The Fair Start Movement begins simply with the fact that wealth in the world today was made through unsustainable and inequitable growth, at cost to children’s rights, in what some call the #famscam.
In the scheme, nations illegally evaded their obligation to only bring children into birth and development conditions compliant with children’s rights and with the measurable political equity from which legitimate governance derives.
They chose a form of unsustainable reproductive autonomy that was akin to the racist separate but equal scams, but one which will kill far more persons. Governments said we were equal and then ensured some children had nothing and others everything under the lie that parental autonomy could exist outside of political equity.
The many funders that framed and defined social justice over the last several decades never created real value in their vast wealth, relative to an objective standard like a healthy climate. Instead they first used inequitable family planning that benefitted their own families, ensuring for others dismal standards for child development and education, thereby violating their own professed values (like animal protection and bio-diversity) by treating people as economic inputs rather than citizens.
For years activists with Fair Start – in their prior employments – were urged by vegan investor-funders to focus on food reforms, the benefits of which – for animals and humans – were being undone by money-making growth.
The results were a catastrophic increase in overall demand and emissions.
The investor-funder’s kids are now thriving. More vulnerable children are now dying from the increased heat, disease, flooding, and fires.
They did this while benefiting from the appearance of inclusive and functional democracies where the average vote was actually being diluted to uselessness. A system of fundamental entitlements likely to kill millions of innocent persons, and which could instead have achieved better outcomes by actually investing in children, is generally considered a failure.
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In the middle of the Twentieth Century world leaders evaded future children’s interests and political equity as a basis for reproductive rights, mostly likely because it would have required heavy investments in racially equitable birth, development, and emancipatory conditions.
Leaders on the left and the right conflated by defining power very narrowly – as the violence of the state, rather than any form of human influence, so one would be free to terminate pregnancies, only to now die in a heat wave because one had no influence over climate policy, and could not afford air conditioning.
The lack of investment directly enabled catastrophic growth and massive inequality, which measurably did more harm than subsequent philanthropic efforts, all tainted by the desire to exploit the growth, did good because the outcomes today involve projections of millions dying in the climate crisis.
We know that this did more harm than good because evading children’s interests brought them into conditions that not only violated their rights, but thereby degraded – through things like extreme heat – the capacity of their ecologies to support what all children need. That inequitable growth simultaneously disenfranchised the average voter, seeding vast political inequity and blocking their ability to halt what was unfolding.
There is no way to assess value in the world that would not be measured relative to basic infant health and life prospects, including self-determination, because infant health and development is the objective basis through which humans experience all value, and the fundamental baseline for unifying values like health, equity, democracy, etc.
It is the minimum measure, or floor, for political legitimacy.
Much of the philanthropy we see today, which avoids discussion of how inequitable growth easily reversed infant development outcomes, does more to hide this problem than fix it. The omission of information on child entry conditions hides liability – and rights to self-defensive reparations – for deadly climate harm to millions of children of color who are born with a tiny fraction of the wealth of white funders’ kids.
Humans need law primarily to protect the vulnerable amongst us, so there is no law, or obligation to do what others say, in a system that starts with punching down on the most vulnerable. And if our oppression comes in our creation through a status quo that does not ensure minimum levels of welfare for kids at entry, it then seems impossible to see and remove without an objective touchstone – like offset, or zero, baselines –that change the status quo.
This year Fairstartmovement.org will engage in the Tell the Truth campaign, urging prominent social justice figures to admit failure as the climate crisis accelerates and kills millions.
At the base of all of the failures is their not having accounted for children entering the world, or the actual creation of power relations, when they urged reforms. That factor was undoing, every day, the benefits their reforms would have ensured. Instead, that factor resulted in the enrichment of a small percentage of mostly white families at deadly cost to countless families of color.
I and many others were encouraged to ignore that issue in our activism, for decades, so that the wealthy funders could take advantage of the growth and inequity driving the crisis.
This is not a debate. Tell the Truth means just urging key figures to disclose how the values they championed were undone – over the last three years – as children entered the world without the resources they need, and in ways that degraded their ecologies and disenfranchised them politically.
For example, we can urge Peter Singer to disclose how his animal liberation work, from the numbers of animals suffering and general impacts on welfare to daily violations of rights, was undone in the last three years by growth that benefitted his backers.
Ask him to relate the numbers to zero baselines that account for actual harm including the value of self-determination, like these, and not projections for food investments.
If we account for the climate crisis the numbers – in both fields he championed – will show him enriching vegan food and other investors, not benefitting animals or vulnerable humans. It’s not about intent. Yes, Exxon and others’ supply-side work drove emissions, but only in response to the same growth-based demand that Singer and others enabled (even if done so simply as a matter of negligence). And Exxon never claimed to be liberating animals.
Animal rights claims are the most falsifiable when we run the numbers. Is hype and a questionable legacy more important than staving off deaths in the crisis?
This goes beyond greenwashing towards fraud, and as deaths mount legal systems are evolving to prohibit drivers of the crisis like moving wealth in deadly ways through omissive messaging.
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What the United Nations calls greenwashing begins as a much more deadly form of entitlement fraud. Wealthy families are literally using wealth made at deadly cost to the values they claimed to be protecting to drown out the voices of the most vulnerable.
To avoid black birth equity, the mostly white families that designed the near-universal reproductive rights regime bypassed equity entirely when defining reproductive autonomy, such that one can only use a thin form of autonomy to terminate their pregnancy, only to then die in a white-wealth-driven heatwave months later because they cannot afford air conditioning.
