Category: Climate Protection

(The following discusses legal and political theory. For a simpler read, see: Family Planning Offers the Best Means for Combating Climate Change: An Interview with Carter Dillard, Fair Start Movement (mahb.stanford.edu))

The Problem: A Broken System

For decades, children’s right to a fair start in life has been ignored. The world has prioritized economic growth over sustainability, leading to environmental destruction, political inequity, and the loss of fundamental freedoms. Many children, especially those of color, are born into conditions with fewer resources and greater risks. This systemic failure has harmed our shared values—like access to clean air, water, and food—more than any social or environmental efforts have helped.

The Root Cause: Growth Over Justice

Unchecked population growth, combined with political disenfranchisement, has weakened societies’ ability to address climate change and social justice issues. Wealthy elites, including corporate and philanthropic leaders, have avoided responsibility for the crisis by focusing on surface-level reforms while ignoring the root issue: fair and sustainable birth and development conditions.

Despite claims of reducing carbon emissions, many environmental organizations operate in high-emission nations where total emissions and negative birth outcomes continue to rise. The supposed progress is undone by the very systems of inequality that these organizations fail to challenge. Children and animals are left in increasingly dire conditions, without the political power or resources to escape harm.

The Fair Start Movement: A Constitutional Watchdog

The Fair Start Movement is the first global initiative focused on exposing the hidden standards that perpetuate environmental and social injustices. We investigate claims made by influential organizations, comparing their reported impact to objective measures of political equity and sustainability. Our goal is to shift the conversation from downstream interventions to upstream solutions—starting with fair starts for all children.

Holding Power Accountable: The “Tell The Truth” Campaign

Through our Tell The Truth campaign, we ask key influencers a simple question: How much of the good you claim to do is undone by ignoring birth inequity and its impact on political power?

By pressuring organizations and funders to disclose their true impact—including the harm caused by ignoring children’s rights—we push for real accountability. If they are willing to acknowledge the truth, we urge them to redirect resources toward ensuring all children are born into fair conditions, setting a foundation for a just and sustainable world.

The Stakes: Who Pays the Price?

For years, major contributors to climate change—like Coca-Cola and Exxon—have profited while shifting the burden of their destruction onto vulnerable communities. Black and brown children in the U.S. and worldwide bear the brunt of these injustices, treated as though basic rights are a privilege rather than a guarantee.

The consequences are visible: hurricanes devastating the southeastern U.S., wildfires ravaging California, and the increasing struggle of unhoused populations. These crises are not accidental; they result from a system designed to protect wealth at the expense of justice.

A Call to Action: Rethinking Justice

True justice starts at birth. If we continue to ignore how children enter the world—born into vastly unequal conditions with no say in their fate—then all other social justice efforts remain incomplete.

The Fair Start Movement challenges traditional power structures by focusing on fundamental rights:

• Political Equity: Ensuring all children have an equal share in democracy.
• Sustainable Growth: Holding corporations and governments accountable for environmental destruction.
• Truthful Impact Reporting: Exposing fraudulent claims that hide systemic injustices.

We invite organizations and individuals to rethink their approach. Instead of using abstract measures of success, we must ask: Are we actually improving lives, or are we perpetuating harm?

Join Us in Demanding Accountability

The future depends on breaking the cycle of injustice. We call on all advocates, organizations, and policymakers to recognize the real drivers of climate and social crises—and to act on solutions that start where justice truly begins: at birth.

Click here to Donate to Fair Start Movement Campaign

(The following requires some familiarity with legal and political theory. For an easier read see: Family Planning Offers the Best Means for Combating Climate Change: An interview with Carter Dillard, Fair Start Movement (mahb.stanford.edu))

Fact: Our collectively violating children’s right to a fair start in life, by using unsustainable growth and loss of political equity and effective shares in democracy to degrade ecosocial birth and development conditions beneath a key threshold, and assuming children of color deserved much fewer resources and much more risk, has done more to harm our shared values – like experiencing moderate temperatures and enjoying access to food and water – as well as our many of our public interest missions, than we did to further them.

Why? The growth those violations enabled has degraded the capacity of the Earth to support infant health. This is exacerbated by vast inequity and political disenfranchisement that inhibits the ability of the average constituent to change our  current trajectory, and all of this loss of freedom and welfare is measurable by widely accepted metrics used for assessing sustainable development.

