Fair Start Movement

Category: Opinions, Essays & Perspectives

Do Children Deserve a Fair Start in Life? Why Equity Must Override Legal Formalism

Do you believe children deserve a fair start in life? Prioritizing that is the most effective way to ensure a better world.

The idea of an equity override is about putting fairness at the center when the strict letter of the law falls short. At the World Court hearing where climate change was described as an “urgent and existential threat, ”an equity override would allow the Court to look beyond technical legalities and focus on what is right and just, especially for those most affected.

This approach would empower the Court to prioritize justice over rigid legal formalism, reinforcing demands like those of Fair Start: that historical emitters must take the lead in mitigation and support. Equity overrides shifts the conversation from narrow legal obligations to broader moral responsibilities, centering principles like climate finance, loss and damage reparations, and Fair Start development pathways.

(For information on Fair Star’s planned research in the context of vulnerability theory, read more here).

For the Global South, this isn’t just about legal recognition–it’s about survival, dignity, and the right to a future shaped by justice rather than inherited crisis.

The Problem: Equitywashing and the Legacy of Power

Any value or impact claim made today is likely out of context because it ignores the radically unequal conditions children face at birth. This goes beyond greenwashing to a more fundamental or first order problem – equitywashing: the hiding of illegitimate, inequitable, and birth-based power relations that ensure defining standards like “green” in a way that enriches some at deadly cost others, and causes the climate crisis.

Equitywashing stems from the historic subversion of racial and social justice movements in the Twentieth Century through policies that privatized family planning and thus the fundamental creation of power relations, rather than making the process equitable or empowering. This sleight of hand and power grab enabled wealthy families and governments to assume authority and and entitlements without legitimacy. They redefined the idea of freedom from power as freedom from the coercion of the state rather than the ability to consent to any influence of others, and using unsustainable and inequitable reproductive rights standards designed to enrich some children at deadly cost to others. The move ensured most people would assume freedom was the absence of government coercion, when that power actually originated in the creation of birth and development positionality/power relations

Those policies led to systems of subjective valuation that hid impacts on objective values like infant health and equity, and ensured the world overshot key thresholds within less than a few generations leading to the climate and political crises we see today. Overshoot was thus essentially the illegal shifting of power.

The standards took the idea of bodily autonomy outside of one’s political equity (accounting for all measures determining that equity and the emancipation it implies), or one’s capacity to influence outcomes that influence them, disenfranchising people. For example, many companies and nonprofit organizations use cost/benefit business models that treat infant victims of the climate crisis as equally self-determining as those who benefited the most from it. These models ignore those infants’ overriding right to equity resources/reparations as the basis of political obligation and state legitimacy. Such frameworks are not just unethical, they are unlawful,, and potentially actionable under unfair competition laws.

This is not about “population control”, but empowerment: is your political “we” legitimate or built under the latter. Our supposed freedom becomes a mechanism for others’ wealth.

Here’s one example: under current legal frameworks, even the most liberal ones—a woman terminating a pregnancy is considered autonomous. Yet if she later dies in a heatwave because she couldn’t influence her government to act, what kind of autonomy is that? She wasn’t free—she was positioned that way by illegitimate standards that valued her life incorrectly–-she was treated as an economic input.

The victim would have been taught and likely assumed that she had just been unlucky in her being born without wealth, when in fact she would have had the right to derive her obligation to the political system and condition her compliance with the law, on the state reversing that state of affairs. She was never free because she was never physically empowered, and in that situation, there would have actually been little reason to follow the rules. What went wrong? She was slowly being disenfranchised. Her freedom was taken out of context, and valued incorrectly, as governments began their worth with the injustice of an illegal birth lottery.

The Consequences: Systemic Disenfranchisement

For decades equity fraud standards have treated children of color as worth exponentially fewer resources and more risk. In doing so, these standards gutted the very idea of equity—equal power to shape the political and economic systems that determine our lives

The Solution: A Preemptive Right to Equity-Reparations

NGOs should have always used measurable birth-based political equity as their guidestar, not sustainability – not sustaining the commercialized democracy approach that created Trump.

There is a big difference. Where else does national legitimacy, and the authority to entitle wealth, come from if not birth equity?

Here is one way to pivot to justice and a form of equity that overrides competing values given that the future majority need freedom, and outnumber those alive today:

fairstartmovement.org

Many are already taking wealth that externalized its costs onto children and using it to fund (via “legitimations”) collective family planning unions that expect government and the wealthy to treat their authority and entitlements as contingent on actually empowering constituents rather than exploiting them for more growth.

There is a preemptive right to equity-based reparations, payable to more collective systems of family planning that guarantee every child a fair start.. Governments must derive their authority and legitimacy from the measurable empowerment, or political equity (equal offsets, relative to zero), of its constituents. That means no child should be born beneath the “legitimacy line”—the threshold of self-determination and necessary resources.

