 2) think about people in terms of their whole life span, including their earliest and most formative years. This is not John Rawls’ intergenerational justice – it’s about creating relatively self-determining people, as discussed below. If there is one condition for rules it is that they be fair, and the rule that creates us is no exception.
If you want to see the lies, join our Tell the Truth campaign and simply urge people and organizations to show you what they were doing to give kids a fair start, ecologically and socially, in the past and how they plan to do it today. Ask them to show the impacts of their family policies – past and present – on things like the climate crisis, inequity, and participatory democracy. Ask them to explain how we can have a just society without fairness, right from the start.
The truth is that no legal system is legitimate and obligatory unless it is comprised of consenting subjects who matter or have an influential role politically, and who thus act as though their capacity for self-determination is inverse to – and balanced against – population growth (which is fundamentally the addition of other sovereign or relatively self-determining people) relative to the absence of human power, or nature. That is the base conception of a social contract – the device that fundamentally makes freedom work. Freedom is the capacity to consent to the influence of others, and as a default, we should not submit to those we do not trust. And with massive power differentials and lack of any common core that proceed from our creation, trust is unreachable.
This is a condition for legitimacy prior to the development of downstream systems – like political representation, markets, or institutions. If power derives from people, is it more accurate to say that we are constituted into a system at some point in the past, through no role of our own, or actively part of a system of constituting physical democracies by taking part in a child-centric system that physically empowers people? Power derives from people who derive from their creation, and if it takes a village to raise a child it takes a village to plan for a child. While things like human rights, representative government, and checks and balances make democracy work, the first and most important device involves the rearing and development of children into people capable of democracy. The way we plan families is blocking this.
It’s hard to make sense of any political or legal system, positive, natural, formal, interpretive or otherwise, without accounting for the creation and development of the people from whom law derives and to whom it should feel obligatory. While we are familiar with forms of social organization like states, corporations, families, and communities, resolving the lie blocking procreative justice opens up the possibility of undiscovered countries of truly consensual obligation – islands of democracy in a sea of nature.
The lie regarding what is personal and interpersonal ensured growth that crippled this process of ensuring consensual governance. The quadrupling of populations in the Twentieth Century fundamentally replaced town halls with shopping malls by converting the possibility of fewer, well-developed citizens whose voices would matter into a mass of disconnected consumers with little influence over their governments, thus disempowering the average person. It ensured the endless greed and self-interest we see today, something Greta Thunberg has noticed, because it robbed people of secure and fulfilling communities that ground people and obviate the need for such things.
The Truth and Resolution
The most just and effective solution to the lie and its horrific impacts is to move the wealth and power that was made through growth – both public and private wealth and power – forward into future generations rather than continue to move it up to the top of the current structure, or what Nobel Laureate Steven Chu called the Ponzi scheme population pyramid.
Just follow where the money that should have gone into investing in future children went by our ignoring their needs and opting for growth.
Dozens of groups are already beginning to move in the direction of just and sustainable families – and it looks like this. The kind of freedom these groups are building is true freedom – e.g., not the fake “I’m alone in the world” freedom to choose to wear or not wear a mask in the middle of a raging pandemic, but the intricate freedom represented by a fundamental state of affairs where any pandemics would have been substantially avoided or mitigated. This move – just and sustainable family planning – has the biggest long run impact by far. It also solves the dilemma at the heart of democracy, aligning 1) just or right outcomes with 2) popularity, by investing more in and developing each person. Through development we come together around truth. There are legitimate economies without democracies preceding them, which means our family policies must create citizens and not consumers. We can ensure that – the first condition of justice – by all means effective.
There is a simple test for whether someone is part of this fix, and really accounting for freedom and justice, that involves looking at their language (much the way we look for binary gender mistakes in pronouns today). How? Ask anyone making claims about policies to define the people – the fundamental social organization – at the base of their claims, e. g. “tell me about the justifiable group that is making and implementing the policy you are discussing, in terms of basic values like the welfare, equity, ecological conditions, and effective roles in their democracy, both now and in the future,” and “tell me how they are consenting to the influence of others.” Ask them to unpack their claims in light of the open multiplier they are using, and the impact of that multiplier on child welfare, equity, nature and participatory democracy. Do they even have an intention for fundamental justice? How do they assess market costs and benefits without the primary baseline of a functional constitutional convention – or democracy – from which to do so?