And yet legal systems, and legitimacy, require the measurable inclusion of constituents in order to be representative, and to legitimately claim exclusive use of violence to ensure compliance with the law. Illegitimate use of violence, of course, breeds violence. 

How could we account for fundamental obligations without first ensuring children are born and raised in child-rights compliant conditions, the fundament of empowering relations?

And yet several organizations in high-emission nations have been running animal protection and environmental campaigns – our most demanding ideals – by fundraising on claims of reduced emissions, while total emissions and negative infant outcomes are rising, the claimed reductions in emissions having been vastly undone by growth, an enabled by political inequity. More and more children and animals have been brought into conditions with no resources with which to deal with the impact of the growing emissions, lack of political influence, and degrading eco-social safety systems.

Human birth and development is the largest determinant of all outcomes we experience. It is thus the fundamental driver of the climate crisis – not just emissions, but political influence to control them, and  resilience to deal with them. And yet even now, wealthy funders driving social justice reforms are hiding their liability for the violations and undoing – and undoing that moved wealth into their hands, and undoing that is costing millions of lives and trillions of dollars. 

The Fair Start Movement was formed as the world’s first constitutional watchdog to engage in fundamental fact checking, scanning for use of the same fundamentally illegal standard of entitlements that caused the crisis by those who would choose to avoid liability for the crisis, and to evade the life-saving and legitimating reparations they owe. Our tactic is simple: We take impact claims made by influential entities and key public interest organizations and we assess them against objective measures of ongoing losses of political equity and democratic influence, or a zero-baseline measure of the full spectrum of harm caused by the crisis. Fair Start does not replace downstream public interest interventions; it reorients them from preemptive, rights-based, legitimating, and upstream base. 

Under the Fair Start Tell The Truth campaign, we ask questions to bifurcate key influencers into the fair and unfair, and in the latter identify key barrierswho should  disclose how much of the value they claimed to create has been undone when we factor in violations of he rights of children and animals. We contrast impact claims with actual harm, relative to a zero baseline, or the neutral standard necessary for a coherent base value of being free.

Language matters, because it would be physically impossible to be free without accurately premised communications that capture how we fundamentally become legally obligated to others as they enter the world, and we are preemptively obligated to communicate in accord with that obligation be self-determining.

How then could we account for fundamental obligations without ensuring children are born and raised in child-rights compliant conditions?

If they are willing to tell the truth, we urge key barriers to then shift some percentage of their resources to incentivize measurably fair starts in life for all kids as the most just and effective solution to the problems we face today.

Legitimate nations begin with – or constitute through – rights-based relations, and Tell the Truth identifies “non-constituitive ” barriers – those who refuse to derive authority and entitlement back to demonstrably empowering the constituents from whose sovereignty these things flow and are conditioned upon. While nonviolence is key these barriers fall outside of a legitimate “we” deserving of protection because they deny it to others, and because they rely on systems of state violence to protect themselves without actually empowering others subject to that violence in a way that makes the state legitimate and representative.  

Children Healers is a transformative initiative dedicated to addressing the profound mental and emotional toll experienced by children affected by trauma. By breaking down barriers to mental health care, we empower children to heal, rebuild, and thrive. In partnership with the Fair Start Movement, we advocate for a more equitable world, where children regardless of their background—have access to the resources they need to succeed.

 

Together, we are focused on ensuring that the most vulnerable children, especially those impacted by the climate crisis, are not left behind. Supporting Children Healers means joining a global effort to provide essential therapeutic services, education, and hope to those who need it most. As we work to create lasting change, we invite you to stand with Children Healers, ensuring that every child has the opportunity to heal and grow in a world that offers them a fair chance at a brighter future.

 

Nour Belokda, founder of Children Healers

Every child has a right to come into the world with their needs met. But due to the actions of major contributors to climate change, like Coca-Cola and Exxon, for the last several decades those rights have been diminished to a point where basic rights are treated like a privilege, especially for black and brown people in the U.S. and around the world.

In the West it’s become disgustingly clear, as we’ve watched Helene ravage the southeast United States, watched fires ravage Altadena, and as we’ve watched the unhoused struggle and suffer just to survive in a country that can consume all while outsourcing its labor needs. The people of the globe, and of the United States, are owed.