This move, of hiding the diminution of equity, relied on a sleight of hand: Defining freedom from power around the authority of the state to use violence, rather than broader definitions that would have captured all entitlements, like those between child and child-maker. The conceptions relied on almost all white and male theorists who abstracted far away from their own birth positionality, leaving us with abstract theories of liberation that would enable a climate crisis deadly to mostly children of color.
Crucially,Robert Nozick’s use of the fallacies described in this letter misdirected liberal political theory
Hans Kelsen theorized of a norm from which all others derived, but never included ecosocial, birth-based share equity in one’s democracy as the obvious most basic ought behind his positivist vision of law.
John Finnis envisions a list of natural rights, which does not include birth equity, and certainly not as foundational.
Cass Sunsteinchallenged common views on baselines, but never asks which generational, racial, national etc. position one should be in while assessing the idea of baselines, a question that seems determinative of millions of lives at risk as temperatures soar.
Contrast with these the work of Dr. Gabirel Bubu Ncha on early democratic women’s circles. WhileJoel Feinberg certainly envisioned every child’s right to an open future, and David DeGrazia comes very close to fairness in creation at the end of Creation Ethics, Ncha’s work on collective planning allows would-be parents to better ensure it.
These theories, minus the last two, are based on the misconception of existence without full positionality, and the abstraction of morality away from the creation of relations at birth. This thinking created decoys, like performative civil rights in employment or voting, masking birth inequity that would allow white wealth built on a lie of unsustainable growth. The theorists generally stopped short of requiring governance by free and equal persons because they did not derive an obligation to follow laws back to the measurable empowerment of subjects as constituents. They all seemed to focus on what the rules should be, not the emancipation or capacity to be part of a rule-making process, probably because they assumed capacity that given their positionality.
These families and their concentrations of wealth and power have not created value. Instead, they first used unsustainable family planning to create their own growing audiences and artificial demand by ensuring dismal standards for child development and education, treating people as economic inputs rather than citizens while benefiting from the appearance of inclusive and functional democracies where the average vote was being diluted to uselessness.
A legal impossibility.
Law is different from other disciplines because it norms can be coerced, and firstly on the idea that subjects are included as equals and thus made constituents. Constitutionalism, at bottom, premises obligation to follow the law on actual inclusion and empowerment.
Again, given the climate harm to future generations, and our obligations to repair the harm, it would be physically impossible to constitute accurately obligatory relations – legal / obligatory relations – at the most basic level without some sort of truth and reconciliation process around the admission and inversion of empowering future generations more than those at the heights of our economic and political hierarchies. Without fair starts in life, there is no capacity to form organizations capable of representative governance, via the measurable self-determination of its constituents.
Where else would the empowering relations come from? If defunding the police makes sense, it’s at least because our legal systems have never included constituents with measurable equity in a way that makes them capable of producing actual representatives, and laws – including property entitlements – that accurately represent the will of those subject to them.
How to see the fraud?
The claims these families make and fund are easily falsifiable, as are the claims of the funders backing decoy nonprofits that silo social justice into various downstream issues in order to hide upstream entitlement and reparations fraud, using a false premise to benefit from a system that undoes the good one seems to do. Focusing downstream, rather than on things like what Dr. Breeze Harper called the primacy of Black Birth Equity, avoids civil rights that actually account for the creation of power disparities in birth, development, and emancipation.
What we think of today as procreative or reproductive autonomy was nothing more than cover for not disturbing mostly white birth privilege and positionality. It was the skin of freedom, not the body. Here are some questions one can ask to identify the fraud:
If the claimant valued some outcome, who will cover the child inequity and entry costs to that outcome – growth undoing climate mitigation, for example – and evade more of it? Is the claimant doing more harm than good by ignoring entry without equity? Do they start with enabling the powerful over the vulnerable? Did the claimant spend more on undoing their mission than furthering it? What formula do they use to assess damages in climate, civil rights, environmental justice, etc. cases? How do they define the term power in the context of being free from power? Who is their intended audience?
This is a constitutive discourse. Again, this is not about population. It’s about lies and omissions to gain power by exploiting positionality. A concrete goal for a better future might entail functional constitutional conventions, where we can be self-determining rather than determined by others, and in concrete and measurable ways.
Animal rights, law and policy as the most falsifiable examples of reparations fraud on almost a dozen levels, but also the standard for the highest level of clawback payments.
If one factors in children entering the world in inequity, the claims of success and impact made by most animal protection organizations are being undone daily. And they are false, with more vastly animals suffering and dying through the creation of their relations with humans than these organizations save.
For example, many of the funders behind animal protections have been pushing what is a social justice movement for the most vulnerable, instead towardtowards investments in growth-based vegan food markets that do more harm to animals – by the numbers – than these funders and their leachy children do good.Many lawyers ostensibly working on behalf of animals made impact claims in this area that were easily being undone, every day, by inequity. Some call this the #demandscam, pretending to with one hand create value you undo with the other, and in a way that benefits the scammer at cost to others. In this case not only did growth do more harm to animals that food reforms did good, but that growth was replacing a chance for democratic relations with commercial ones via low investments in children, while concealing the death debt investors already owed for climate deaths.
FSM members were actually told, by a leading animal law professor who was accustomed to not having to link legal institutions to the measurable empowerment of their constituents, that fair start reforms were natural rather than positive law, and that one could work to save animals through food reforms while not altering the underlying retrodictive rights that would – each day – undo any gains from food reforms.