Do the people in question act as though population growth is inverse to one’s capacity for self-determination, relative to nature or a zero-power baseline? Groups of relatively self-determining people are bordered by the absence of human power (nature, or the absence of being determined by others, which makes consent to power possible), accept loss of pure self-determination as they grow in number, but seek to divide and create new groups to maintain the relative power of each individual. This is the fundamental equation of free and equal people, one test for which will be the presence of fluid – not fixed – political borders defined by people and not arbitrary lines.
This is not mere theory – this is what might be beginning to happen in places Catalan, against the will of autocrats like Donald Trump. This is what optimal world populations – using a base value of freedom – might begin to look like, and where people would matter politically rather than trying to matter by literally imitating figures in the advertising we were raised on as is the case in social media today. Free polities are formed through the rule that meets the basic test for all rules – one that is fair. And in the case of any truly first rule, it can’t be practical or even interpretive, but must be existential in nature. It must be a rule – God notwithstanding – about who we should be.
In other words, do the people making policy claims act as though people matter politically, and do they seek to empower the majority – future generations (which make the idea of population more normative than descriptive) – through family planning reforms that limit and decentralize (or reconstitute) the power each of us have over one another such that we reach qualitative optimal populations? If it takes a village to raise kids, it takes a village to plan for them – for the phase of entry into society, from their creation to their emancipation. If we want relatively autonomous families, where vulnerable entities like the poor, women, and children share in the autonomy, we have to plan for and create them as such and not pretend autonomy will magically appear.
As a practical matter, do the claimants support a discourse where every child’s right to an ecosocial Fair Start in life overrides property rights? To constitute – politically – is to transfer power in a way that ensures the capacity for relative self-determination. It’s about making power flow bottom up, rather than top down and based on coercion, as it does today. Are the claimants willing to make that transfer of power, a sort of “first tax” that pays for existential justice? If they are not, they are putting property and things over people, rejecting the relative self-determination of peoples, and are choosing to remain part of fundamentally unjust systems. In other words, are they part of – or opposed to – constituting just societies comprised of democracies where voices of the people are heard and matter? If not, the people in question are preconstitutional, or “precons.” They cannot account for any form of justice because they cannot account for how people – the majority – will fit into those forms. They cannot account for “constituting” or the physical limitation and decentralization of power, regardless of its form. To the extent they are intending parents they would be unwilling to empower their children and may not be ready to parent. In other words, hey are insufficiently other-regarding to constitute just societies.
Urge them to change course and help us liberate the majority of entities – those who will live in the future (both human and nonhuman) – by supporting our action before the UN Human Rights Council. We begin legitimacy by through the physical conditions that make social obligations genuinely reflective of the people subject to them.
Take action:
We can use the values that free us to physically define our species. Click here for dozens of ways to take action to support true freedom for the majority, starting by engaging in the direct action discourse that puts people over property, and which helps us act against concentrations of wealth and power in ways the liberate and decolonize the future.Putting human rights, like Fair Start, before governmental processes will feel infeasible because we have lived in a world filed with people who did not get a fair start in life. We can change that.
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Carter is author of Justice as a Fair Start in Life, works to resolve the constitutive fallacy, or the mistake of attempting to practice any form of freedom and/or justice without first ensuring the same in the dynamic creation – or procreation – of human power relations. Simply put, those that do not promote procreative justice can never orient from a just place or prioritize the needs of the future majoirty, while many have begun to move in the direction of actually doing so and physically constituting – via just power relations – free and equal societies.
Carter began his career as an Honors Program appointee to the U.S. Department of Justice. He later served as a legal adviser to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, in the national security law division. He wrote his thesis reformulating the right to have children under Jeremy Waldron, his extensive academic work on family planning has been published by Yale, Duke, and Northwestern Universities, as well as in peer-reviewed pieces, and he has served on the Steering Committee of the Population Ethics and Policy Research Project and was a Visiting Scholar at the Uehiro Center, both at the University of Oxford. He has taught at several law schools in the U.S., served as a peer reviewer for the journal Bioethics, and most recently managed an animal protection strategic impact litigation program, with annual resources in excess of five million dollars. As early as 2007 his work provided a sufficient human rights basis for policy changes that could have significantly mitigated the climate, inequity and other crises we now face, and with the Fair Start Movement, Carter now works to hold those blocking the reforms – including those creating noise through self-serving ineffective reforms – responsible for the harm they caused.