The only viable reform tactic? Fact-value checking—securing public admissions of truth and formal commitments to change. This kind of discourse doesn’t just inform policy; it creates obligation. It builds the foundation for truly self-determining lives.

Free people follow laws only when the system empowers them. Any governance model that ignores how birth conditions impact one’s capacity for self-determination is not empowering—it is disenfranchising.

This is not about mere intersectionality. It’s about unifying obligation and asserting the preemptive principle: governments cannot unilaterally define empowerment. Empowerment is measurable. And a just society must begin by measuring what truly matters.

Obligation, not intersectionality. This is about preemption – governments can’t define what it means to be empowered. That is an objectively measurable thing.

August 13, 2025
How Fake Liberals Enabled Musk and the Climate Crisis And Why Real Change Goes Beyond Left vs. Right

In the mid-20th century, world leaders deliberately ignored the interests of future children and political equity when shaping reproductive rights. This likely stemmed from their unwillingness to invest in racially equitable birth, development, and emancipatory conditions.

Both left- and right-wing leaders defined power narrowly—as the violence of the state rather than any form of human influence. This meant that while people had the right to terminate pregnancies, they now face deadly heat waves without any real influence over climate policy or the means to afford air conditioning.

The failure to invest in equitable beginnings directly fueled catastrophic population growth and extreme inequality. These factors have caused significantly more harm than subsequent philanthropic efforts—many of which were motivated by the desire to exploit that growth—have ever managed to repair. Today, projections show that millions will die due to the climate crisis.

These omissions also led to a system that treats children of color as deserving only a fraction of available resources while exposing them to exponentially greater risks. As a result, billions today face extreme climate threats despite contributing little to the crisis.

The Hidden Harm of Inequitable Growth

We know that avoiding children’s interests has done more harm than good. By bringing them into conditions that violate their fundamental rights, we have degraded the very ecosystems they rely on for survival.

This inequitable growth has also weakened democracy, disenfranchising the average voter and obstructing their ability to stop these unfolding crises.

There is no way to assess value in the world without measuring it relative to infant health and life prospects, including self-determination. Infant health and development form the objective basis through which humans experience all value—serving as the foundation for health, equity, democracy, and other unifying ideals. It is the minimum standard for political legitimacy.

Philanthropy’s Role in Concealing the Problem

Many philanthropic efforts today avoid addressing how inequitable growth has reversed progress in infant development. Instead of fixing the problem, they obscure it.

By omitting discussions of birth conditions, these efforts conceal liability—and the right to self-defensive reparations—for the climate crisis’ deadly impact on millions of children of color, who are born into extreme disadvantage compared to the children of wealthy white funders.

The Solution: Measurable Standards for Justice

The most effective solution is to adopt measurable standards for true social justice and ecological restoration. Climate reparations must be directly tied to the self-determination of each child entering the world.

Because our positionality—our standing relative to others and the environment—is legally preemptive, we must take bold action to reclaim reparations and correct these systemic injustices.

A Call to Action

The primary function of law is to protect the most vulnerable. A system that fails to ensure basic welfare at birth is inherently unjust. If oppression begins at creation—through a status quo that denies minimum welfare standards for children—then dismantling that status quo requires an objective foundation, such as offset or zero baselines, to measure and enforce change.

TAKE ACTION: Support efforts at the United Nations to replace dysfunctional reproductive rights systems with Fair Start policies.

Click here to Donate to Fair Start Movement Campaign

March 25, 2025
What is Birth/Political Equity and Why Can’t We Be Free Without It?
The Cambridge Dictionary defines “equity” as the “value of a company, divided into many equal parts owned by the shareholders, or one of the equal parts into which the value of a company is divided.”

But why do companies and shareholders have the authority to own equity at all? There is also – earlier on – the equity one has in one’s democracy, or the share one has in their political system that makes one relatively self-determining or free, as opposed to being determined by others.

Generally, citizens receive their shares at birth, which vest when one becomes emancipated, and can vote.

And because persons are generally considered politically equal, a rule that means each person gets one vote, one’s share of their democracy, first and foremost depends on the number of other individuals in it. That is why many thinkers have been concerned with the way growth dilutes the average person’s share, a fact hidden by formulas like representative ratios that are not based on empowering those subject to the law by treating them as equally empowered, relative to a neutral standard.

But growth does not really account for other key factors that account for the equity, or level of influence, one has over one’s political system. What if that system has created macro changes in the environment so that persons are influenced, say by heat waves, against their will? What if one has a share, but because of structural racism and birth-based economic inequality, it really is not an equal share?

Equity matters because it gives us some control over the systems in which we live, and that equity depends on the number of people with whom we share those systems, the disparities in the resources each of us may have, and things like the way we impact the physical environment around us.

If one does not have equity in the political system, it’s hard to understand how they are free, or relatively self-determining. And there are hard parameters for what the amount of equity each of us deserves.

