We can’t truly call ourselves civilized if we don’t protect our most vulnerable. The Fair Start Movement gives current and future children the advocates they need to get the life they deserve.
Anne Green, PhD Former Professor at Carnegie Mellon University Executive Director, One Step for Animals
For all of the reasons given above, many reasonable people would consider the young mother taking peaceful action to achieve birth equity for her future child, and setting an example that others might embrace to protect all future children the height of working towards freedom and justice. Free people will follow rules that start by limiting the influence others have over them. The process of her seeking birth equity would be, in that sense, liberating.
She can leave the money with the wealthy family, knowing it was made at cost to others, or move it and save lives.
Those on whom she would make the demands – who would choose preventable deaths – seem tiny and worthy of targeting relative to all of that. Her move to demand is a move towards knowing her and many other children, under a test laid out by one of the leading political philosophers in the world, will live free.
The climate crisis is not just about emissions. It’s about how children, animals, and adults will actually experience the crisis, and that depends long run on the mental and physical resources they have, their location, those people that surround them, etc. And that depends on what they have at birth.
Impact, on many levels. depends on how we have kids.
Consider this fact: People, not documents, constitute nations, and the creation of their power relations through birth and development – by definition and inevitably – determines whether they are relatively self-determining or determined by others. These relations are part of the implied “we” in every statement, the often-unspoken presence of the dominant political/legal system – usually the nation – from which the statement is orienting. How would you ever really account for inclusive power relations to allow a say in what the law should be without starting at creation, and accounting for the move from minor to adult that makes persons full citizens capable of making the rules.
You would not, and the failure to halt the climate crisis is evidence of this. And there is a clear formula to assess reparations. The would-be mother would be truly constituting democracy, speaking the truth and logic of self-determination to power.
So . . . if that young mother were charged with trespassing in making the demand, could she challenge it – and expect a jury to side with her – because the state cannot limit access to property without first empowering (actually or physically constituting) its people to be involved in the making of such property rules, i.e. empowering them through just the sort of constitutive discourse in which she seeks to engage? How do we every get to governance by the people without elevating her pre-political right above the process-based rule of trespass? Do we really choose to constitute our relations via top-down force in a system run by men, versus a system of bottom-up empowerment run by women, via the act of care?
Her act is fundamentally liberating, and the best explanation of political obligation, because free people will start by limiting and decentralizing the influence others have over them.
This is not theoretical. A complaint reflecting the right to make such demands is now before the United Nations, to benefit the most vulnerable communities impacted by the crisis.
For all of the reasons given above, many reasonable people would consider the young mother taking peaceful action to achieve birth equity for her future child, and setting an example that others might embrace to protect all future children the height of working towards freedom and justice.
She would be ensuring self-determination for many, true freedom, instead of them being determined by others. What is the right way to deal with someone who insists on participating in a system that risks millions of lives in order for that person to make more money?
She can leave the money with the wealthy family, knowing it was made at cost to others, or move it and save lives. She can empower children equally and help solve another problem: Acts of mass violence do not stem from mental illness as much as from a sense of disempowerment, and the need to matter in one final act within what shooters perceive as an unjust world. We were sold sustainable town halls where we matter and can control the world around us to a degree, but got unsustainable, massive shopping malls where most do not matter and have no say. And those that benefitted from this system, at cost to others, want to block media from reporting things like mass shootings to hide the costs of their systems.
Those on whom she would make the demands – who would choose preventable deaths – seem tiny and worthy of targeting relative to all of that. Her move to demand is a move towards knowing her and many other children, under a test laid out by one of the leading political philosophers in the world, will live free.
Do you support an academic institution? Most of the academics in debates about family reforms contradict in their writings the basic values they exhibited throughout their lives, e.g. seeking minimum thresholds of personal welfare, expecting equal access to opportunities, participating in and adherence to political/legal systems that purported to represent the governed, use and enjoyment of an environment relatively conducive to human and nonhuman health, etc.
