That inequity, coupled with growth, has ensured that many will die as the climate crisis unfolds, with those who benefitted from the crisis using their wealth to thrive while the least wealthy face the greatest risks. The stakes for a correction are high, with those who benefitted from creating the crisis on the verge of escaping its harm.
A nonviolent revolution moving wealth from the top to fund all of this could ensure freedom for many.
In other words, we have many seeking liberties, and a small group blocking it. A peaceful revolution based on fair starts in life for all kids would by more evolved than other revolutions, happening at the true border of human power: Our creation and development, which is where true self-determination occurs.
Ask anyone claiming to do good to account for the fundamental creation of power relations, or how they are ensuring children are only born and raised in conditions that lead to democracies or self-determining persons thriving in biodiversity. We urge those making the claims and backing the policies that do not reflect this basic justice to instead choose 2) bottom-up investing in equitable family planning and child development entitlements that protect and empower children, and also restore democracies and biodiversity. This will save many lives, as child rights override economic growth, and ecocentrism replaces Anthro-centrism, as a baseline for policymaking.
Who is blocking freedom today?
If freedom is really about living some relative level of self-determination (relative because we are created by others), it probably requires creating and raising children in conditions that comply minimally with the Children’s Rights Convention and ideally in conditions of climate restoration and birth equity.
Why? By definition children can’t become relatively self-determining as they grow – rather than be determined, ecologically and socially, by wealthy and powerful others – without these conditions. If we are really self-determining and politically equal, that means we are invested in and empowered enough to offset each other’s capacity for self-determination equally as nations grow, so that each person can influence the rules under which they have to live and be free enough – as if in a functional constitutional convention – to look into each other’s eyes without fear or deference.
That is the beginning of freedom in terms of fundamental power relations, actual relations. If we don’t offset as our numbers grow, something is going wrong at the base of our democracies. This fact also gives us a qualitative basis for determining and meeting optimal world population ranges that track what many decorated theorists have suggested.
Why does this matter? Today most political systems do the opposite, urging women to have children with no minimum standards for care in order to create wealth for a few, at cost to values we all share – 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.
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 truly be constituting democracy, speaking the truth and logic of self-determination to power.
The border of freedom is not between nations, but in how we have and raise children. And becoming free involves empowering them, and each other, through birth equity entitlements, delaying having kids until parents are ready to parent well, and a universal ethic of smaller or more eco families.
Today it’s common for parents to have kids without thinking of how doing so impacts others’ children. That causes harm. Here are seven ways family planning today hurts impoverished kids, and how to end the harm.
4. All of the above limits the freedom, or the relative self-determination of future generations, the vast majority of persons who will ever live. Free people will fight to change this, and liberate others.
The fix?
We can end this harm by moving from top down and dysfunctional parent-focused planning towards child-centric or bottom up systems of Fair Start family planning. This move ensures climate and biodiversity restoration through birth equity entitlements that ensure parenting delay, a level playing field for all kids, and smaller more sustainable families. It’s fairness and freedom for all.
TAKE ACTION: SIGN OUR LETTER TO THE UNITED NATIONS URGING THEM TO DO THEIR JOBS, AND SECURE HUMAN RIGHTS, STARTING WITH CHILDREN’S RIGHTS FOR ALL FUTURE GENERATIONS.
There is a truth many are hiding via greenwashing and other moves, to avoid or reduce climate liability: The obligation to pay just and effective Fair Start family reparations.
The portion of wealth made at cost to this baseline is subject to that use now as the most effective form of climate reparations today, and many are leading by example, paying those costs to families to avoid million dying as temperatures rise. Government cannot assign wealth until they fulfill fair start obligations, the obligation that justifies their authority. Why? Law is a unique obligation because it can be coerced. After the Enlightenment and the development of democracy, that is so because we assume law represents the will of the governed. Logically then, the first obligation is to have and raise children in a way that actually makes that true.
We caused harm by using family policy to quietly convert public progress into private benefits, and must pay now, compensate the harmed and be free of that obligation. Some of those who benefited the most from not giving what they should have in the past are covering those reparations, via effective programs like Seeds, using hard metrics like the Children’s Rights Convention, climate restoration via birth equity, and Tucker/Dasgupta’s optimality.
These entitlements ensure parenting delay, readiness, reallocation of entitlements for birth and rearing equity, and smaller or ecocentric families that raise influential citizens – not economic inputs with little say over the rules under the rules they must live. We are not bound by written constitutions, but whatever justly constitutes our power relations to make those relations consensual, which comes very close to the ideal of decolonization, ensuring at the same time the protection of the most vulnerable: Future children and nonhumans.
If freedom always requires some level of self-determination, it would be impossible to ensure any version of it without birth and development conditions for all children that meet minimum thresholds so they can self-determine rather than be determined (e.g., climatologically) by others, and one test for whether that is occurring equitably would be treating growth as inverse to self-determination, relative to the absence of human power/nature (which requires, at a minimum, climate restoration). This formula leads to a free and equal future – Tucker/Dasgupta’s optimality.
Who we should be, via children’s rights, logically always comes first – and sets an overriding baseline for all cost and benefit analysis, including climate reparations. One’s positionality, intergenerational and otherwise, is key in this analysis. Money often controls how one sees this work.
Be effective.
Take Action: Find and “pull” high profile levers to be effective family role models by paying what they owe, and bend the arc of who we are becoming towards justice. How? Start by asking public figures claiming to do good in the world to actually tell the truth. Ask them to account for how the family norms, policies and relative ranking of obligations they never accounted for has undone those values and created the climate crisis and vast inequity.