Establishing a preemptive standard for self-determination, and political obligation

One way to consider birth/political equity, or what might also be called relative self-determination and autonomy, is to contrast it with the concept of population in the field of policy, a concept used by some to disenfranchise many.

Partha Dasgupta is a brilliant theorist who has assessed optimal world population ranges. But, how do these persons actually relate to one another? What is the quality of those relations? How do we decide?

Fair Start’s main value-add to the world is to say that we should only bring kids into certain birth and development conditions, and that if we did that, the future would be better. And when we say “should,” we are the only organization in the world that has shown the “should” overrides all else because who we should be comes before what we do.

Our first hurdle in ensuring that “should” is to overcome the idea that having kids is just about the freedom of the parents. It’s also about the freedom of the child and the community they form. And that second freedom is unique because all authority to govern and to own wealth derives from the inclusion of those subject to the governance or wealth as free and equal persons, with one person/one vote or equal self-determination. But by 1968, governments had taken equity out of reproductive rights systems, so that inclusion never occurred. Instead, economic growth became the standard.

Freedom was taken out of context, and the creation of power relations was privatized using an illegal – exclusive from self-determining political processes – standard. Challenging that standard can be controversial. In fact, one former ally organization removed content referring to this approach over traditional considerations of population, through the lens of reproductive autonomy, around the time of their receiving a significant grant.

One way to tell this story involves abortion. The illegal standard, even by the most liberal assessments, treats terminating a pregnancy as autonomy for the woman, even if she dies months later in a climate crisis heat wave, because she could not afford air conditioning, could not influence her political system to save herself, and did not have levels of trust to access her neighbor’s air conditioning, and was positioned that way because under fake “efficiency” standards she was treated as an economic input, etc. She was never free because she was never empowered, and in that situation, there is little reason to follow the rules.

So just as Dasgupta has theorized optimal numbers, we can assess optimal qualitative relations, which we would practically create (whatever we do for equity after the fact) by ensuring no child is born beneath a particular line (or threshold: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/justice-intergenerational/ ). That line, in many ways, represents the border of human freedom, and we could implement it in current policy measures by preempting baby bonds and similar legislation, using AI to set the line around a host of parameters that try to zero out harm, including the harm of taking the value of autonomy out of one’s political equity.

Here are many useful measures to inform how we draw the line:
- Welfare, or https://www.unicef.org/child-rights-convention4
- Economic equity, or https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jel.20151206
- Political equity/democracy, which for now we can just say is not a larger congress but higher investments in kids to drag down the ratio: https://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/data-download/nations-population-growing-congress-standing-still-rcna103142. And a good goal would be for any nation to be able to engage in a functional constitutional convention at will with political equity measures like these https://academic.oup.com/ooec/article/3/Supplement_1/i262/7708076 and https://politicalinequality.org/2022/09/30/political-equality-as-measured-by-varieties-of-democracy-v-dem/ and https://dobetter.esade.edu/en/political-equality-democracy and https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/computer-science/political-equality
- Nature, which for now we can characterize as restorative climate or rewilding: https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR2442.html and https://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?handle=hein.journals/elrna51&div=8&id=&page= and the animal rights (relations with individuals in the nonhuman world) side of that: https://www.zerotothree.org/resource/how-to-help-your-child-develop-empathy/
- Successful parenting: And we can use child abuse/neglect and parental regret metrics for that: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37796606/ and https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/child-maltreatment
- True Efficiency: https://event.newschool.edu/babybondsandbeyond
- Trust: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5250644/ (though this measure (must be altered to account for empathy measures, and reasons not to trust those who reject fundamental fairness.)
Please consider making a contribution through Donate. Together, we can create lasting change to save next generation
March 14, 2025
A Story About Deadly Privilege: Why the World Needs Fair Start Reforms

Violating children’s right to a fair start in life, or what they are owed under the Children’s Rights Convention, has done more harm to public interest efforts than any organization has done good because 1) it has allowed inequitable growth – the greatest driver degrading the capacity of the earth to ensure the thriving of human and animal life. And 2) we all managed to do that, to exploit growth rather than invest in children, by treating children of color as deserving many fewer resources and much more risk.

We don’t get to justice from injustice, or earn obligations from others by ignoring your obligations to them. The solution? We have to accurately derive, state and comply with our first obligations: To actually empower children as they come into the world so that we live in a democracy, and not just an economy.

A friend and I consistently debate environmentalism, He was born into a wealthy, white family, and enlarged that wealth by holding real estate, the value of which increased because of growth-based demand in California. He has also invested in artificial intelligence systems that use illegal code that degrades democracy by promoting political obligation without assurances of political equity.

His wealth – made at horrific environmental cost to mostly children of color – allows him not to work, and to elevate his own children’s choices in life even as other children are born into early deaths. That wealth allows him to travel – even enjoying access to private surf locations local surfers could never afford. He was recently able to surf an artificial wave pool while traveling, which is an environmentally damaging system that allows wealthy investors to profit by replacing something natural, and at deadly cost to vulnerable communities.