Given that animal liberation is the highest form of environmentalism (treating ecologies as the homes of entities who have relations, families, and lives of their own rather than a human resource) the cooptation of animal liberation is horrific. The ideal requires equitable human and nonhumans relations. Instead it is funded towardtowards flashy, downstream, low-impact, micro-level campaigns and victories that get easily undone on a macro level.
It is, by the numbers, the greatest example of “winner take all” greenwashing possible. Funders, and the performative advocates who take their money, decoy us all away from seeing animal law, rights and policy as the most demanding standard for who humans should become, ethically, because they would rather use an illegitimate system to improve their positionality and image than do the work of legitimating the system around liberation of humans and nonhumans.
Humans are animals. Seeing us as such moves us away from anthrocentric thinking that ensured the climate crisis, and will kill millions. So, what we refer to as animal rights and law focus on nonhumans not because of their species, but because of their unique vulnerability. Animal law is not merely law that refers to animals. Animal law would have to start with a capacity to actually protect nonhumans, especially in the creation of their relations with future humans who will determine much about their lives.Animal law in the best sense starts with inclusive birth and child welfare policies that create empathetic relations capable of benefitting animals.
So animal rights, law and policy, if we want to protect nonhumans, is just a system of obligation oriented around the most vulnerable, the most demanding form of law and justice. That system has to have the capacity to actually benefit the beneficiaries, not just pretend to. What does pretending to benefit animals look like? Look at most of the micro victories for animal rights and personhood claimed by organizations over the last few decades, and contrast those with the impacts of growth on animals, and the reality, at a macro level, of embedded nonhuman propertyhood in our archaic reproductive rights regimes. Animal rights in the comprehensive sense is not just ecological – it involves the mots demanding levels of empathy in future generations.
Why then not focus on infants and animals, and – at a macro level of inclusive animal personhood – the creation of fundamental power relations between the two? Those like animal rights theorist Peter Singer, and others, do not do so because that level of comprehensive vision involves equity, race, democracy, and other factors that require true tradeoffs against one’s positionality.
The wealthy families funding animal rights, law and policy, for decades, refused to deal with this issue because they wanted to benefit from a system that quietly harmed animals, while seeming to be their saviors. Animal rights and law, in this sense, starts with the actual creation of power relations as children enter the world, represented by the collective pronouns implied or expressed in all statements, including purportedly “constitutive” statements like “We the People.” It is the most demanding standard, eco or animal centric, rather than anthropocentric, or punching down on the most vulnerable. But for Singer it was more important to raise his position as savior in an illegitimate system rather than focus on a better version of a “we” to legitimate it, and that did much more harm to animals than he did good.
Singer’s version of animal rights and law, the abstraction away from the creation of actual relations, is just charade version of animal liberation they need: Value animals in the abstract with one hand, make money on growth and privilege at cost to them with the other.
Effective animal rights in the best sense is personally expensive, not profitable. It’s easier to ignore all of that and let the macro undo good for animals at the micro level. True animal rights and law focuses on the creation of power relations, and limiting capacity to harm others – the capacity that is the core of the Anthropocene and the antithesis of animal rights. True animal rights mean preemptive standards in things like assessing damages to animals (and children). If captivity harms elephants for example, it’s because it deviates from a biodiverse and less crowded world where elephants are free of most human influence, not deviation from a relatively dismal life at a sanctuary.
Animal law starts with moving away from anthrocentric systems, toward seeing humans as the animals that they are, and situating them in equity, before we should have any sense that they can be free. But, as a close source to Fair Start said: “This is all the organizations will pay you to do. And if you love animals, that’s better than working for nonprofits.” Actually, research in the areas suggests the charade does more harm than good by moving the goalposts of social justice, and that in fact those engaged in it would never do so if they were not otherwise privileged to do so.
Fair Start initiated whistleblowing in this area as the evidence arose that the climate crisis could actually reduce the carrying capacities of ecosystems, rather than just exceed them, and that birth and developmental positionality was the greatest determinant of one’s prospects to to live or suffer/die in the crisis.
Implementing the fix: Being effective means addressing the root cause, not the symptom.
The only way to engage in damage evaluation for reparations, and the fraud hiding them, is to peg them to a functionally inclusive baseline – children entering the world relative to certain counterfactual thresholds – that would not have caused the death of millions of innocent persons.
Accurate reparations – relative to one’s positioning or membership position in the fundamental system of political obligation – fixes the problem of share inequity in one’s democracy vastly undoing the good many claimed to have done. Without them admitting the harm and fulfilling their obligations it would be impossible for any of us to live in a system of collective self-determination.
We only owe others as much as they owe entrants into the world, because any claim of inalienable rights assumes fulfillment of a prior duty to others. One can use the discourse mentioned above, the questions, to force others to derive their thinking back to “might makes right” logic, such that they fall outside of any theory of legitimacy or political obligation that would create a duty ensuring their protection by others. Living such a logic makes those who refuse fundamental fairness – those who embrace missing a crucial step in the logic of their oughtness – fall outside of systems of mutual obligation.
Here are some indicia that an entity is engaged in fundamental, or constitutive reparations fraud:
They will silo justice into downstream issues to avoid dealing with the creation of power relations.
They will conflate the difficulty of inverting power systems with their desire to retain their privilege.
They will redefine values over time to evade having contradicted themselves when called for payments.