Are the charities you fund undoing their own good? Find out before you give, and if organizations do not promote climate restoration via birth equity, and admit mistakes that led to the climate crisis, find out why. Where do your organizations fit in the timeline below?
Many other organizations are implicated in this scam.
But there is a fix.The Tell the Truth campaign.
Be effective.
Just ask the right questions of any person or group claiming to do good: 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 to make money?
Find out where the organizations – from foundations, to companies, to media, to political parties etc. – you support fit into the FamScam timeline below. Some will claim this is not their issue. How can we do anything that does not involve other persons, and the relationships created through family policy? We can’t. What those insisting on ignoring family reforms really mean is that they are choosing status-quo policies from which they benefit at deadly cost to others. They are choosing injustice, often to benefit their rich kids at cost to others.
2018: The Animal Legal Defense Fund files a federal suit to reverse this process, using an animal liberation or ecocentric standard for climate reforms. The claim is simple – to constitute a free and just society first requires climate restoration via a right to ecosocial birth equity, and this is consistent with guarantees of a right to autonomy in the U.S. Constitution. The suit calls for ppm reductions a third or more greater than the Paris Agreement.
2018-2021: The anthropocentric-based Paris Agreement on climate reform is seen to be a failure, as average temperatures as expected to well exceed 1.5C. At the same time the Fund comes under sustained pressure from Our Children’s Trust and many funders, both of whom embrace an anthropocentric over ecocentric policies for climate reform and climate reparations, to drop the litigation.
Spring2022: The Fund and other organizations quietly withdraw the litigation, choosing status quo policies that minimize climate reparations, and hide their priority over property entitlements, putting millions at risk while many in leadership at the organizations personally benefit. That same year WHO reports rising deaths from an accelerating climate crisis.
June 2023: Additional allegations about the Fund come to light in a long-form article, including an investigation into the Executive Director who withdrew the litigation and was subsequently replaced. The article affirms racism and other issues consistent with the organization’s refusal to promote racial equity in family and environmental policies.
July 2023: Fair Start Movement, in conjunction with the California’s Green Initial Public Offering (IPO), announces a pilot Fair Start Certification standard, and green/growth-washing filings targeting nonprofits, companies, foundations, etc. engaged in the FamScam for deadly harm caused to at-risk victims in nations around the world. The standard 1) uses international human rights law, not purely domestic standards, which is required for the climate crisis – but in a way that includes domestic remedies, 2) sets the highest standard for climate reparations rather than undercutting victims’ claims, 3) mandates direct family-based reparations, which have the greatest impact, and 4) corrects the baseline error or fallacy discussed above, including climate migration and pro-labor/equity employment policy changes.
The Fair Start certification program is a fundamentally a human rights certification. It’s standards track capital itself, and forthcoming state attorney-general complaints, Lanham and other tort litigation – tied to climate loss and damage cases – will target relevant green/growth-washing claim, in many contexts. Because green/growth-washing comes from business, charities, media, politicians, academics, etc., all of whom are responding to capital which is predisposed to green/growth-wash. Our lives and freedom are determined by obligation, and the dominant one is law. The fundamental creation of power/obligation relations – our birth and development – should have been determined over the last several decades by incentivizing resources that would have ensured birth equity for all children, and equal influence over the laws under which we must live. That never happened, but climate reparations are a chance to change.
TAKE ACTION: 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 to make money?
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.
We end the lies, and the harm they cause, by treating every child’s right to an ecosocial Fair Start in life – including climate restoration through birth equity – as the first and overriding human right under international law. This is not charity. This is justice.
This is mandating these outcomes as a human right:
George Monbiot tweeted recently that anyone claiming he and other leading environmentalists did not do enough to stop the climate crisis must not be familiar with his work. That’s a haughty claim.
Instead he chose to privilege his own biological children, relative to the scores of children dying in infancy in the Global South, the children whose climate now threatened by the system George upheld. Family planning entitlements could have avoided that. In practice George is anthropocentric, nor ecocentric.
George has long opposed family reforms that would ensure children are readied for the future, and instead chooses to use his platform to talk about food. He’s misusing his platform, doing what many vegan funders do – choosing to convert a miniscule fraction of the world to diets while benefiting from the growth that on balance does much more harm to animals.
He just assumed that family planning policies – all based on parental autonomy – were part of a menu of choices governments could use to improve outcomes. He never realized that no government is legitimate if it is not empowering its people, and that word “empowerment” is not rhetoric – it means something and is measurable. George may be an environmentalist relative to conservatives – but that is not the standard by which he should be judged. The Children’s Convention – or who we should be – is the standard, and George never advocated for ensuring all children birth and development conditions that comply with it – a move that would have blunted the worst of the climate crisis.
Unless someone is willing to claim that people should not be empowered equally to control the rules under which they must live, then they must admit they made a critical mistake by not using that baseline (seeing creation of persons as the first human border of human power and freedom, or compliance with the Children’s Convention that ensures minimum levels of welfare, equity, biodiversity through climate restoration, and participatory democracy) in the past, a mistake that harmed many.
TAKE ACTION: Urge George to admit this mistake and pay what he owes, or to defend his position in an online debate at Lewis and Clark University on Aril 18th, 2023.
There is a subtle a mistake in our thinking and work that is exacerbating the climate, inequity and other crises we all face today.
To ensure justice and freedom for all, our thinking and work would have to start with family planning policies that create birth and development conditions for all children consistent with the Children’s Rights Convention.
