What’s the solution? The UN should use the right to a healthy environment as a springboard to a more aggressive or restorative approach that restores nature and habitat, for all species.
National organizations urge COP26 leaders to protect most vulnerable
San Francisco, CA – Dozens of leading NGOs are calling on the President and Delegates of the COP26 in this open letter to take an urgent and clear public position recommending just and sustainable family planning as the most effective solution to address the climate crisis, and rising global inequality, including gender inequity.
The global community has failed to inform and support a universal effort towards just and sustainable family planning, which:
Is human-rights centered
Ensures sustainable and equitable resources for greater investment in each child
Enables communities and governments to protect children and future generations while upholding reproductive rights
On the contrary, pressures to increase births, or to obstruct family planning programs, are driving our biggest crises and putting the health, safety, and welfare of current and future generations in peril. Unsustainable population growth, a documented threat multiplier, is contributing to catastrophic climate change, unprecedented flooding, pandemics, ecosystem destruction, groundwater depletion, mass extinctions, and environmental degradation. Worsening inequality, in large part driven by our growing population, is also a grave threat to democracy and political stability across the globe.
Nandita Bajaj, Executive Director of Population Balance says, “Our growth-driven policies are not only a cause of immense suffering for marginalized human and ecological communities, present and future, but they are premised upon oppressive power structures. Not only are reproductive, intergenerational, and ecological justice under attack, our current unsustainable growth-centred family planning policies are threatening all life on earth. We collectively need to acknowledge and address the urgency of this predicament.”
Fair Start Movement is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization dedicated to reforming family planning by replacing growth-centered family planning models with the human rights-based and child-first Fair Start model.
Population Balance is a 501(c) 3 nonprofit organization that provides education and solutions to address the impacts of human overpopulation and overconsumption on the planet, people, and animals.
This cognitive dissonance creates a special problem when it comes to systems of justice and freedom, normally things that we first deal with through laws, nations’ constitutions, and international human rights conventions. This is the problem: We tend to think of constitutions, or other fundamental and dominant systems of norms, statically. We think of them as fixed things. That is incorrect. The legitimacy of systems of governance derives from people, and people are not static. They are constantly being born and dying. They are dynamic. And most people, all of whom matter, will live in the future. What lies at the base of things like justice and freedom – the dynamic “we” in “We the People” – is more fluid than our brains usually perceive.
It is thus more accurate and true to our values of deriving legitimate governance from the people themselves (per a recent peer-reviewed article), to say that we are constantly constituting as we create new persons, not constituted by god-like founders in the past.We have to account for justice and freedom in the fundamental and ongoing formation of power relations, in the act of having children and ensuring their capacity to consent to the power of others. We thus “constitute” by accounting for the key stages in our development, early childhood and the creation of things like empathy, and the collective impact of that on our ability to socially self-determine. This is how we truly come together, or constitute, as free and equal people. We surpass our constant confusion about what it means to be free by seeing that such a state of being first lies in who we are – the fundamental power relations formed between us as we are created – before freedom can emerge, or not, in what we do.
Making that change, using a verb, frees us from what might be called the constitutive fallacy, an erroneous deference to power structures that oppresses us – like property entitlements that prevent equal opportunities in life for all. Or treating the planning of our families – the creation of children – as “nobody else’s business.”That sense of privacy was not meant to protect would-be parents or children, but was instead designed for concentrations of wealth and power to evade collective obligations to give kids a fair start in life via things like family planning incentives/entitlements pegged to literal birth equity.
How does the verb form free us? If we are dynamically constituting, then that process – limiting and decentralizing power to ensure future generations are free – becomes the dominant norm or ubernorm. We have to first and constantly make a free “We the People.” It precedes and overrides other norms. If we value justice and freedom (or self-determination over top-down systems of influences outside of ourselves like coercion or even incentives, which we can think of as simple sticks and carrots), we have to start from the premise that governance derives its legitimacy – its compelling oughtness – from the norm which through our creation ensures consensual governance.
We have to create future generations in ways that assure they are relatively self-determining, part of a system of laws that reflects their will, and as such free from all forms of power to which they cannot consent.