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The climate crisis is not a distant threat, it’s is an urgent challenge for all of us, particularly in global south where vulnerable communities bear the brunt of climate crisis and inequalities impacts. As the world going with rising temperatures, resource depletion and extreme weather changes, Addressing systemic errors in climate solutions is vital to ensure a sustainable future for coming generations. A critical step that involves valuing neglected communities and integrating gender perspectives into climate action strategies.
Why neglected communities matter?
Neglected communities often on the fringes of mainstream development efforts possess valuable local knowledge and resilience. Indigenous populations, rural women and marginalized urban dwellers frequently adapt to environmental changes using sustainable practices passed down through generations. However, voices are often excluded from policymaking, leading to top-down solutions that fail to address unique challenges in today’s generation. Acknowledging these communities as partners rather than beneficiaries can drive more inclusive and effective climate action.
The role of gender in climate solutions. Gender disparities exacerbate vulnerabilities to climate change especially for women in the global south. Women carry responsibilities for water collection, food production, Care giving disproportion affected by drought, floods, resource scarcity. Remain underrepresented in decision making spaces like COPs. Empowering women and integrated gender responsive approaches can enhance equalities. Women Care groups in doing kitchen gardens, Agroforestry, animal protection, child saving and family planning as per fair Start standards have demonstrated innovative solutions and creativity to address the needs and climate restoration, food security, small family planning, child bonds and fair Start standards for families in the neglected communities from global south to save next generations.
Addressing systemic errors
Systemic errors in current climate interventions rooted from treating global south as a homogeneous group and ignoring the intersection of social-economic, culture, political, environmental factors based on
Participatory Approaches; policies must involve marginalized communities and ensure addressed concerns to the solutions.
Gender Equity; Funding and programs must prioritize women Care group model in climate restoration and adoption of Fair Start Movement standards
Decentralization; once top bottom system is changed to use bottom – up, cultures and indigenous knowledge can be valued in reshaping model.
A collective Responsibility.
Valuing neglected communities and gender in climate strategies is not a moral imperative but should be practical necessity. As global citizens, we must ensure Fair Start standards to advocate equality and equity in climate actions whereby most vulnerable communities have access to resources and voices hard and recognized in order to strive for the better future.
Few leaders/wealth people that make small percentage on this world should not decide on the behalf of voiceless and neglected communities from global south.
Call to Tell the Truth
In 2019, I came in to decentralize power of the system, I made a statement “The fight for climate change is not just a fight for only environmental degradation but also includes a fight for equality, justice and the rights to a future for every child, woman and men at forefront communities who deserve to be saved, empowered and voices Heard at international level because are affected more yet contribute less to the damage”
That’s because for many years I used system not inverting the power of the system to decentralize I used Village Health Team (VHT) system while working in the refugee settlement to address health challenges in the community in accessing public health and it was not in decent razing the power to women in addressing climate crisis and food insecurity that’s why I started using Women Care Groups in decentralization and address the cause of climate change not signs and symptoms.
Carter hiding in liberating animals using illegal standards here is the key false claim of Carter in 2016 and now is backing Women Care groups. What I did was similar to what Carter did in hiding the undoing of the liberation of animals.
COPs is failing to center climate Reparations and justice for neglected gender and communities to Fair Start standards.
The conference of Parties (COPs) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) has become a global stage for negotiations on climate actions. Year after year, these conferences are criticized for failing to address the root cause of climate injustice at neglected communities and gender who are most vulnerable to the climate crisis. This failure is from lack of meaningful engagement and admitting the truth and putting structures of climate reparations in equitable manner and decentralized focused solutions. This failure undermines efforts to adhere to Fair Start Movement standards that prioritizes intergenerational justice and equity for future generations.
Damages/harms caused by wealthy people/nations are often the largest polluters from global north on the global south. Despite decades of advocacy, COPs have consistently omitted financial commitments to reparations, instead offering vague pledges that rarely translate into actionable changes.
Without clear structure reparations, vulnerable communities and gender from the global south with least responsibility for the climate crisis are left to bear the brunt of the effects. Failing to address these imbalances perpetuates cycles of inequality and extinction of next generations.
Omission of decentralization at COPs
Fair Start Movement emphasizes that true climate justice begins at community level (Decentralization) as based on the Afrocentric model. Indigenous women and local communities possess valuable knowledge about sustainable practices and ecosystem management whereas COPs negotiations frequently prioritize profit based solutions like carbon trading over nonprofit Decentralization systemic approach.
Impacts on black Americans in the system of white supremacy. Climate change is not just an environmental issue. It is a social justice issue disproportionately affecting marginalized communities. For black Americans, the overlapping crises of climate change and systemic racism within a white supremacist structure amplify existing inequalities and create unique vulnerability.
Climate change and environmental Racism
Black communities in America have been systematically neglected from wealthy building opportunities and relegated to neighborhoods with higher exposure to environmental harsh conditions. Industrial plants, landfills and highways are often located near predominantly black communities, leading to chronic health conditions such as Asthma, Allergies and others. Climate change exacerbates inequalities by intensifying extreme weather changes such hurricanes, heat waves and flooding in poor household air-conditioning.
In 2005, During Hurricane Katrina, more black residents of New Orleans were disproportionately affected. Many lived in low lying geographic areas more prone to flooding, lacked access to reliable transportation to evacuate and faced systemic neglect in disaster response and these results are not accidental but are results of policies shaped by white supremacy.
Economic injustice and climate vulnerability. The racial wealth gap leaves black Americans with fewer resources to recover from climate related disasters. Generations of poverty redlining and discriminatory practices in housing and lending have left many black families without adequate child bonds. The economic insecurity increases challenges of displacement, job loss and homelessness a rising from climate injustices and inequalities.