Given their privileged intergenerational positionality, and the fact that they sent their lives generally relying on and participated in legal/political systems of coercive obligation that benefitted them at cost to others, they should at least begin from a default or provisional position of extending those values to future generations by saying – as a fundamental premise of justice over top-down power – that basic human rights systems should prioritize the child welfare/equity in instruments like the Children’s Rights Convention over parental subjective choice in the ethics, law and policy of family planning, population, and procreation so that future generations can also debate these things from the comfort and security these academics do. Urge any academic institution you support to back Fair Start family reforms.
The wealthiest and the charities they fund want to pretend the world was always meant to look like a massive shopping mall, and that climate damages should be evaluated on that basis. The truth is human rights guaranteed functional town halls in biodiverse nature. That is what was lost. That is how we measure the harm.
While charities were touting the benefits of saving a particular forest, ending certain diseases, or enlarging cages for laying hens, they were also ignoring the growth-based economic systems that were enriching their largest billionaire funders. Those same growth-based systems have undone three quarters of the climate crisis mitigation attempts made over the last several years.
That growth, from which these charities and their funders profited, now threatens millions of lives. That growth will cause more animal suffering and ecocide than many of the myopic, window-dressing campaigns these organizations ran and used for fundraising actually prevented.
The wealthiest and the charities want to pretend the world was always meant to look like a massive shopping mall, and that climate damages should be evaluated on that basis. The truth is human rights guaranteed functional town halls in biodiverse nature. That is what was lost. That is how we measure the harm.
But if the basic condition for any rule is that it be fair, and the first rule is that which accounts for our creation and development, e.g. the right of parents to freely have kids, then that rule must be made fair. And fairness begins with all children’s rights to a restored climate and ecosocial birth equity – true relative self-determination.
And we need not wait for governments to recognize and fix the issue. Many are using the correct baseline to cover effective reparations already.
Why don’t we have to wait?
Free people will condition compliance with the law on their being fundamentally empowered by it, and that’s physically impossible without treating an ecosicial fair start in life as the first and overriding human right, a right that includes actual participation in governance – being created for town halls, not shopping malls. Governments cannot assign property rights – to Musk or others – without first ensuring the human rights that justify governmental authority.
Today’s freedom fighters move beyond the outdated idea of national borders and fight for fundamentally liberating family policies that free us all ensuring climate and biodiversity restoration through birth equity entitlements that ensure parenting delay, a level playing field for all kids, and smaller or more eco-centric families.
Almost all talk of climate and inequity ignores family policy. Ask the questions that bring out the basic truth, and identifies who – fundamentally – owes what.
Exploitative growth policies have now put the planet and millions of lives in peril. The climate and inequity crises we face today were caused, fundamentally, because as we described in a recent Newsweek op-ed, world leaders did not ensure every child an ecosocial fair start in life as required by the Children’s Rights Convention.
Many, in the face of the climate and inequity crises threatening so many lives, are pushing women to have more kids in order to profit from the growth it would create.
They are doing so with no minimum safeguards for the would-be mothers, or their children.
Solution
Require disclosure of past, present, and future family policies. Break the fantasy.
Ask anyone claiming to do any form of good, whether they are conservative, liberal or otherwise inclined, how they have accounted for children being born into the world, and whether they are investing in those children to give them a fair start, or exploiting them for growth. Do they support family planning entitlements that ensure parental delay and readiness, relocation, leveling the playing field for all kids, and smaller or more ecocentric families? Or are they putting millions of innocent lives at risk?
By knowing the truth, we can move from a paradigm of family planning where would-be parents just randomly have kids to one where they are able to plan based on the incentivizing availability of resources that would give their kids an ecosocial fair start in life. We can take the money some made on a system that created lots of people for shopping malls and use it to fund a system that invests in kids to empower them in democratic town halls.
Those blocking this change operate from a false premise, and a misunderstanding of freedom. Any obligation to follow the law – including respecting property entitlements – is contingent on the basic limitation and decentralization of power, which has to start with being empowered to control the law and obligation in the way we are created and reared. The first obligation has to do with our creation, not our behavior, and is based on child ecosocial equity, not procreative autonomy. That means first moving towards hard metrics for inclusive democracy, biodiversity and climate restoration via an ecosocial human right to birth equity and development.