Using the verb constituting may feel nebulous, leaving us lost in time and space without the familiar static concept of a written constitution, sitting under glass in some far-away place, or militarily defended lines on a globe that define some amorphous “we.” There is a simple way to fix this. If we are constituting or in motion, we will necessarily be focused on where we are going, prioritizing a universal and child-centric (as opposed to parent-centric) system for planning our families that ensures justice and freedom for the majority (those that will live in the future) of persons. We will be sufficiently other-regarding – and free enough – to physically constitute just communities.
In the Fair Start Movement a collective of diverse people are discussing what it means to physically constitute those communities, using the simple and most basic value parameters of 1) minimum levels of welfare approaching birth equity for all, 2) an effective voice for everyone in more participatory democracies, and 3) restoration of nature, or the nonhuman world, which we can also think of as nonpolity, or the original positions/states of nature that undergird all theories of freedom. These values, just relations between people, and freedom, are simply inseparable from who we are and should be. And who we are and should be first depends on our creation. It’s about people, not population, and a physicalizing of justice through an existential norm that would include all other forms of traditional justice, e.g. distributive, environmental, intergenerational, procedural, retributive. We cannot be free if we carry pre-ordained hierarchies into our creation.
In other words, if we don’t start from a just people policy that gives all kids an ecosocial Fair Start in life, we can never proceed from a just position.We can never really be free. Our language and vision for the future will not orient from any of the values that comprise freedom.
As we move to correct the fallacy in our thinking, we will find ourselves divided between free people, and those who are entrenched in preconstituting modes (whom we might call “precons”), often because they benefit at cost to others from those modes. The divide, at this first and uniquely critical border of human power, is binary: We either support sufficiently just beginnings and are sufficiently other-regarding to constitute, or not. We either constitute/maintain polities and their citizenry in the position of being able to effectively participate in a constitutional convention, and have the capacity to consent to others’ power, or we give up the pretense of being free and equal people.
How can we identify precons?While forthcoming federal policies requiring disclosures regarding the role large companies play in the climate and other crises will help out these people, we can force the conversation with a few questions: How do they account for freedom and justice if not in the ongoing formation of power relations, as we have children? How could they care about children without caring about the conditions in which they are born? Is one’s birth position really a matter of fortune, or the result of things we can control? Is procreation more self, or other, determining? How can we consent to others’ power over us without accounting for the fundamental formation of power relations? If we value welfare, equity, democracy, or nature, wouldn’t we want to reflect those values in the norms that create us? Won’t we want to avoid relegating untold numbers of children to an ecologically degraded future with no guaranteed levels of resource or resilience?
TAKE ACTION:
These facts are indisputable: 1) Many benefitted from the mistakes described above by placing costs – ecological and social – on others. They did so in violation of multiple universal human rights that would have otherwise allowed us to constitute as free and equal people. And they did so in part by hiding the impact of the unjust family planning policies from which they were benefitting, instead using distracting downstream policies to prevent effective upstream reforms. 2) Most justly and effectively compensating future generations, who should be treated as a majority, for those violations requires targeting those precons most responsible, and those precons who benefitted the most, from blocking the process of constituting. They stand between us and legitimate systems of governance. 3) We right the fundamental wrong by taking and using portions of their concentrated power and wealth, measured against the relevant fundamental baseline, to constitute free and equal groups of future people via the effective vehicle of Fair Start incentives/entitlements.
Free people will demand these resources, and be opposed by precons, who should be treated as the fundamental threat to our freedom.
In other words these entities, like Exxon, should pay for the costs they externalized on others. And they must do so by complying with the first and overriding human right – Fair Start. We can spread this modeling, and this simple discourse: “Part of your wealth is my and my future child’s family planning entitlement and incentive.” If justice is meant to protect the most vulnerable, and it is, then it starts by protecting future persons, including nonhumans, which are the most vulnerable entities in the moral universe.
World Environment Day 2021 provided a crucial opportunity for the United Nations to make good on its promise to reset humanity’s relationship with nature. But by continuing to adhere to a family planning model that allows unfettered growth, despite every opportunity to simply issue statements that would initiate reform, it has failed to honor its pledge at the most fundamental and impactful level.