A voice from the voiceless: women care group leaders of western Uganda Speak to the global north.
“We are the women of western Uganda, members of women care groups, mothers, farmers and protectors of life. We speak not just for ourselves but for our children and the land we nurture. We are voice of voiceless, calling on you leaders and funders of global north to listen to our cry as the climate crisis tightens its grip on our lives. The rivers we once relied upon are drying. The rains we depended on to grow food come too late or too hard destroying our crops. The land we call home which we have cared for like a mother cares for her child is cracking and drying under the weight of this climate crisis and the world looks away. We, the women, feel this crisis most deeply. When water sources dry up, we walk longer distances to fetch water. When crops fail, it is our children who go to bed hungry. When mosquitoes grow, it’s our children who suffer from Malaria and some die. When disasters strike, it is on our hand to rebuild homes and lives and often with no support or recognition. The inequality is increasing, while we suffer the consequences of climate change. Knowing that the emissions driving this catastrophe come far away from factories, industries and lifestyles in the global north. We contribute the least yet we pay the highest price. We ask you global north leaders and funders: how can it be just our lives, our communities, our future sacrificed so others can prosper? How can you speak of justice while our cries are ignored? We are not just victims, we are also part of the solution but feel neglected at decision making, We may be neglected now but we are not powerless. We are speaking now and we will keep speaking until our voices are heard. Leaders of the global north, Funders and policymakers; will you hear us? Will you stand with us or will you turn away?”
The truth needs to be heard from you and shame the devil.
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If you comb through coverage on the Vox news site regarding a variety of issues – including the environment, population, democracy, animal rights, etc. – you will see something odd.
They never trace all of these problems back to the source: Unsustainable and inequitable family models that exploit future children for economic growth. Each day those models make the problems being covered worse. Like most concentrations of wealth and power the news outlet’s values do not outweigh their desire to exploit growth and their own birth positionality, even when that exploitation drives a deadly climate crisis. And even when doing so makes their coverage hypocritical.
Fact: Our collectively violating children’s right to a fair start in life, and assuming children of color deserve fewer resources and more risk, has done more to harm our values and missions than we have done to further them.
Wealth in the world today was made through growth and at cost to children’s rights, in what some call the #famscam. In the scheme, nations illegally evaded their obligation to only bring children into birth and development conditions compliant with children’s rights and the political equity from which legitimate governance derives.
They chose a form of unsustainable reproductive autonomy that was akin to the racist separate but equal scams, but one which will kill far more persons. Governments said we were equal and then ensured some children had nothing and others everything under the lie that parental autonomy could exist outside of political equity.
Anything that starts with less is inherently oppressive and non-inclusive. People, rather than documents, constitute nations as they are born, raised, and emancipated. What we think of as growth is actually political inequity. We have an overriding or preemptive right to take the wealth that was stolen and use it to fund family reforms, or the constituting of a just future.
Those who subverted the civil rights movements decades ago, by ignoring children’s rights in the idea of reproductive autonomy, were avoiding the override – the fact that political equity always comes first and would allow the needy to take the correct resources by all means. National borders, rules and entitlements derive from the sovereignty or self-determination of constituents, and that derives from relations developed in birth, development and emancipation.
The many funders that framed and defined social justice over the last several decades never created real value in their vast wealth, relative to an objective standard like a healthy climate. Instead they first used inequitable family planning to create their own audiences and artificial demand by ensuring dismal standards for child development and education, violating their own professed values (like animal protection and children’s rights) and treating people as economic inputs rather than citizens.
They did this while benefiting from the appearance of inclusive and functional democracies where the average vote was actually being diluted to uselessness. A system of fundamental entitlements likely to kill millions of innocent persons, and which could instead have achieved better outcomes by actually investing in children, is generally considered a failure.
The baseline those like Vox uses has subverted the civil rights and anti-apartheid movements by undoing with family inequity upstream the good they seem to be doing downstream – a move that exponentially catalyzes the climate and related crises, while aiming the harm of the crises towards the least responsible for it, and most vulnerable to it.
If the Three-Fifths Compromise in U.S. history fractionalized the worth of persons of color, the one-tenth and greater illegal disparities in generational wealth that violate legally enforceable children’s rights regimes will now mean the death of millions of children of color in a climate crisis caused primarily by white wealth.
Wealthy, mostly white, families and other entities are now funding charities, media, politicians and academics who silo social justice issues away from birth equity, and use omissive messaging – a form of entitlement and impact, or equity, fraud – that hides their liability and the illegal macro entitlement systems ensuring the death of millions as the climate crisis accelerates. Fraud is intentionally benefitting at harm to others based on misinformation, including omissions.
Exploiting mothers’ vulnerability to ensure growth, and not first ensuring reparative family reforms that assure children birth and development conditions consistent with the Children’s Condition, does more harm to all of our missions than we are doing good, because the power dynamics that choice creates is degrading the ecological capacity of the planet to ensure infant health – the first and only measure of value.
Take Action:
Contact Swati, a key lead at Vox, and urge her to report in a way that covers the real driver of the problems we face. Ask her if she thinks all kids deserve a fair start in life.
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She remains so until she takes account of the primacy of her positionality, and acts on it.
We can’t get to justice, legitimacy and an obligation to follow the law from the injustice of violating children’s birthrights and assuming children of color deserve exponentially less resources and more risk. Doing that has done more harm than we did good. How? Exploiting mothers’ vulnerability to ensure growth, and not first ensuring reparative family reforms that assure children birth and development conditions consistent with the Children’s Condition, does more harm to all of our missions than we are doing good, because the power dynamics that choice creates is degrading the ecological capacity of the planet to ensure infant health – the first and only measure of value.