Regina Stone Grover,Rei Stone-Grover MA – Co-Executive Director, Fair Start Movement, Poet, Writer, and Trauma educator; Commit To Healing Vol. 1 https://www.amazon.com/Commit-Healing-Vol-Poetic-Experience/dp/0578900327

For many years, There has been an error in addressing climate injustices and birth inequality until the world is at threshold and soon bursting. Very many charities and foundations emerged in addressing climate injustices and birth inequalities but the method used by these charities is insufficient in that it lacks the measurable accountability to the death of vulnerable children from harm hidden in Their charity because  they didn’t address the root cause of the crisis. Whereas indigenous emerged from the grassroots from Affected communities with Afrocentric model to address climate injustices and birth inequalities but have limited access to funds to execute this model in saving the next generation.

Introduction 

The Fair Start Movement formed because of the common use, in U.S. companies, nonprofits, media, universities, etc. of an illegal, and fundamentally racist, assessment and reporting standard that hides climate damage liability. This standard is based on the same fundamentally Illegal metrics that caused the climate crisis and millions of deaths. The standard – deriving from power grab efforts by wealthy families in the Twentieth Century that subverted the civil rights movements – used the contradiction in terms of procreative autonomy, and by hiding measures of the loss of political equity,  started to silo justice into downstream issue areas that acted as decoys with the work being undone daily by growth. 

Reproductive rights regimes based on isolated decision making, which ensured long run inequity, have become the base driver of a white wealthy supremacy that will kill countless children of color.

This move effectively skipped ensuring children’s rights in the logic of human rights regimes, applying them only after children were born into conditions that violated the rights. This shifted costs onto mostly children of color, evading hard checks on growth, avoiding racial equity, and ensuring status quo in the direction of power. This racial subversion standard centers on using top-down, abstract, and arbitrary measures for social justice and public interest outcomes, rather than zeroing out harm in the actual creation of relations.

A stark example is  – in the last several decades – the anthropocentric commercialization of animal rights as a form of food salesmanship centered on vegan food, which shows how a radical social justice movement can fall prey to the standard, and continue to make fraudulent impact claims undone every day by inequity and growth. 

These same wealthy families and other entities are now funding charities, media, politicians and academics who silo social justice issues away from birth equity, and use omissive messaging – a form of entitlement and impact, or equity, fraud –  that hides their liability and the illegal macro entitlement systems ensuring the death of millions as the climate crisis accelerates. Fraud is intentionally benefitting at harm to others based on misinformation, including omissions.

If you ask the right questions, those engaged in it become obvious: Their work is inevitably abstract, ignoring the entry into the world of children, and starts by assuming entitlements that contradict the values and impacts they claim, entitlements that enable the industries they claim to fight.

This further cements in place the subversion of civil rights.

In the Fair Start Tell the Truth campaign we ask all how they are first accounting for children entering the world relative to what their rights require, because social  justice reforms should address this – the largest determinants of outcomes – first. 

We can all start to change that, and with easy conversations that begin with questions like:

“We noticed you said this about your work and impact. We worry this refers to the use of the same fundamental assessment and reporting standard that caused the climate crisis. How were you accounting for children’s rights as they entered the world when you claimed to have a beneficial impact?” 

You don’t get to justice by starting at injustice. We don’t get to legitimate nations by having zero functional protections for children as they enter the world, and thus for the nonhuman world they will impact. In essence the proponents are using a shell/ponzi scheme, identified as such by Nobel laureates, which has caused the deaths of millions of innocent persons around the world. 

Forget left versus right politics and focus on the top-downs: Government over citizens, owners over managers, employers over employees, parents over children and future children, and humans over nonhumans. It’s about a choice of power, a directional binary choice between entitling the powerful or the vulnerable, with the former choice  illegally violating infant and animal rights, rather than creating an inclusive system where the powerful can represent the vulnerable.

How could we invert that system, in practice? 

See more below, but in essence one can invert by talking about the vulnerable when assessing and reporting impacts – by talking in a dynamic way about constituting relations, rather than focusing on a static national constitution that has nothing to do with deriving and conditioning authority on the empowerment of subjects. Just the way binary gender language erases nonbinary identities, or nationalistic language erases rightful indigenous land owners, static language erases future children as the priority class of most numerous and vulnerable entities. 

What’s justice? It starts with existence and birth, or developmental and emancipatory positionality – or what we understand to be the commonly accepted idea of intergenerational justice as minimum thresholds for children entering the world, though these thresholds must now be modified to account for the fundamental driver of the climate crisis. 

