The population-driven climate crisis will do more harm to wild big cat populations in the long run than the Act can do good. Although the act protects current species of cats from being unnecessarily overbred and domesticated, it does not address threats that still exist through the interactions humans have with the environment, as shown by the infographic below.
Changing these interactions begins with us. Truly liberating big cats means reversing their slide towards extinction by promoting and funding incentives that create a universal ethic of sustainable and economically equitable human families, loving families that build empathy in children.
Let’s not undo progress for animals with growth-based policies, pushed by some animal advocates. Let’s not trick ourselves – growth is undoing progress.
Don’t confuse chaos with freedom. Truly free people will fundamentally limit and decentralize the power (including subtle power like climate emissions, the impact of bad parenting on communities, massive disparities of wealth, etc.) others have over them, and by all means effective. They will condition their obligation to follow the law on their actually being empowered, assessed via a simple test, in functional democracies.
Every week parents are arrested for severely abusing their own young children, in some cases torturing them. In news stories, you may never connect that to the fact that scientists have now determined the world has completely failed to reach its goal of avoiding at least a deadly 1.5C temperature rise due to the climate crisis.
But the truth is the stories are connected.
These problems both flow fundamentally from family policies that do not comply with the Children’s Rights Convention, assuring children – especially infants – the eco-social conditions they need to actually constitute just and free communities in the long run. The Convention functionally requires a natural environment and parents who are ready before they have kids. Nations ignored these requirements in family planning policies to make money by exploiting people as economic inputs. And many charities went along with the lie, often because funders pressured them to.
We are fixing that, targeting unjust concentrations of wealth that formed because of the failed family policies, the ones that allowed massive population growth rather than investing more in women and children.
TAKE ACTION: URGE EXXON TO PAY WHAT IT OWES TO SOLVE THE FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEM DRIVING SO MANY CRISES.
Here is a simple test for whether any particular person, corporation, nonprofit, politician, etc. is making the climate crisis worse by adopting misleading climate policies, especially as we account for how people will actually experience the crisis:
Do you or they support simply ensuring that children are born and raised in the eco-social conditions promised to them by the Children’s Convention, so that we can actually constitute just and democratic communities?
Let’s keep this test true and simple: People who support policies that do not include climate restoration and #birthequity are making the climate crisis, and how people experience it, worse. Consensual governance and freedom, where people actually consent to the influence of others, are impossible without these things.
What’s an alternative? Truly free people will fundamentally limit and decentralize the power (including subtle influences like climate emissions, the slow dilution of democracy, the concentration of wealth, power and control in a few, and the impact of bad parenting on communities) others have over them. They will not allow themselves to be subject to political systems, including taking property rights the system may give, where they are not democratically empowered.
These reforms correct something called the constitutive fallacy: Ignoring the way our creation and development does and (assuming we use baselines like the Children’s Rights Convention) should – fundamentally – constitute actual power relations, between humans, and between humans and the nonhuman world or nature upon which freedom is based. Each person chooses to commit or evade the fallacy in every normative (or “should”) claim they make by accepting or rejecting particular forms of fundamental political obligation like written constitutions and choosing to orient from a relatively just or unjust place.
If they did not the idea that governmental authority derives from groups of people, the authority of which depends on the individuals in those groups, would make no sense. This is about the creation of power relations – or constituting – and relative self-determination more than “population.” It’s about treating every child’s right to a Fair Start in life as the first and overriding human right so that we can actually – in terms of our fundamental power relations – be fair and thereby free.
Given that the majority of people will be those who live in the future changing behavior, might be best thought of as having and raising kids well. What the heck does that mean? In the Twentieth Century, based on significant developments in the fields of child development, civil society came largely to agree – in what would eventually be called the Children’s Rights Convention – on the birth and development conditions children deserve. These resources would create a world we should all value – filled with nature, equality of opportunity, and democracies where each person would matter.