At the end of this post we ask her to prioritize intergenerational justice, not as an issue siloed from her animal work, but as the correct basis for it.
Introduction
The climate crisis is intensifying, and killing millions who had little role in causing or exacerbating it. At the same time a small percentage of persons have become obscenely wealthy. Many are asking if there has been a fundamental failure of justice – in the actual creation, at birth, of power relations – that we should all address. Many entities in those nations most responsible for the crisis are using the same fraudulent political systems, and impact / reporting standards, that caused the crisis in order to hide liability.
Fact: The failure of world leaders for decades to ensure a measurable fair start in life, both ecologically and socially, for all children has done more to harm the practice of justice than Nussbaum and other luminaries have done to further it. There is no form of justice, and certainly not animal justice, that ignores the actual creation of human and nonhuman relations. And it’s very hard to change a future child’s prospects once they are born, so true justice first focuses on thresholds beneath which children should not be born. Most thinking about that threshold seems focused on welfare. But if we use a metric or value like self-determination, the idea of intergenerational justice actually becomes a the first necessary condition for political obligation, the first rule, or what is required to owe others our allegiance to a legal system. Nothing is more primary than our birth-determined relations to others.
When the reproductive rights regime was developed and put into law, the architects conflated the acts of having kids and not having kids equally as a matter of parental bodily isolation. But creating a child is the least isolating thing one can do – it’s interpersonal in nature, not personal, and it is in fact the basis of our relations – it’s constitutive: https://mahb.stanford.edu/blog/family-planning-offers-the-best-means-for-combating-climate-change-an-interview-with-carter-dillard-fair-start-movement/.
Autonomy as isolation, out of context, was effectively an extension of the racist “separate but equal” thinking at work at the time.
Nussbaum’s work ignores this primary issue – the largest determinant of animals lives.
This is a failure many funding the fields of animal law and justice are eager to ignore because they made their wealth on the growth and inequity that together are killing many as temperatures rise. Climate change and inequality are interconnected crises that disproportionately harm the most vulnerable, requiring immediate, systemic action. This is not a choice on a menu of public interest interventions. This work relates to the inescapable system of costs, benefits, and obligations we are all born into, the largest driver of outcomes, and the choice to exploit that system or legitimate it.
There is no universe in which beneficial impacts, taken out of context from their relative position to birth equity, occurred. Use of such-out-of-context claims hides the fundamental driver for the deaths: Enabling the powerful over the vulnerable
Fair Start is writing Nussbaum openly for a reason
That backchannel and time consuming discourse is what one might call distracademia. In light of the immediate horrors of things like growth-exacerbated heat waves, much in the modern animal protection movement – like the academy and its questionable impact – seems more like a self-aggrandizing garden club that has been funded by the clear cutting of local forests than drivers of a true social justice movement.
At a meta level, beyond the façade, is Nussbaum assuming entitlements she should not?
Liberalism, and freedom, mean being empowered. How could that possibly happen outside of the context creation, development and emancipation? Are academics exempt from this relative positioning? Those who reject fair creation obligations limit themselves to a version of freedom that is leading to the death of others. Why not change the entitlements default while engaged in the discourse to avoid that? Would Martha have focused on this change, decades ago, if she had known how the climate crisis would unfold?
It’s very possible we should define fundamental political group membership, and the deserving of collective protection, based on the level of protection members would extend to infants and animals. Those rejecting self-determining protections for these vulnerables through things like parental delay and readiness incentives would themselves fall outside the scope of being owed protection because there would never be a way to explain why they have shown the reciprocity necessary for membership. They are not included in any collective “we.” Deserving that, being included in a legitimate system, is not onerous and could just require backing high level birth protections for infants. For those who do not, it’s unclear why they deserve basic protection in political systems which are, at base, premised on inclusion.
That is all we are asking Nussbaum to do – to consider resetting the default for obligation, and protection, while she engages in discourse.
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. These free riders threaten us all. Why? It is physically impossible to be free, as in self-determining, if we cannot ask and then assure that persons are created, developed and emancipated in ways that offset equally their capacity to influence political systems equally, relative to a neutral position or objective standard for evaluation.
Those entering the world are either not empowered, or we all have no choice but to be subjected to their power and influence – including their degradation of the environment around us. We should instead empower the governed, not the government and the wealthy.
All evidence suggests that not ensuring all children a measurable fair start in life, and birth and development conditions consistent with the Children’s Rights Convention and the Human Right to a Healthy Environment, has done more to harm all social justice goals, including individual freedom, than any other efforts have done to further them. In many cases when one factors in loss of political equity, or one’s effective shares in democracy to control the influence of others, many public interest organizations have spent more on lavish travel and events than furthering their missions.
But we don’t talk about this because it means admitting the historic subversion of civil rights through family inequity, and the treating of children of color as deserving a fraction of what white kids deserve, while assuming those children of color should suffer the brunt of the climate crisis. The wealth we see in the world today carries massive debt because we all benefitted from the violation of children’s rights to make it, bringing children into the world as means and not rights-bearing ends.
Whatever Nussbaum said, she lived a life of benefiting from not having to assure her own values in the birth-creation of others’ power relations, for example, in the funding that would have backed her work. All of that wealth would have been made in disregard of the lives of animals and the most vulnerable children because their interests are absent in the fundamental family creation norms that entitle wealth.