Legitimacy requires first accounting for vulnerable children entering the world in conditions that do not fulfill their rights, and at levels that degrade their environment and disenfranchise them politically, as a factor impacting our claims. Was that factor undoing the work we were doing, and maybe even doing more harm to our missions than we were doing good, especially because the status quo standard scored children of color as deserving substantially fewer resources, and exponentially more risk, risk that is now causing them to die in the climate crisis?

Fair Start’s research shows that – given the millions of deaths being caused by the climate crisis – ignoring this factor meant that many charities on balance did more to enrich the families of wealthy investors/funders than accomplish their missions.

More vulnerable entities will suffer and die, because of the subversive standard and the protection of generational wealth, than most prominent charities will have saved. 

By not accounting for the fair or equitable creation of actual power relations at birth, our social justice and public interest work became performative, abstracted from reality in a way that ensured the current crises. As described above, our research also shows that all legal obligations derive from language that accurately captures our first obligations to others, and given our harming future children in the climate crisis, the corrective admissions we call for here are needed to move our language towards mutually empowering all using measurable self-determination as the base value.

Dignity – and the human rights that derive from it and equity – require orienting from truth, not failed forms of justice derived from injustice.

Change can start with interim disclaimers like “our work does not account for inequity,” as well as making disclosures under the Fair Start Tell the Truth campaign contrasting omissive claims that used the status quo standards with new measures of actual harm to vulnerable infants and animals.

Background 

The problem originates from the subversion of the civil rights and anti-apartheid movements, decades ago, when world leaders removed political equity from reproductive rights regimes, essentially ensuring “separate but equal” standards in families. 

After World War Two, aspirational standards for social justice, like environmentalism and animal protection, were largely left by governments and businesses to a third sector, civil society.

But there was an inherent conflict of interest. Large, wealthy families like the Rockefellers largely controlled the sector through their philanthropy, and they had a history of conveying generational wealth rather than ensuring equity. They, and the church, played a crucial role in privatizing reproductive rights regimes, and focusing them on the quantitative issue of population, over the qualitative issue of one’s effective share in one’s democracy – one’s political equity. It was not conservatives or the government that set low standards ensuring the crises we see today. 

It was nepotistic liberal families who elevated their children over others with unearned privilege. 

Without political equity, reproductive rights regimes became fundamentally unjust and unsustainable, skewing what it means to be self versus other-determining by wrongly treating the act of having children as more personal to the parents than other-determining for the child. The regimes enabled prior = generations to abuse an unlimited right to have children at cost to the rights of current and future generations, creating massive inequity and ecocidal growth.

To the extent wealthy and mostly white families owed reparative justice, this was reparations fraud, the evasion of the heavy investments in racially equitable birth, development, and emancipatory conditions child rights required.

The lack of investment, the lack of necessitating rights-compliant early childhood development conditions, directly enabled catastrophic growth and massive inequality, which measurably did more harm than subsequent philanthropic efforts, all tainted by the desire to exploit the growth and enabling some kids much further ahead than others, did more harm than good because it blocked life-saving funds in favor of concentrating and growing generational wealth.

It was not conservatives that fundamentally caused modern ecocide, inequity, and autocratic nationalism. It was the hypocritical liberals behind philanthropy who refused at base to reconcile their generational wealth and unearned privilege with justice, and they thereby set horrifically insufficient goals for social justice movements, siloing justice away from birth equity and into decoy versions of the ideals that through inequitable growth ensured the climate and related crises.

Those concentrations are so extreme today that they can ensure sustained propaganda of an underpopulation “crisis” in the middle of a growth-driven climate crisis killing millions. They use an illegal standard for cost/benefit assessment and reporting that was designed to benefit the children of wealthy investor-philanthropists by arbitrarily scoring their worth higher than other children, in violation of the rights of all children.

Continued use of that standard gives rise to justifiable retaliation by those tricked into being obligated to follow the law without being fairly empowered to change it (what we might call the #equiscam).

Those insufficient public interest efforts would have inevitably started with zero actual protections for those the intervenors claimed to protect while entitling the industries they failed to police, treating children of color as deserving a fraction of the resources as white kids and exponentially more risk, meaning that today billions of persons are at extreme risk from a climate crisis they had little to no role in causing.