What went wrong? Governments and big businesses colluded to reinterpret human rights regimes to ensure population-driven economic growth, rather than child-centric family planning consistent with the human rights regime. That move – over time – created the world we live in today – beset by the climate crisis and massive inequity. The men that engineered this scam robbed us of true/participatory democracy, and the freedom of consensual governance, in order to build concentrations of wealth and power.
They used poor family planning and growth to slowly push and crowd people out of town halls and into shopping malls, robbing us of our freedom.
We might be inclined to resist such forms of protests because the majority of people alive today would support them, and there are good reasons to defer to the majority. Given that the majority of persons are actually those vulnerable-to-us people who will live in the future, and this work would be saving them from the tyrannical minority that are those people alive today inflicting harm on the future, you should think the opposite.
We can do this work because being free, in terms of who we are, precedes being free in terms of what we do – including forming governments to assign property to wealth that was made by externalizing costs, by not giving mothers and kids what they need.
We can think of the child described above as we engage them – and anyone who opposes giving kids a fair start in life – for they are fundamentally to blame for what happened to that child. They reject a change in the way we plan families that would have prevented the child’s death, in order to ensure and exploit growth.
Children are the future. Isn’t that what everyone says? It is a lovely sentiment. Sadly, very little is done to secure that future. Without a fair start to life, millions of children are doomed. This is where Fair Start Movement comes in.
We believe that all children deserve the same rights; they should all be born at the same starting line. This line is more of a zig-zag, though, as those in power invest in keeping the wealthy at the top and everyone else to fend for themselves. And as we have seen, this method is only making things worse for the rest of us.
Fair Start Movement focuses on two things: (1) push for family planning practices where would-be parents wait until they are mentally, emotionally, and financially ready to have children, (2) educating people on why sustainable families are better for the individuals and society as our planet’s resources are depleting quickly, and (3) advocate for policies that invest in programs and services that help all children, not only those born into wealthy families.
For as long as I can remember, the message has been “having children is your purpose, and the more children the better!” I made a choice of not having children because honestly, I do not want to bring a child into the world as it is, especially with the environmental issues we face. But there are millions of families out there who will continue to have children and we need to change things for them.
What we have been doing as a society is not working. When one of the wealthiest countries in the world, with around 720 BILLIONAIRES, how can we justify unhoused, starving children? Things need to change.
Lee Raymond may have done more to exacerbate the climate crisis than any other one person on the planet. His active burying of the truth of the emerging crisis and how Exxon was responsible stands out among those who have done the greatest harm to our environment.
Using concentrations of wealth and power to fund family reforms is the most just and effective way to respond to the climate crisis, restoring our environment and building resilience in children at the same time. This would also help guarantee the right to a healthy environment, now recognized by the UN. An ecosocial Fair Start in life for all children is the first human right, and we can ensure it by all means effective. Why? We are before we do, so true justice comes in creation; it is existential.
As the climate crisis unfolds it should be obvious to everyone that the many large environmental organizations who claimed to be protecting our environment have failed.
What is the fundamental source of the climate crisis?
These are the facts:
More sustainable families are the most effective way to reduce the impact on the climate and animals. Read more.
Fair Start family planning is the most effective way to simultaneously: reduce intergenerational inequalities, strengthen democracy, and preserve a healthy planet.
The proven impacts are 10 to 20 times higher than traditional downstream attempts to protect kids, animals, and the environment. The model converts poor and unsustainable family planning into equality, opportunity, democracy, and nature.
The alternative is the international law regime set up after World War 2, the one designed to prevent nations dominating one another. That regime is just missing one piece: A just system of family policies that would prohibit the growth, and exploitation of future generations, the Benzel and Kotlikoff article highlights.
A just families system would replace growth-based national dominance with the goal of ensuring equitable families that raise children consistent with the Children’s Convention. That would move us away from a superpower, and towards the ideal of human rights: Sustainable and participatory democracies composed of people who truly have equal opportunities to thrive. Rather than vie for supremacy, we should urge the United Nations to do its job and help change family systems to create that future.