We can get there through a simple discourse around resources, or the physical constituting of just communities, the sort of cooperative family planning that can create the equitable power relations that must precede legitimate constitutions. If we take the idea of freedom or self-determination seriously, it has to occur primarily if not exclusively through the ecosocial conditions in which we are born and raised – through things like what the Children’s Convention promises.
Free people will recognize their obligations to such a mutually empowering system – true human rights – as overriding obligations to downstream or more traditional legal/political systems that do not derive all the way back.
Instead – according to one Nobel laureate – that wealth went to the top and created the climate crisis and vast inequity. Those continuing that system are skewing the baseline for climate reparations, benefitting themselves at cost to others, and putting millions of lives at risk.
What’s the biggest impact you can have to make the world better for all? It’s probably not what you think.
WHAT’S THE PROBLEM?
Food insecurity made worse by climate instability in Uganda.
WHAT’S THE CAUSE?
Wealthy nations disproportionately using resources that exacerbate climate change. There are specific men who benefit from this, and could save millions of lives by leading by example.
WHAT’S THE SOLUTION?
Distribution of seeds for fruit and vegetables, gardening for self-sufficiency and resiliency.
Opening basic bank accounts/saving plans for children at recognized financial institutions in Uganda.
Sensitizing local populations toward equitable family planning.
Moving wealth from the one percent wealthiest into family planning and ecorestoration entitlements as a form of climate reparations, and the first and overriding human rights. As described in Newsweek, we are unleashing underprivileged women’s and children’s rights with the Seeds for the Future campaign.
This moved wealth from women and children into the hands of relatively small group of men, and hid the way just family policies can override political processes and the entitlements they try to assign to the wealthiest and most powerful.
Who has more at stake in the act of creating a child – the adults or the kid? If we really think about it, children do. Adults can and do walk away from the children they create all the time. Children cannot walk away from their lives. So fundamental justice begins from the bottom, like democracy, with child-centric policies that include climate reforms, as described in this Newsweek piece. Prior political theories missed this, and did not account for our birth and development as the most basic power relations and obligations, because they treated power as flowing top down, not truly deriving from people and not about real relations to the extent they ignored ensuring the creation of persons in conditions – and with relations – consistent with minimums like the Children’s Rights Convention.
Not making this change and ending what we might call the #famscam means those least responsible for the crisis – including future generations – will be the most harmed. There is no greater injustice.
And because everything we do originates from the obligations to those around us, a process that is dynamic as persons enter and leave the world, we all have a choice to orient our lives from a relatively just, or child-centric, or unjust fundamental position – and to take direct action to liberate ourselves and others accordingly – as described in the Newsweek piece above.
Freedom begins with human rights and democracy, or the limiting of subjective human influence with objective norms. But because of our failure to orient family policies more around what children need than what parents want, this crucial limiting never occurred.
If you support a child welfare organization: Does it urge communities and parents to ensure minimum levels of welfare for kids, before they are born, in order to avoid less effective interventions later in life?
If you support an environmental or animal protection organization: Does it promote sustainable families, by far the most effective way to ensure a healthy environment, biodiversity, and less animal suffering?
If you support social justice organizations working on racial, economic, gender, or other forms of equality: Do they promote family planning policies that a) level the playing field for all kids so that they truly have equal opportunities In life, and b) advance gender equity by eliminating all forms of pronatalism, or pushing people to have kids?
If you support organizations promoting human rights and democracy: Do they promote family planning policies that will ensure each person has an effective voice in their political systems and is not lost in the crowd?
Greenwashing is generally when someone conveys a false impression or misleading information about how a company’s products or services are environmentally sound. Often it involves using terms like green, sustainable, humane, safe, or regenerative, etc. when those making the claim are on balance harming the environment.