The impact claims this philanthropy funded were wildly off base, being undone daily by the growth / political inequity. There is no universe in which those positive impacts occurred – they were simply reported out of context, omitting the largest determinant of outcomes undoing the benefits every day, making social justice a top-down and performative charade, a cosmetic version that started by mis-entitling the powerful and ignoring universally enforceable obligations. 

Activists now with Fair Start will admit being paid by funders of other nonprofits to create a fantasy world that made it look like there was progress and a better future, when in reality both were just moving money towards themselves as the situation deteriorated for the most vulnerable. The activists used wealth to create a fantasy world that ensured audiences would assume entitlements that were contrary to the organizational missions, while they were shifting benefits away from the vulnerable and to ourselves.

It was like a magic trick. At the end of almost two decades of activism with other organizations, many of our activists could demonstrate how despite their organizations’ claims, they had quietly chosen policies that placed more vulnerable entities in harm’s way, while simultaneously enriching themselves and their funders. We had benefited from a system of racist entitlements, exacerbated them through growth and the creation of a fantasy world of social progress that hid the reality of the crisis, and that enabled us to now enjoy comforts like air conditioning while those least responsible for the crisis died in heat waves. 

We were leeches free-riding on the inequity and injustice of the birth lottery, benefiting at deadly cost to others while creating a fantasy world of impact that did not exist. 

We know that this did more harm than good because evading children’s interests brought them into conditions that not only violated their rights, but thereby degraded – through things like extreme heat – the capacity of their ecologies to support what all children need. That inequitable growth simultaneously disenfranchised the average voter, seeding vast political inequity and blocking their ability to halt what was unfolding.

There is no way to assess value in the world that would not be measured relative to basic infant health and life prospects, including self-determination, because infant health and development is the objective basis through which humans experience all value, and the fundamental baseline for unifying values like health, equity, democracy, etc. It is the minimum measure, or floor, for political legitimacy. It’s very hard to change a future child’s prospects once they are born into economic use, so justice should focus on thresholds beneath which children should not be born.

Much of the philanthropy we see today, which avoids discussion of how inequitable growth easily reversed infant development outcomes, does more to hide this problem than fix it. In fact, funders have blocked some efforts to reform the standards, thereby minimizing climate damage evaluations, including amounts, the weight or priority of claims, universal enforceability, and priority uses of funds. 

The many public interest organizations Fair Start activists are aware of have used concrete illegal practices, often employing a “social justice decoy” — a weaker version of the effective interventions needed, but instead one that would do more to transfer wealth to certain families than ensure mission objectives. One funder in particular, influential in reproductive rights and animal welfare, told me he chose a reproductive rights standard without equity because he benefited from the outcomes.

But continuing that tradition and policy of ignoring political equity in reproductive rights goes beyond bad acting, like racism. By hiding from policy the actual creation – at birth – of power relations, it skews how we see the world, treating the most interpersonal thing – having kids – as personal. This moves values, like nature, equity and democracy, from defining a subject-level “we” towards being objects in our sentences, which enabled things like discount rates and other top-down inaccuracies that exacerbate the climate crisis. Under this misdirection, the focus will be on emissions, ignoring how growth undoes reductions while bringing children into the world without the resources to deal with the impacts. The crisis is about power relations; emissions are only a tiny aspect of that.  

For example, funders claiming to protect biodiversity from growth, or animals under the legal system, have siloed the issues away from birth equity in ways that benefited them, and their families, at cost to the values they claimed to be furthering. They have avoided covering costs at the level of subject-equity, and got the benefit of seeming to be saviors at a charade-object level, through charities that focused downstream on issues of biodiversity and animal welfare. 

Against all of this, Fair Start, or an equity-based focus, is the preemptive standard to assess reparations fraud because governments cannot create their own definitions of legitimacy in lieu of the objective measure for that value.

There are a few tactics we can use to change the standard: 

1) We can ask key leading social justice organizations:

What were you doing to ensure children’s birth rights to development and equity over unsustainable demand for the products you criticize? We can urge key influencers who might act as barriers to fair starts, and whose role modeling and inversion of political system would have a large impact whether they would have chosen to institute such a system decades ago had they known the climate crisis would unfold as it did. 

This assesses the level of commitment to one’s actual values. This discourse can lead into the process of elevating reparations to a measurable level of self-determination, and treat those reparations as owed and payable to would-be parents to bend down the arc of growth and consumption towards child-rights compliant families that are smaller, equitable and democratic. 