Matt Ball, longtime activist, husband, father, and early member of the Fair Start Movement, recently published his third book, Losing My Religions. A mix of memoir, essays, musings, photography, and travel log, Losing tells the story of Matt’s efforts to make the world a better place, while offering a fearless analysis of his many mistakes.
As one reviewer put it:
[H]e plays with quotes, stories, and a wily, at times even serious irreverence. He lets us into the world of his own joys, realizations, and daily suffering. Family, religion, consciousness, health, life, reality, and everything are given a series of pulsating reflections and staggering vulnerabilities that are hard to put down.
From a professional full-time writer:
A tour de force! The narrative and visuals (everything from Death Valley to chocolate crinkle cookies) are so lively. It’s really unlike anything I’ve read before.
And from Australia:
It’s only just after 7 am now and I read the first 70 pages. It’s very unusual writing and I have found it efficient in that I couldn’t put it down – even though I repeatedly thought I’d only just read one more page.
The ebook version is free; you can get the files and learn more at LosingMyReligions.net
Matt and Anne’s child Elwen, many years ago.
Here’s an excerpt from his chapter, “God, the Greatest Murderer of All Time”:
Abortion is awesome. It isn’t icky. It isn’t a “necessary evil.” It isn’t “I personally oppose abortion, but….” It isn’t something non-politicians should shy away from. Anything that can help women have more control over their reproduction is awesome. Anything that can help make every baby a wanted baby is awesome.
Just consider what the other side is saying: They, through the powers of the state, want to control when a woman can reproduce. They don’t want every child to be a wanted child.
We want every child to be a wanted child.
Think about it: take two pills and expel a tiny clump of cells with less sentience than a cockroach. The world is spared yet another unwanted child, and on average, poverty is reduced. The woman regains control of her life, and in the future, can bring a wanted and provided-for child into the world.
And from “Fight the Power Part 1: To breed or not to breed:”
Of the people you know well, how many were provided a happy, healthy, balanced, lie-free, totally-loved childhood? (Religion counts as a lie.)
And many parents are far less happy than you would think (or than they will let on). As is probably obvious, parents feel internal and external pressure to sing the praises of their children. But simply Google “Are single people happier?” or “Are childfree couples happier?” and you will find seemingly endless studies showing that having kids is definitely not the key to happiness. Doing this search while I write this, the top results say, “the data suggest single people are happier and more satisfied with their lives than commonly believed,” and “Couples without children have happier marriages, according to one of the biggest studies ever of relationships in Britain. Childless men and women are more satisfied with their relationships and more likely to feel valued by their partner.” And this happiness is in spite of our genetic and familial and social pressures to breed.
If you think your life would be empty without a child, your life has bigger problems than a child could or should fill. If you think your life won’t be full without a child, are you sure you want to fill it with pain, screams, worry, regret, poop, worry, anguish, apprehension, guilt, and then a topping of worry?
Matt and Anne.
…
I truly think that there would be a lot more happiness if fewer people got married and many fewer people had kids. Even before the pandemic, this seemed to be happening with folks currently in their twenties and thirties. So maybe more kids these days are breaking free of the pressures and doing what’s right for their own life satisfaction.
And “Test Your Marriage”:
Getting “fixed” was yet another example of how society promotes procreating. As happened to all my friends who got vasectomies, I was questioned very seriously if I really wanted this. (YES.) (Although it was uncomfortable, and seeing smoke rising … down there … well, there were moments….)
But no one grills you about bringing an entirely new person into the world. No one questions you about that decision at all. That. Is. Fucked. Up. Reverse that – make everyone who wants to breed pass an inquisition and let anyone who wants a vasectomy get one free and without hassle – and the world would be a vastly better place.
If you’d like to learn more from Matt’s “half-failed life of airplanes, agony, animals, basketball, bliss, cameras, chaos, cops…,” and discover how his life’s lessons led him to realize the importance of the Fair Start Movement, please check out LosingMyReligions.net. But be warned, you might have this reaction:
I am riveted. For the next 36 hours, I want to curve myself into a comfy chair and read every word, every quote, gaze at every photo…and then read it again.