In essence, he won a birth lottery that ensured him a life of ease fundamentally built on costs to others, and he favors conservative environmental nonprofits that do not interfere with the fundamental process that will allow him to ensure his eco-social privileges to his children.

When he learned about Fair Start he urged me to focus on getting officials to agree to the standards we promote rather than treat them as fundamental, because that immediately assumes their authority and his entitlements. He knows how to decoy from questions of fundamental entitlements, white wealth, and the first drivers of all outcomes towards existing systems of “justice” controlled by the same false assumptions that ensured the climate crisis.

I could be more culpable than my friend. I worked as a public interest attorney for both the federal government, and many nonprofits, all of which used the same illegal assessment and reporting standards (which in essence, are just forms of language) that caused the climate and political crises we see in the world today. I was using the same standards as my friend, standards enabled by removing political equity from reproductive rights regimes decades ago in efforts to subvert Twentieth Century racial justice movements, a move that more than any other one thing has exacerbated the climate and related crises we see today. In essence, by privatizing family planning, and at the most fundamental level, it created a false version of freedom – on that covered all senses of that value – by taking it outside of the context of one’s political equity or effective share in one’s political system.

That move obscured the most basic rule that determines whether we are free, in violation of every metric one can imagine, from protecting children and the environment to assuring each person some level of influence in their democracy.

In my public interest work I performed a horrible magic trick: I and others with influence used a fundamental set of assumptions, entitlements, and authorities – standards – in which I received a goodwill increase in my reputation from the work, more money in my accounts, and yet the vulnerable I claimed to represent are now all worse off.

And I mean worse off in terms of the measurably outcomes that underlie things like the laws that deal with children’s rights, animal rights, and civil rights. In all categories, the entities those laws seek to protect are worse off as heat rises, democracy declines, and the distance between the wealthy and impoverished widens.

My friend and I used the same standard that caused the crisis to hide liability for it. He is many things, many of them good. But this is the dilemma of the dysfunctional family system we have all inherited: He benefits at deadly cost to others, and chooses to continue that way in his life. That, in a fundamental way, is who he has chosen to be.

There is an ecosocial baseline children need to experience value, and their birth and development itself can alter that baseline in a way that harms infants’ needs. That baseline is the objective measure of our value, relative to others. There are no values outside of that system, given climatological impacts on infants, and infant/human health as a basis measure of all value.

Is there a fix?

Fair Start reforms begins simply with our admitting that the wealth in the world today was made through growth and at cost to children’s rights because for decades – in what we might call the #famscam – nations illegally evaded their obligation to only bring children into conditions compliant with those rights. Anything that starts with less is inherently oppressive and non-inclusive.

People, rather than documents, constitute nations as they are born, raised, and emancipated. We all have an overriding or preemptive right and obligation to take the wealth that was stolen by violating children’s rights and use it to fund family reforms, or the constituting of a just future defined by actual relations, not some abstraction.

That standard – a demand for family planning resources to ensure children’s rights, the right which are the most basic standard for who our species should be – is the key to mutual self-determination, or freedom.

Many entities in those nations most responsible for the climate crisis are using the same fraudulent impact assessment and reporting standards, ignoring how children entering the world has undone sustainable development impacts, that drove the crisis in order to hide their liability for the death of millions.

The charities my friend supports use those standards.

The Tell the Truth (TTT) Campaign: Justice starts with speaking the truth, and neutral fact checking from a zero harm baseline.

The Fair Start Tell the Truth campaign just asks one question of those like my friend.

If you have claimed to create market value, public interest impact, or to exercise authority as government officials or holders of wealth, please explain how were you accounting for children entering the world relative to their rights and especially to measurable levels of political equity? Just the same way we have equity in a company, we have equity in your democracy. Your share depends on how many others are in it, the varying levels of influence they have, the impact on the environment around the democracy, etc.

We ask this question in the Tell the Truth campaign: How did you account for these things when you made your claims of impact?

We can ask other questions. Would my friend be willing to say that his entailments to his wealth, and the authority of government to use force to protect him and it, derive from and are conditioned on ensuring birth equity for all children? Would my friend change the standards, and elevate birth equity above bodily autonomy and economic growth in reproductive rights regimes, if he could go back in history and do it? Would he choose to sacrifice some of his wealth in exchange for saving lives if he could go back and do it?

The answer is my friend and others were not accounting for such things, because no one ever told them that any measure of value and impact, of governmental authority and entitlement to wealth, starts with empowering people.

The Tell the Truth campaign goes beyond deferring to the will of others, and into the dignity of fundamental rights and obligations, and what we all owe. It allows everyone to relate their experiences to the reality of the most vulnerable: Children entering the world and impacting animals in the actual and first creation of unjust power relations, rather than relating those experiences to decoy points (politicians, celebrities, advertising, etc.) created by the powerful.