Every corporation, nonprofits included, may be obligated to read their current civil rights obligations as preemptively directed by that standard. Fair Start is urging the United Nations Human Rights Committee and other human rights bodies to admit fundamental failure – in what one Nobel laureate saw as amounting to a shell-ponzi game of commercializing democracy.  We can then recognize an overriding and fundable right to a fair start in life for all children as the solution. This standard naturally overrides national authority to define citizenship and other designations of political membership. 

Why? Bringing future children into the world is the largest determinant of outcomes in the long run, and because who we should be – fundamentally relating to one another based on rights and not growth commerce – comes before what we do, we can take radical action to move the incentivizing funds. Would we really think it racist not to hire someone because of their race, but to ignore climate risks to millions because of race-based differences in generational wealth? 

Climate change and inequality are birth-interconnected crises that disproportionately harm the most vulnerable, requiring immediate, systemic action. 

This is not a choice on a menu of public interest interventions. This work relates to the inescapable system of costs, benefits, and obligations we are all born into, the largest driver of outcomes, and the choice to exploit that system or legitimate it. If we care about a particular value, like animal liberation, biodiversity, children’s rights, or democracy wouldn’t we be eager to account for a fundamental cost/benefit analysis that accounts for the harm wealth has done to those values, and what it owes going forward? 

2) We can identify and make examples of high profile barriers (“noncons,” or those who block constituting a just future), many of whom would have funded social justice “decoy” philanthropy: 

These are some of the people who are most harmed.

These are some of the people who most benefited.

Failure to resolve this injustice takes the debtors outside of deserving public (legal/inclusive) protection because by their bypassing child-rights compliant positionality and formation of relations, it would be impossible to account for their being included in a comprehensive system of obligation/rights that actually accounts for the costs and benefits of birth positionality. While nonviolence is key, these barriers fall outside of a legitimate “we” deserving of protection because they deny it to others, and because they rely on systems of state violence to protect themselves without actually empowering others subject to that violence in a way that makes the state legitimate and representative.  

They are fundamentally illegal, and not based on an assessment using fictitious borders like lines on a globe, but the true border to self v. other determination controlled by who – via creation – we actually share the world with. In such an assessment and the horrors of the climate crisis, those seen as leaders become targets. 

They deserve as much as they necessitate for the most vulnerable. No rights for infants in creation, rights that act as cost limits on our behavior, means no rights for the cost evaders. It was this override, the primacy of creation positionality and its impact on political equity, that those behind the racial subversion standard described above were likely terrified of, and hiding. 

But their wealth was fundamentally made at cost to our freedom, and the freedom of others, and there is no reason we should not take it back in order to fundamentally liberate. Their behavior, each day, is evidence of whether they ensure legitimacy, or collective freedom from power, or assume illegal entitlements to benefit at deadly cost to others while masquerading as free. 

This tactic can begin by asking government officials, wealthy individuals and families, and key leaders across all sectors whether they think kids deserve a fair start on life; how they are accounting for entitlements that ensure children only being born into conditions that comply with their rights under the Children’s Convention so that we can all share a legitimate, or a rights-based, political system; and to admit their entitlements derive from and are conditioned upon an obligation to measurably empower the constituents in a way that actually justifies governance.

This can include focusing on the adult children of key targets, who under the preemptive standards above would inherit the death debt of their parents.   

It can also include academics.

For decades the majority of assumptions in population ethics, as a field, have been fundamentally premised on welfare improvements that the climate crisis has now reversed. Moreover, those assumptions ignored the need to use self-determination or political equity as the fundamental value for social organization, because welfare cannot account for political obligation and unless current systems were designed to kill millions, they failed on even a welfare standard. 

Abstract academic debates about ethics, often funded by concentrations of wealth and power reliant on inequity and growth, threaten to exacerbate the results of the climate crisis by forestalling law and policy reforms. Many of the debates derive from the same Eurocentric vestige of colonialism described above – the historic entitlement of wealthy families to exploit birth positionality ensured by colonized nations. 

Academia should be objective and that doesn’t mean ignoring one’s positionality. It actually means first accounting for it, especially to avoid contradictory exploitation and entitlements that conflict with one’s values. 

There is no accurate evaluation, no assessment of values, without inclusive positioning.