Nussbaum clearly avails herself of the benefits of our legal system, to protect herself for example, without deriving that system back to, and conditioning its legitimacy upon, measurably empowering those subject to it. That is the problem – one the impacts the freedom of others in a way that calls for a reaction.
Abstract academic debates about ethics, often funded by concentrations of wealth and power reliant on inequity and growth, threaten to exacerbate the results of the climate crisis by forestalling law and policy reforms. Many of the debates derive from the same Eurocentric vestige of colonialism described above – the historic entitlement of wealthy families to exploit birth positionality relative to colonized nations – nesting in the human-rights regime.
Academia should be objective and that doesn’t mean ignoring one’s positionality. It actually means first accounting for it, especially to avoid contradictory exploitation and entitlements that conflict with one’s values.
They will silo off values, like animals’ rights, from the issue of who the humans – the performance of which those rights depend on – should be. They will avoid discussions of their full positionality. They will avoid explicitly conditioning state authority on empowering each person equally.
If the micro-liberation of nonhumans looks like open rescues at factory farms, the macro would look like “real new deal” social contract demands for reparations in exchange for child-centric planning that would ensure a truly climate-restored and bio-diverse future in which humans are empathetic enough to be inclined to treat nonhumans well. But many academics, whose interests do not align with macro reforms, ignore the latter.
These academics often assist funders in coaptating the values, imitating and redefining things like animal rights and mutual self-determination of humans and nonhumans, creating something that looks like the value but more aligned with their interests.
Fair Start has shown that a necessary condition for something to constitute “animal law” would be that it can actually benefit nonhumans, including accounting for the creation – through our birth and development – of their relations with humans. There are influential funders in this space however that define the field to specifically avoid that issue, going so far as to selectively report developments in the field to hide the way macro forces like growth undo the value of granular “victories” at a macro level. This benefits the funders, and wealthy their kids, as deadly cost to nonhumans and mostly vulnerable children of color. Both Nussbaum and the funders have affirmed their views of animal law and justice in this regard, with Fair Start activists in communications the activists can provide.
Our language, by not including the impact children entering the world has on our values, work, and missions, hides costs we foist on others and blocks our ability to derive obligations to follow the law back to a condition of its actually measurably empowering those subject to it. The hiding means we value the things in our lives by taking the idea of self-determination out of context, ignoring how our lives very much determine others – climatologically for example. At a subject-subject level of animal liberation, it would not mean that we have social contract obligations with nonhumans as voters or contractors. It would means that their presence influences who the human persons we share our democracy with are and should be. That’s what matters to nonhumans.
As discussed below, one solution is to legally require disclosures contrasting claims about values with the actual ecosocial baseline children need to experience value, and how their birth and development alters that baseline in a way that harms infants’ needs.
We have all benefitted at deadly cost to future generations, a fact quickly manifesting now as the climate crisis intensifies.
None can be allowed to ignore creation ethics / positionality. Where, when and with which resources we are born is the largest determinant of outcomes in things like the climate crisis. And in terms of justice, and political obligation, there is no more basic a choice than how to deal with and offset our creation positionality, and the benefits and costs it conveys, intergenerationally for example.
Our collective failure to deal with the unjust and unsustainable system of growth that created our own birth, developmental, and emancipatory positionalities is leading to the death of millions. Academics are not immune from this systems of benefits and costs. In fact leaders in the academy are some of the most responsible given their decoy effects.
We should all admit our benefitting at deadly cost to others based on never ensuring all children the fair start in life justice required. Doing so now, and changing policies to internalize the costs we foist on others, can save lives. Doing so would allow us to require fundamental social coordination around a norm which is infinitely easier to use than a written constitution of the sort we have in the U.S., a thing unknowable to most – and more backed by guns than collective reason and understanding.
Nussbaum’s work and claims contain the same self-serving baseline error as the work of Cass Sunstein. Instead of self-determination in the accurate sense, law and policy forced our thinking into an immediate focus on other humans that veiled our creation. How? Again, our legal and political systems treated having children as an act of autonomy, bundled up with the act of not having children, because that form of autonomy would define the concept of power in a way that avoided questioning certain entitlements.
The dangerous and powerful were the men with guns in government, and the castle of the home was an autonomous zone to be protected from it. That’s not the definition of the conception of power that makes democracy work. Power is any form of human influence, the mass aggregate of human activities that is killing millions in the climate crisis, and it begins as we—and our relations to others—are created fundamentally through birth and development. Watch for others entering the world, not the leaders with money and guns they will become.
This was power over others, not self-determination for all, and the misconception mainly operated by taking the element of time out of the equation and assuming certain relations rather than requiring birth and developmental self-determination. However, families are not just part of the social contract but constitutive of it.
Instead of racing others to the bottom for how bad we can act or be, the natural and temporalized threshold for being is based on hard metrics linked to physical conditions in the world, and it is much easier to see and achieve in a collective setting, like care modeling, than a nuclear family. This is a binary choice between acting obligated towards bottom-up systems of investment and inclusion, or top-down systems of governmental violence that exploit low levels of child welfare to create growth that kills animals and destroys nature.
But as the climate and relate crises worsen, there are fewer reasons to continue to make that mistake. In essence, if we do not change the standard, we are inclined to “double dip,” to ignore birth positionality – the fundamental system most driving the outcomes, the main determinant, while pretending we are saviors ensuring justice. The Fair Start, “Tell the Truth,” theory of change takes claims each of us have made that assumed state authority and wealth entitlements not conditioned on the actual empowerment of constituents, has us admit those claims were fallacious, and urged us to now commit to elevating the empowerment threshold as an obligation above state authority.