Fair Start is now pursuing legal action to ensure disclosure requirements – from companies and charities – detailing how growth has compounded children’s rights violations, increasingly degraded ecosystems, and ensured massive political disenfranchisement.

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 barriers who 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 that use the illegal standard that ignores harm to some children with actual harm to all children, 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.

We have a right to know what entities are doing to the physical capacity for all to self-determine. We are either included in a system of rights, which must include children’s rights as the base, or we are not. Those of us who are not could never justify why basic obligations are owed, given that they do not extend them to others. . The disclosures discussed above can ensure correctly assessing who chooses to be free or self-determining, and who chooses to exploit their positionality at deadly cost to others and thus fall outside of any logical system of liberating mutual protection.

Take action:

All should admit that our collectively not prioritizing a fair start in life for all kids has more harm to our values and missions than we have done to further them. And we should take action to reverse that mistake, and elevate children’s birthrights as the first and overriding human rights.

You can urge the United Nations to do so here.

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, clutching at others and dragging them down as they go. These free riders threaten us all. Why? It is physically impossible to be free, as in self-determining, if we don’t use accurately obligatory language – a new standard – to ask and then assure that persons are created, developed and emaciated in ways that offset equally their capacity to influence political systems equally, relative to a neutral position or objective standard for evaluation.

If we do not invest enough in children to offset their capacity to influence relative to zero, then political representatives and officials are not that at all, and constituents are not being empowered equally. The creation and entry of others does and should fundamentally shift our obligations, and freedoms. Without Tell the Truth, without this inversion of obligation in the language that inevitably determines how we relate to others, 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. And it’s very hard to change a future child’s prospects once they are born, so justice should focus on thresholds beneath which children should not be born.

Please consider making a contribution through Donate. Together, we can create lasting change to save next generation

January 16, 2025
Many Regret Having Kids. Why Not Fund Delay and Readiness Instead?

More and more people are coming forward to say they regret having kids, as many others struggle to keep up with the costs of parenting.

And yet governments and big business are working together to try to push more women to have kids in order to create cheap labor, more consumers, and dumbed-down taxpayers. Fair Start is fighting back, and taking the money they stole to make sure families work for families, not governments and business.

Funding every child’s right to a fair start in life – over competing rights – is the most just and effective solution to the many crises we face today. It has an exponentially greater impact than most other interventions, many of which are being undone as children enter the world without the things they need.

Ask anyone claiming to do good in the world how children being born without what they need undid the claimed benefit. Current policies have increased overall child abuse and neglect – including child torture and death, undone most of the efforts to mitigate climate change, degraded democracy and increased racial and other deadly inequities.

No child should ever be born outside a structure of debt/savings accounts that protect all children from the climate crisis by including and empowering them with their universal birthright.

Our obligations to fund that accounting come before anything we do because it ensures fundamental justice; it creates the inclusive and empowering “we” that comes before the things we do. Without this we can’t choose who has influence, and control, over us. We can’t be free.

TAKE ACTIONS: 1) Donate here to enable Fair Start to ensure parents are ready to parent before they have kids, 2) sign here to say you think Fair Start overrides barriers – like claims to wealth that could instead be used to avoid many from having kids before they are ready, and 3) urge any charity you support – regardless of the issue – to admit not prioritizing funded fair starts in life for all kids did more harm to their missions than they did good.

December 2, 2024
Guest Blog: The Strong Financial Drive for Profit is Causing Harm to People, Animals, and the Environment.

Guest Contributor: Ayubu Nnko, founder and CEO of Education for African Animals Welfare Organization, based in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

He is leading EAAW organization that focuses on animal issues while focusing focuses their hands-on efforts in Makalama and Iramba district,located in Singida Region because of it’s severity in rabies cases, number of less cared animals like dogs, cats, donkeys and low level of awareness on animal welfare in these areas. EAAW is also leading the Cage Free activities for layers in Tanzania while emphasizing and educating communities on plant diet for ethical and health reasons.

Some people with great financial ability, have been helping to develop the business of raising animals for food as part of their prestige, or because they have a great ability to buy food and products derived from animals. This has been done without considering the harm they cause. They may or may not be aware of this, although there are various reports that explain the effects caused by large animal farms, the environment and the effect on humans to a large extent due to its results.

It is saddening to see that animals suffer while others enjoy it. Animal agriculture produces 65% of the world’s nitrous oxide emissions which has a global warming impact 296 times greater than carbon dioxide. It causes harm to many innocent people while the powerful do not suffer from the harm they cause. They have the opportunity to create an alternative or to continue living while their actions cause pain to millions of people, especially the powerless.

Studies show that raising livestock for human consumption generates nearly 15% of total global greenhouse gas emissions, which is greater than all transportation emissions combined. This is the reason why it is important to insist that the majority of people abandon the use of foods and products derived from animals in order to reduce these serious effects on animals and the current and future generations.

According to the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), meat and dairy specifically accounts for around 14.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions. If the world is to meet its target of limiting global warming to well below 2C, some degree of diet shift will be necessary.