Most of the academics in these debates contradict in their writings the basic things they seemed to value throughout their lives, e.g., 1) seeking minimum thresholds of personal welfare while letting at risk children and certainly many members of future generations die in infancy through deprivation and abuse that could have been avoided; 2) expecting equal access to opportunities while the exponentially discriminatory birth positioning of others resign them to a life of servitude, 3) participating in and adhering to political/legal systems that purported to represent the governed while ignoring the way dilution and positionality ensure the voices of some carry no weight, 4) using and enjoying an environment relatively conducive to human and nonhuman health while others are born into the deadly results of racist ecocide, an outcome that contradicts the efficiency many of these leech-like academics laud in the abstract as they enjoy growth-based investments, and 5) enjoying a right to have a child in relatively safe conditions while others and those in the future have no such option, etc.

You can identify these academics because they will avoid discussions of how shared values relate to the actual creation of power relations. They will pontificate on values while enjoying the benefits of their birth lottery outcome. They will silo off values, like animals’ rights, from the issue of who the humans – the performance of which those rights depend on – should be. They will avoid discussions of their full positionality. They will avoid explicitly conditioning state authority, and the justification of violence, on empowering each person equally. They will choose a false default position of illegal entitlements while they pontificate, and through positionality, harm others. 

If the micro-liberation of nonhumans looks like open rescues at factory farms, the macro would look like “real new deal” social contract demands for reparations in exchange for child-centric planning that would ensure a truly climate-restored and bio-diverse future in which humans are empathetic enough to be inclined to treat nonhumans well. But many academics, whose interests do not align with macro reforms, ignore the latter.

Regardless, there is no room for continued debate under the status quo entitlements, as the death rate climbs. Illegal power derives from the illusion of representative authority, which is used to to justify the exclusive right to use of violence.

That illegitimacy, that abuse, is what breeds all violence. How do we react well? 

Free persons will only follow rules that are fair, and the first rule accounts for our creation or positioning into the system of rules, so that we are more self-determining than determined by others. The most basic legal rule of all – after World War Two and objective limits (human rights) on subjective individual and national sovereignty – requires representatives and property-rights claimants to derive their authority from those they claim to represent, from an objective system of empowerment. 

Because of the racial subversion standard, that never occurred. Leaders exploited the arbitrary nature of the birth lottery, rather than ending it. That subversion is so internalized today that major figures in justice advocacy, like Martha Nussbaum and Michael Sandel, never even touch on the main driver of the climate crisis. God did not create them into relative positions of safety and benefit, bad policy did.

Telling the truth allows us to see who is sufficiently other-regarding to be included in the “we,” or those who support capacity for self determination, versus those who were engaged in a performative version of justice without covering the actual costs. 

 Telling the truth allows everyone to relate their experiences to the dynamic reality of the most vulnerable, children entering the world and impacting animals – in the actual first creation of unjust power relations, rather than relating those experiences to decoy points (politicians, celebrities, advertising, etc.) created by the powerful. 

All legal obligation derives from language, and ours should mutually empower – not disempower – at the base. Language that accurately reflects and forms obligations has to be accessible to the people who are engaged in the discourse – meaning it definitely is not a traditional national constitution. 

There is an analogy for the shift that is needed: All work is done on a floor that is falling apart, and some want to keep going while others fall through and clutch at those around them, taking many down with them. By delaying the replacement of the floor, these free riders threaten us all.

Above all, this is the most important thing to remember: 

Law must be interpreted to legitimate itself, and the areas of positive law necessary to carry the Fair Start reform forward, including constitutional, fraud, consumer protection, child welfare, environmental, nationality, democracy, civil rights, and others, must be preemptively interpreted to ensure inclusion and representation. As such, treaties like the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights as well as others must be enforced by the ultimate source of authority, the people, through things like the Tell the Truth campaign, and demand for reparations payments from key concentrations of wealth and power to class representatives of collective family defense systems.   

This is not altruism.

Again: It is physically impossible to be free, as in self-determining, if we cannot ask how our communications account for and then assure that persons are created, developed and emaciated in ways that offset equally their capacity to influence political systems, relative to a neutral position or objective standard for evaluation. Without that those entering the world are either not empowered, or we all have no choice but to be subjected to their power and influence – including the degradation of the environment around us. We should instead empower the governed, not the government and the wealthy, whose authority and entitlements derive from and are conditioned on the creation of liberating relations. Those that think and act otherwise – nonconstitutives – logically fall outside of the scope of protection free, or measurably self-determining persons, must give each other.

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