Our relationship with nature is fundamentally defined by the laws that shape family planning and drive population size, and whether – in those laws – nature or the nonhuman world is seen as a resource for population growth, or instead a check on it.
By adhering to the isolation modeling the UN is enabling a false idea of autonomy and is perpetuating inequity that benefits white colonizing nations. (That colonialism is reflected in the current 1/10 wealth gap between black and white children in the U.S.) Instead the UN should promote birth equity to achieve true autonomy and as a reparations to future generations.
The UN has not taken action. It has failed to link its outdated modeling to the overcrowding and poor public health that helped drive the COVID-19 pandemic. It has failed to condemn China’s new pronatal family planning regime, which is intended to create a baby boom among a population that – because of its size – already poses the greatest threat to the world’s ecologies. Instead the UN has focused on downstream efforts while at the same time profiting, politically, from population-based GDP growth.
Inaction threatens the UN’s credibility. Pronatal policies being rolled out in response to a perceived economic “baby bust” show that our current systems of governance are fundamentally illegitimate. If we are willing to create lots of people in whom we invest relatively little in order to satisfy markets and economies, instead of fewer people in whom we invest more in order to build the democracies that must precede, justify and regulate those markets and economies, we are admitting fundamental illegitimacy, or as the peer-reviewed work shows, the preconstitutionality, of our political systems. This is especially true when doing so exacerbates the climate crisis. In that case, all effective measures to correct this inversion are just.
The costs of ignoring reproductive justice legal reforms are mounting. These include the costs of the relevant climate emissions that could have been avoided since at least 2007, and the role the failure to require equitable family planning has played in driving the massive and growing gap between rich and poor across the globe. The Fair Start Movement is calculating those costs as harms, and believes world leadership must – and one day will – be held fully accountable for them.
Will you join that call? Nothing would have a greater long-run impact on restoring our environment than simultaneously compensating future generations, while helping them become parts of legitimate democracies, via Fair Start investments in their empowerment and resilience.
Kudos to Sarah Kaplan for covering the ongoing debate over whether population growth, or things like inequity, technology, and patterns of consumption, are to blame for the climate and other ecological crises.
Is it wrong to blame overpopulation for the climate crisis? Perhaps it’s better to reframe the question: Is it wrong to blame overpopulation alone for the climate crisis?
Of course.
There are always multiple factors at play, from the growth that fundamentally creates demand to the inequity that’s driving overconsumption and the colonization of nature. The key to success is not to take any of the relevant factors out of our policy reforms, including the fundamental source of the Anthropocene: Treating the planet as a human resource in the design of our systems, from the economy to family planning. Doing so would replicate the mistakes that lead to the crisis. Instead let’s work together to give all kids a #fairstart in life.
Kudos to Alexandra Paul for pushing back against the constant media messaging – often promoted by their advertisers – that falling fertility rates are a bad thing. Her recent letter, published in the LA Times, points out what should be obvious: Growth is not sustainable. She is speaking that truth to the powerful – media and corporate conglomerates – who would exploit future generations as cheap labor, and the Earth with them, to continue growth-fueled profits.
The move towards better planned families is 1) the product of decades of intentional interventions to stave off disaster, 2) emblematic of the liberation of women, and 3) the most effective tool – on a scale of 20x the impact – we have to fight the climate crisis.
Chaos Enabled by Irresponsible Behavior Is the Antithesis of Freedom
What do pandemics like Covid-19, and ecocidal things like the climate crisis, have to do with the idea of human freedom? For some, these events will be perceived as opportunities for governments to limit human freedom. For others, they will seem like limitations on freedom, along with governments’ failure to prevent them. Whatever the view, these events are largely driven by human behavior, which in turn is driven by values and norms, like freedom. How we further these events, and react to them, fundamentally derives in many ways from our perception of freedom and how it limits or justifies behavior. Dealing with these crises could then fundamentally start with examining the concept. Below are three particular perspectives, centered on isolation, inclusion, and creation, respectively.