One of the worst forms of greenwashing is called growthwashing, or hiding the impact of population growth when making a claim. When a company or nonprofit makes any claim related to the environment, check to see if they are accounting for the way outdated family policy, and the growth it creates, is undoing that progress. The claims usually omit the fact that population growth is undoing the what is being claimed, increasing demand and consumption in a way that is causing ecocide. That means those making the claims chose family policies that put more animals in factory farms, research labs, and puppy mills, ensured more children would be born and raised in conditions of abuse, suffering and deprivation, and policies that also ensured each person had less of a voice in their political systems – the systems many groups point to as the best source of change.
They growth many claims hid (and sometimes promoted) undid roughly three-quarters of the reductions in carbon emissions achieved since 1990 by increased efficiency and alternative energy production.
The growth in the chart below – at the most fundamental level – made some rich, some poor, and ensured the climate crisis would fall hardest on those least responsible for it.
I have sat and chatted with wealthy funders backing vegan food companies and nonprofits that made wildly misleading claims about the social and environmental benefits of the products, and who were making money on population -driven growth in markets. They knew what they were doing. I have seen national nonprofits bury research showing the harm growthwashing does, for fear of what their funders – many of whom are moving massive and unearned privilege to their rich white kids – would do if it were revealed. No only were they lying about the impacts of their philanthropy, but they were doing so in a way that harmed poor kids to enrich their own kids through growth-based investments.
TAKE ACTION: One way to address growthwashing is by requiring the Environmental, Social and Governance reporting requirements include family policies and their impacts. Urge the Biden Administration to require this.
*Note – we changed the content on May 11th based on advice from a social change leader urging that we should be less confrontational, and more collaborative. This was the advice:
I think framing John Raymond as a bad person who needs to have his money removed from him is not a angle that readers can get behind, since he is just doing what ambitious capitalist Americans do. Let’s face it, if most Americans were in John Raymond’s shoes, they would have done the same thing. The argument would be that John Raymond’s son or daughter will have to do differently, as our world cannot continue having this economic system that it does. And if Raymond loves his children, he will change his ways NOW since we do not have time to waste. So instead of us preying on John and taking things from him, framing it as John giving to the world by changing his ways because he loves his kid might be a better tactic.
And because he is in the business of fossil fuels, the wealth he “owns” was made at cost – through the climate crisis – to those in the future. The cost of much of his family’s wealth could be the death of millions.
John T. Raymond is great example of the climate trolley problem, recently covered in Newsweek. What if you could save millions by engaging one man? You can. John. T Raymond is worth hundreds of millions of dollars, money made by externalizing costs and risks on others.
One could argue that the positive law entitlements described in the first link of this paragraph must control in the absence of agreement otherwise, but unpacked that boils down to doing what the government – the men with guns – says, because it is the government. But that, as a reason, is the opposite of the ideal of American freedom.
This is all beyond liberalism or conservatism. We might equally target the lead at the New York Times – Joseph Kahn – for his role, his use of power, in holding up the family system that created John’s wealth.
TAKE ACTION: Contact John here through his agents, and urge him to do the right thing, or find and reason with him lawfully and peacefully in person and we will publicize your bravery. Free persons will limit and decentralize the influence others have over them (including climatological influence) by physically constituting just communities, relative to a neutral baseline like a restored climate and nature, such that we are not interfering with the freedom or relative self-determination of others.
John, using some of his wealth to give back to future generations and reorient what we mean by being free, could lead in this regard.
Want to be effective? Target other choke point high-value targets like Vladimir Putin (who financed western oil companies) or Joseph Kahn, lead editor at the New York Times, who urges women to have kids to in order to further grow the economy that is ensuring the climate crisis.
Fact: The New York Times spent more time reporting on falling fertility rates as a threat to economic growth over the past several years than covering either the beneficial impact of that fall on the climate crisis, or on peer-reviewed research that showed the change in fertility rates could catalyze fundamental changes in United Nations’ policy that could would have the greatest long-run impact on child welfare, inequity, and climate/biodiversity restoration.
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.Find and engage Kahn in person to #TellThe Truth and pay what he owes. Freedom entails converting the family norms that created today’s crowding shopping malls into policies that instead build democracy, converting concentrations of wealth and power into universal family planning entitlements that ensure all children have what they need to comprise town halls of self-determining citizens.