Organizations that support animal welfare work have a great responsibility to ensure that the owners of large farms raising animals for food and other products, are responsible for supporting campaigns to eliminate the use of animal products, but they also support animal welfare activities to avoid those great effects that affect the world now and in the future.

It is sad that the immense poverty that is caused by the imbalance of the economic opportunities is continuing to cause suffering whereby poverty, unemployment and ongoing climate change continue to be a hindrance in addressing animal welfare problems in Africa.

The Fair Start Movement is in collaborations with Africa based organizations through the Seeds for the Future projects in Uganda and Tanzania among others. They are trying to bring in the balance where women can get enough food for their families while serving for their children, and through the improved environment, animals can have enough food which is part of their welfare.

September 5, 2024
Why Should You Focus on Fair Start?

Measurable birth, developmental and emancipatory share equity / self-determination is the first human right.

This article explains what it looks like.

Consider also:

The right should have been used preemptively to override entitlements between 1948 and 1968 as the universal human rights regime was being implemented. Instead, wealthy white families and corrupt leaders privatized the notion of family freedom, taking it out of its environmental and social context, and elevating isolation over equity to protect existing entitlements held by concentrations of wealth and empower, and to ensure those entities would profit from growth.

Regardless, share equity / self-determination is the preemptive human right, and it is protected through constitutive discourse that accurately accounts for positionality, and a binary redirection of each of our abilities to influence the world so as to first empower the most vulnerable – future children and their nonhuman ecologies, which is the thing that makes the freedom of inclusive democracy and any obligation to follow the law possible.

An ecosocial fair start in life is also the standard for evaluating legal damages for the many crises unfolding today, including the rampant impact fraud hiding climate liability, and it is the preemptive standard for all law and policy to resolve the damages.

For most, fair start just means doing what they are doing, but orienting from a position where they do not benefit at cost – often deadly cost – to others, and undo the good work we otherwise do in the world.

TAKE ACTION: Urge the United Nations to back fair start reforms today.

August 23, 2024
Why Add Fair Start to Your Work? Why Tell the Truth That the Good We Claimed to Do Has Been Undone Because We Ignored Children’s Rights as They Entered the World?

Free persons will make their obligation to follow the laws of their nation contingent on a universal system of empowerment that tends to unite our values. But the chance to do so – and save millions of lives – is not something we ever talk about. Below are two moves you can make to change that.

We formed Fair Start because many of our members, in prior public statements about our work and successes, omitted facts that would have revealed that our claims were inaccurate, with the progress being undone by other factors. These were factors from which we were fundamentally benefiting at deadly cost to others, and our omissions hid life-saving entitlements. I personally omitted these facts – enriching myself, and other white families, at deadly cost to many black children.

Many others are doing the same.

Omitting positionality, and its costs for others

These omissions hid the full impact of our positionality, climatologically and otherwise, in contradiction of the values we all live (like evading deadly heat waves, being counted as an influential equal in politics, wanting at least the choice to have children in safe conditions, etc.) – including the value of self-determination. They also delayed and minimized climate reparations, skewing the baseline used to determine them. At base, the omissions hid that we were benefiting from coercive and obligatory legal systems the protected current entitlements without paying the correlative costs: Ensuring, at birth, children’s rights to political equity.

These omissions hid an obvious error in our thinking about what it means to be free, for nations to be sovereign and legitimate, and the role that laws around the world governing families play in this. The error combined with the climate crisis will mean the death of millions, many of whom could be saved if we admit and reverse the mistake.

Freedom or autonomy to do what you want always follows and flows from the freedom or autonomy of being physically included as an equal in your democracy. Simply as a matter of logic, who we should be comes first, and it derives – and should derive – from our creation and development, relative to others and our environment. Adults with human rights – our first and inescapable obligations to others – would first have had rights as children, rights which would have also defined the reproductive rights that should have guide our creation, so that we are not born into conditions and with power relations that functionally disabled the rights. This is not altruism, but a commitment to being truly free by first limiting who has influence over you, and the amount of influence they have, through family reforms that ensure children enter the world and are raised in conditions consistent with their joining communities of free persons.

Those who accumulated wealth because of a misplaced sense of freedom – freedom from environmental regulations, from being a responsible parent, from the requirement to not take what you did not earn – were just harming others, benefiting by placing the true costs on others. They were acting in a way that determined the lives of others using birth positionality and ecological impacts, not in a free, or relatively self-determining, way. They owe those costs to the future children they harmed.

Equity, or a share of control, as the first move towards freedom

Fair Start means children being born and raised with real equity – where each person eventually can offset the influence of others in a measurable way, and control through rulemaking who has influence or power over them. The first entitlements in any political system belong to would-be parents, not government or the wealthy. They belong to those plan families around child equity using seven concrete metrics based on values we all live day to day. The rules of creation are unique because the values become inextricable in the act, including the value of subjective choice.