A common view of freedom is the right to do whatever one wishes, absent some obvious and unjustifiable harm to others. The vision here is that one is and should be autonomous from other people, a vision captured in statements we see all the time: A gym owner in Arizona who refuses to require masks or close his business despite Covid-19, landowners who refuse to comply with the endangered species act, companies in trade associations that push back against consumer regulations, or coalitions fighting regulations that would limit climate emissions. The entire concept proceeds from intentional myopia, or the decision to view oneself in isolation from others, in time and space. It is the maintaining of willful ignorance of how people came to occupy different positions in society, the subtlety of harm, and the importance of things beyond harm – like obtaining the considered consent of others we influence. That myopia makes these claims of freedom easy to contest, but they endure to the extent our political systems position people so that they are – in an antisocial way – unwilling or unable to examine them. Collective problems, like the climate crisis and Covid 19, are primarily seen as presenting a risk that the collective will have a new opportunity to interfere with the will of individuals.
A second and less common view of freedom evades these problems we find in the first view. It takes many forms, but the general idea is to more comprehensively account for one’s position in the collective, and ensure a shared arrangement that allows one to do what one wishes as part of a system that simultaneously allows others to do the same. The goal is to not prevent each other from self-determination in the process. The philosophers: Joseph Raz, in The Morality of Freedom, or Philip Pettit, in a recent Ted Talk, exemplify this more comprehensive view. It cannot easily be picked apart by examining how the autonomy of the individual relates to the collective – they have accounted for these complex and relevant connections. Under this view, both the climate crisis and Covid-19 present direct risks to the autonomy or freedom of all, as well as those in the future. It is consistent with the objective value of people getting to do what they want that we require all to change their behavior in response to these events. This vision is more complex and accurate – but beyond the capacity or willingness of many to grasp.
But the truly myopic, and even the more comprehensive visions of freedom, aside, there is a third view of freedom that involves something unique. Is there something odd about the two visions of freedom just discussed? There is no account of how the people in them came to be. It’s as if they dropped from the sky. But if freedom entails freedom from other people and their unwanted influence, as well as the freedom to do things – like choose among the valuable options in life enabled by particular types of social organization – don’t we have to first account for the creation of people? Don’t we have to assure all some minimum levels of welfare or even equity of opportunity at birth, some meaningful role in controlling their governance, and political entities physically defined by nature so that we can be free from others? In other words – we first need a norm that accounts for the creation of free people.
This third view of freedom – which we might call a fair start, is centered on the act of creating other people to ensure they live as free and equal persons. It is not exclusive of the first two but rather precedes and enables them, and would be furthered through a very specific process of reforming family planning and population policies – specifically treating the act of procreation as more other-determining for the child than self-determining for the parents. It asks: How can we be inclusive without first accounting for the creation of the people to be included? The impact of these family planning reforms would exponentially surpass many of the downstream reforms underway to alleviate child poverty, ensure equity, restore democracy, and protect our environment. So would the long-term impact on the climate crisis, and the impact and risks of pandemics.
Lastly, this third view has a unique feature: Because it always proceeds other behaviors, in that we are before we do, it overrides conflicting interests. We may do whatever it takes to ensure all children a fair start in life or to continuously recreate the people who actually – or physically – comprise free societies.
The crises we face today arise from and depend on values, like freedom. Starting at the source of the problem entails examining what we mean when we use this word, and what it means for others.
What’s the most effective way to protect the planet and fight the climate crisis? Fair Start reproductive justice policies, which have ten to twenty times the impact of less fundamental changes. We are only in this ecological mess because world leaders failed to make sure family planning policies worked.
By 2100, world population could vary by billions of people depending on whether the average woman in the world has one child more or one child fewer.
Simply stated, the current family planning model used by United Nations was developed prior to awareness of climate change, the disproportionate impact of early childhood development on human well being, how birth conditions and early development exacerbate inequality and other factors. This old model makes our future less secure, healthy and equitable.
Members of Congress are urging President Biden to declare a climate emergency and use his presidential powers to take immediate action to address the crisis, which is quickly accelerating. Having Kids is urging Biden to do the same. Here’s why:
Fair Start is the genesis of social justice, and the beginning of actually constituting democracies through the limitation and decentralization of human power. It was and is wrong to put population-driven economic growth over that right, or over smaller and more functional democracies where each voice is influential.
Biden acting to declare an emergency now, and to take immediate next steps for any or all the reasons given above, would start to right this wrong.