This mimics some of the truth and reconciliation work in other contexts, but with future children.
Nussbaum is a luminary. She is also a person who simply benefitted at deadly cost to others, as many of us have. She can be a leader in fixing the fundamental cause of that. Martha will have air conditioning this summer. Some infants near her in Chicago will not.
For example, we could ask whether she would consider who – between wealthy families uniquely responsible for the climate crisis seeking to defend their wealth, and impoverished would-be mothers needing resources to defend their future children’s choices in life, would have a superior claim to use state violence?
But as the climate crisis intensifies and kills millions who had little role in causing or exacerbating it, and at a time where a small percentage of persons have become obscenely wealthy, many are asking if there has been a fundamental failure of justice that we should all address.
Fact: The failure of world leaders for decades to ensure a measurable fair start in life, both ecologically and socially, for all children has done more to harm the practice of justice than Sandel and other luminaries have done to further it.
We have all benefitted at deadly cost to future generations, a fact quickly manifesting now as as the climate crisis intensifies.
None can be allowed to ignore creation ethics / positionality. Where, when and with which resources we are born is the largest determinant of outcomes in things like the climate crisis. And in terms of justice, and political obligation, there is no more basic a choice than how to deal with and offset our creation positionality, and the benefits and costs it conveys, intergenerationally for example.
Our collective failure to deal with the unjust and unsustainable system of growth that created our own birth, developmental, and emancipatory positionalities is leading to the death of millions. Academics are not immune from this systems of benefits and costs. In fact leaders in the academy are some of the most responsible, and we should all admit our benefitting at deadly cost to others based on never ensuring children the fair start in life justice required.
Ask anyone claiming to good work in the world to account for children being born without what the Children’s Rights Convention promises those kids in resources and rights. Then ask the person claiming to do good to reassess their claims. You will see a lot of good that many claimed to do actually fall away, by metrics we all believe in, with harm escalating as temperatures rise.
The field of animal law, rights, and protection has been around for a long time. It is one of the most aspirational areas of justice, aiming to protect and liberate nonhumans from the horrors humans inflict upon them. But as the climate crisis unfolds, and more animals are harmed each day by humans, we should look for what must have gone wrong in the field to bring us to today.
Brad Goldberg has been one of the most influential figures in the field of animal rights and law, having used his wealth to in a definitive way, funding and advising organizations, academics and activists for decades. He seeded animal law programs at some of the leading schools in the nation, and has written extensively about funding and activism for animals.
But if one closely analyzes his public statements, his giving, and the results of his giving, something foundational is missing. He never seems to account for how children entering the world, and the very different resources they have when they do, impact the lives of animals.
That’s not ideal, given that is the largest determinant of animals’ lives. Claims of animal protection, in the face of the growth and inequity driving the climate crisis, are some of the most falsifiable impact claims being made in philanthropy. Growth and inequity has done more to harm animals than those working in the field have done to save them.
Is there a more macro way to think about animals?
Humans are animals. Seeing ourselves as such moves us away from anthrocentric thinking that ensured the climate crisis, and will kill millions. So, what we refer to as animal rights and law would focus on nonhumans not because of their species, but because of their unique vulnerability. In other words, animal law cannot merely be law that happens to refers to animals.
The base – and in this case the base of what Brad assumed as a legitimate legal system – treated children of color as worth exponentially less investment in birth and development, and by fundamentally enabling growth, triggered a climate crisis killing some while enriching others.
Fact: When impacts are correctly measured, not prioritizing a measurably fair start in life for all children did exponentially more harm to most stated missions of organizations than those organizations did good.
Intergenerational justice legitimates nations, making them capable of representing their constituents. We all do this together, by ensuring no child is born beneath a threshold of investment that would give them an influential equity stake in their democracies. Not having done this to date has condemned millions to die in a climate crisis, while the children of the wealthy families who benefited from illegitimacy have been enriched.
Why Fair Start?
Funding that ensures no child is born beneath a set level of entitlement, consistent with the Children’s Rights Convention and Right to a Healthy Environment,is exponentially the most just and effective way to protect our future and free all of us. The creation of power relations – through birth, development, and emancipation – is usually the biggest driver of social justice outcomes because it operates on many levels, compounding impacts simultaneously.
Fair Start’s recent action before the United Nations asks anyone relying on any legal authority to derive back to the most preemptive source of legitimacy, an exercise that inevitably ends with the need to prioritize entitlements that would measurably empower all children through improved birth and development conditions, ensuring them a fair start in life and share equity in democracy.
Under the universally preemptive standard that ensures fair starts in life for all kids, we can remove extractive birth entitlements where children of color get a tenth or less of the wealth as white kids, are largely excluded from the political system, and bear the deadly cost of an ecocide they did not create.
In this effort Fair Start is urging officials to contrast the claims of beneficial public impact being made by many entities and those they fund with actual harms to women and infants – correctly measured relative to a neutral position rather than the fictitious standards that created the climate and related crises.
Not omitting the impacts of children entering the world, admitting the use of failed and fraudulent standards, and inverting our obligation from the powerful to first women and children, can save both human and nonhuman lives.
TAKE ACTION: Urge Brad here to assess how children entering the world over the last several decades impacts his claims about the field of animal law, rights and protection, how that impact alters his legacy, and to consider how – in light of this factor – he would alter his advice to those he funded.
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