The entitlements – structured around antiracism and decolonization – enable parents delaying having kids until they are truly ready, as well as having and raising those kids at a time, in a place, and with resources where those children can truly self-determine and thus legitimate the nations they form. As such we all have more of a right and responsibility to enforce those primary entitlements than the government, or any group, has to deny them.

Obligation to follow the law is conditional on being empowered through birth and developmental positionality. Dare anyone to logically explain to you how we get to a fair system with an unfair start – without the equity of an equal and influential role in making the fundamental rules that limit the influence we have over each other. We get to true reproductive autonomy – in the fullest sense where women who can terminate pregnancies don’t later die in anthropogenic heat waves – via birth equity for future children, without which autonomy becomes impossible.

Starting in 2004 I helped raise millions for animal charities by claiming to use the U.S. legal system to save the lives of animals. The statements I made carried deadly omissions, making them inaccurate. The focus on low impact micro victories hid that progress was being undone – and in deadly ways – on a macro level that was taking infinitely more animals than I was saving. Often we siloed off the issue of nonhuman rights because it was easier to raise money, avoid complexity, and evade additional controversy. Often we avoided the issue of birth equity because leaders did not want to examine their own children’s unearned privileges, or because they had quietly given up on their professed causes while retaining their positions and salaries. The combined impact of those silos, across the spectrum of public interest work, led us to the word in which we live today.

In truth that legal system – like almost all around the world – offered no real protection to nonhumans or the future children that will determine animals’ lives, because it did not financially entitle would-be parents to plan well, in an equitable way that will not harm both the children and the nonhumans. The system, like many others, was on balance – at a macro level – eradicating animals and exacerbating the climate crisis for the most vulnerable humans in what is accurately described as racist ecocide. Through my omissions I hid the error described above and the claims many have to reparations.

This, along with the withdrawal of litigation meant to begin to reverse the error described above, helped many wealthy funders backing those and other organizations evade or reduce liability for the climate crisis. I hid how the legal system was undermining its own legitimacy – acting like a one-sided social contract, robbing future children of their rights to minimum levels of welfare, equality of opportunity, and safe and natural environment, and an equal and influential voice in governance while obligating them to follow laws that protected property rights, for example.

The deadly costs of what is not said

I benefited from hiding the true nature of what I was doing: Fundamentally placing deadly costs on children that undid what I was claiming to do for animals, both socially and ecologically, children like Anthony Avalos who was tortured to death by his caregivers, and Mbabazi Judith, who died in eastern Uganda of the malaria the climate crisis is making more deadly. The system from which I benefitted systematically disenfranchised and treated them as economic inputs – as means, rather than as empowered ends comprising democracies.

Theirs and millions of children’s deaths derived – fundamentally – from a system that benefits me and others by protecting current entitlements, allowing us to determine the lives of others, rather than ensuring the primary parental entitlements that help constitute free nations. It could have been any of us that died in this way, and justice starts with being empathetic enough to avoid these situations by exploiting others as means as they enter the world. Equity does not conflict with autonomy if we ensure it precedes it between birth and emancipation, but the human brain struggles with time frames this large, and many have taken advantage of this fact.

Take Action:

Some are beginning to fix this deadly problem with two simple moves: 1) Making the same admission we make here and urging others to do likewise, moving towards the truth and the language of dynamic and conditional political obligation. Find specific and public statements they have made, and engage them.

Then 2) urge them to begin modeling the changes above, including giving equitable, family planning entitlements as climate reparations, and as our primary obligation even before taxes, to ensure governance and obligation actually flow from the governed. Engage the adult children and employees of those who should be modeling this change the most, and understand what’s at stake.

Freedom, or self-determination, by definition first flows from the restoration of nature (a baseline defined by the relative absence of human influence) achieved via delayed parenting, which is entitled through birth and developmental equity funding pegged inverse to wealth. This is owed as the first and overriding human right, and it allows each to be relatively free at the most fundamental level from the ecological and social influence of others – and thus capable of constituting a system of legitimate governance.

This process does not need violence because unlike our current system it is politically inclusive, or constitutive. All rules should be fair, and that which determines our creation is the first rule. That rule contains an inescapable logic: That if government truly derives from the governed, young women would have justification to obtain funds for life-saving equitable family planning entitlements – to give all kids a fair start in life – and actually constitute legitimate nations and become a “we,” more than the state would have to use violence to keep that wealth where it is.

For example, here we would want a United States Senator to alter and complete legislation for “baby bonds.” In reality, all of his authority is premised on the change because without it he’s not really representing democratically empowered citizens. The same could be said of courts’ authority to judge the legality of protests to constitute a better future. To ignore these limits is to focus on the symbolic, and not the real. The United Nations could easily (and really should) say so and make the first move in taking human rights seriously. There is no inclusive “we” from which to coercively assign property or other rights without this primary process.

This is social change through role modeling. It can actually help evade acts of mass violence – long run – from the many who feel disempowered. It can do so by revealing those who truly benefitted from the political process, and how to reverse it peacefully.

All of this is not a matter of academics or research. It’s just a factual history and a action commitment to not being obligated to follow the laws of nations that do not empower all members in an equitable and measurable way.

Join the Fair Start Tell the Truth and Act Campaign with the two moves above and bend the arc of our species towards a better future.

April 23, 2024
Governments and Other Institutions That Kill Their Innocent Citizens Become Illegitimate. Why Is the Climate Catastrophe Any Different, and What Do We Do About It?

According to a growing body of peer-reviewed research, systems that provide no minimum protections for the most vulnerable, protections like equitable birth and development conditions for children and thus protections for the environment they will need, lead to the supporters of such systems contradicting themselves, are inherently illegitimate because they are not inclusive and reflective of their subjects, and thus cannot generate an obligation to follow their laws. By definition, freedom among equals means birth and development against ecocentric or natural ecologies in conditions that ensure equity of opportunity and an influential voice in deciding – and thus legitimating – the rules under which one must live.

What is power? How we think about freedom depends on the answer. For many years political theorists defined power in terms of governments, who have exclusive authority to use violence to enforce their will. The powerful could thus be the government, or those who could invoke the power of the government through the legal system – the wealthy, for example. Freedom was thus defined as resistance to such power, the right to bear arms against an oppressive state, for example. One sees this notion – of resistance to the edicts of others and to do what one wishes – in the way many discuss and practice freedom, especially conservatives or libertarians.

But the climate catastrophe has shown that definition of power to be a failure. Expected changes in world temperature are likely to kill more people than those killed in the history of oppressive governments. The crisis has taught us that power is any form of human influence. That, in turn, must change our view of what freedom means. Freedom – or to be specific, self-determination, derives from conditions of birth and development that ensure the capacity for us to choose who has influence, including climatologically, or power over us.

Read more in this recent Law360 article on the subject.

Freedom may now best be conceived as the conditions of influence (cask or other incentives, entitlements, coercion, renown, group belonging, the inclination of humans to imitate one another to ensure group safety, etc.), and polarity, where organizations of free and equal persons can form, dissolve, and reform — more like bubbles than an extended organizational chart. What would it take in the creation and development of persons to ensure they acted as free and equal persons and were able to look each other in the eye without fear or deference – in the formation of groups, the state of affairs implied by the “We” at the beginning of the U.S. Constitution.

What would it take to ensure that across generations we were not imposing our ecological and other costs on future generations? Given that self-determination by definition requires birth and development conditions ensuring all children have an open future, that is where we start – with the right of young women to family planning incentives/entitlements that would enable ecosocial birth and developmental equity, ensuring they have any children only at a time, place and with resources that ensure those children will thrive based on very specific metrics, which would also constitute the most just form of climate reparations. And because being free in this sense is constitutive, or comes first, those women would have claim to such resources that overrode the existing property rights of extreme wealth made at cost to future generations.

A growing body of peer-reviewed research has shown the basis of deadly climate greenwashing – which is killing millions – and originates with child welfare policies that illegitimate political systems because they ensure no minimum threshold of self-determination or freedom. These policies literally set inequitable standards killing millions of those least responsible for the crisis. And those backing them are choosing to benefit at deadly cost to others, when there are clear alternatives – like moving wealth through externalizing deadly costs into the hands of young women able to save many lives. Who we should be, the “ought” of Children’s Rights and the hard metrics of being a legal person as opposed to an economic person, logically always comes first – before what we should do, and the allocation of other entitlements.

These policies are illegitimate governance because our generations can’t get the benefit of future generations’ political obligation, not to violently target us for reparations required by the deadly climate catastrophe for example, because we never met our obligations to them. At the very least young women demanding birth equity reparations would have greater right to use coercion to protect their children than the state would have to defend existing property rights that harm their children. That said, nonviolence is more effective in achieving justice, and there are dozens of ways to make the transition to true freedom.

Despite the many reasons to understand power and freedom in a fully comprehensive way, you will notice concentrations of wealth and power pushing the old view – usually because it benefits them. As a prosecutor I defined power as the authority of government because that was the form of power I wielded. Look at how the New York Times has of late dedicated its reporting to covering governmental officials who hardly represent their constituents in a serious way as the locus of power. To the extent it covers parents – the fundamental sources of authority if government derives from the people, its focus has been on reduced fertility as a threat to the growth-based state.

Instead, the transition towards real freedom means choosing not to back illegitimate political systems that benefit some at the deadly cost to others, and we can test who is making which choice with these easy questions:

What are you doing to ensure the conditions in which children are born and raised, including their environment and role models, are being improved so as not to undo the benefits of the work you discuss? Does the entity you are asking have any minimum protections for children and animals when you look at their actual approach to family planning policy? Will they admit that their failure to ensure such minimums through a correct system of entitlements, historically, is now killing millions of those least responsible for the climate catastrophe?

January 17, 2024