- The climate crisis is now killing women and infants, with hundreds of millions at risk, mostly persons of color that had nothing to do with causing the crisis. This is racist ecocide, and trillions of animals likely to suffer and die as the crisis unfolds. Ask anyone making a claim about furthering particular values to account for how the family planning norms, policies and relative ranking of obligations they never accounted for has undone those values and created the deadly climate crisis and vast inequity.
- There is a way to reverse this, ensuring all children a fair start in life. A young Nigerian attorney – Esther Afolaranmi – has called on the United Nations to recognize that political legitimacy, the obligation to follow the law, begins by ensuring all children a fair start in life. The changes would prioritize climate reparations as family planning entitlements to ensure legitimate (politically inclusive) systems where children are born only at a time, place, and with resources that reverse climate and other harms and empower them.
- Some are blocking this reform. We need to out them.
- Of anyone claiming to do right in the world, we simply ask: What are we doing to assure the conditions in which children born and raised, including their environment and role models, are being improved so as not to undo the benefits of the work we are otherwise doing in the world? Yes many are doing good, but they can do better and avoid green-growthwshing by disclosing their current and historic policy impacts on child-welfare.
- By asking this question we are looking for those whose work literally starts with a system that causes grave harm to women and infants, without adequate compensation. Such people do so to benefit, usually from unsustainable and inequitable growth, at deadly cost to others – or the deliberate creation of an impoverished labor and consumer class that could absorb the costs of their wealth.
- The process of climate justice starts by recognizing birth equity as the first human right or obligation to others, which means any person can ensure distribution for family planning incentives and birthright entitlements by any means effective – thus crowdsourcing the emergency enforcement of climate justice. This will save countless lives, and reduce the migration and other costs of the climate crisis by trillions of dollars.
The reform is already underway in Africa.
This process reverse that which fundamentally caused the climate crisis through growth that ignored reasonable thresholds of welfare in family planning for mothers and infants, and this the nonhuman world they would consume and destroy. Wealthy whites funded nonprofits that undid their own work, quietly, through family policies that exacerbated the climate crisis and racial inequity.
How would free and equal persons every be able to organize themselves to make these changes?
These systems – based on the violation of children’s rights – are illegitimate because they do not comply with the first human rights, children’s rights, or what creators owe those whom they create. Given the primacy of children’s rights and the hundreds of millions of lives at stake, young women engaged in fair start demands would have greater justification for using coercion to assure what their child needs than unrepresentative government would have to defend illegitimate property rights created and maintained at deadly cost to primarily children of color. People, not written constitutions, constitute nations and people are born with the need for resources to develop – they are not “simply here” (even though our brains have trouble thinking otherwise).
The idea that there is such a thing as legitimate governance that does not start with children’s rights is called the #childscam: A move by a handful of wealthy white men in 1968 to elevate their children over others by ensuring to down systems of power without bottom up justice. They used the institutions of governance to assign themselves and others property rights without legitimating those institutions. They got the benefit without covering the costs.
They made wealth by using low child-welfare standards to enable growth, turning town halls into shopping malls and influential citizens into disempowered consumers. We can all take that wealth back as reparations to young women and their future generations to reverse the process, legitimate governance, and become free. The biggest obstacle to freedom is knowing how social, or other-regarding, we have to be to be included in a free nation. Well, legitimate governance derives from emancipated people, we all have to be other-regarding enough to invest in young women enough for them to have children that will be emaciated, testable on several levels.
In other words, there is no legitimate “We the people” from which to orient obligation without first addressing the need to reverse and compensate climate impacts on infants. We cannot derive obligation from others by first evading it for ourselves. We cannot derive obligation from its absence.
This is not charity or altruism. According to a raft of positive peer-reviews it is impossible to ensure the capacity for us to choose who has influence or power over us, to be free, without reforming family policy around every child’s right to a fair start in life, testable by sufficient investments in each child to create equal offsets and degrowth relative to nature.
When we support such systems we are backing a process that undoes the things – like basic health, equality of opportunity, and relative levels of self-determination – that how we all have lived our lives showed we all value. We are included in legitimate systems – living in integrity of who we should be ecologically, and deserving of legal protection, when we extent these basic values to others.
Many have benefitted form unsustainable growth that is likely to kill many in the future. They should now cover the costs, and help avoid the deaths. Older generations made their wealth at cost to future generations, and I’ve witnessed wealthy funders choose to back charities that hid and exacerbated that fact, and sad employees at charities who refuse to speak out because they fear for their jobs.
But who we should be comes first, and we should not be women and infants dying from a disaster the wealthy caused.
TAKE ACTION: Back the Fair Start reform at the UN, and ask the question above to get towards true justice.
Here are a few facts:
Climate change is now harming fetal and infant health harm, primarily in vulnerable families of color, as heat increases threaten to kill millions in the future. Roughly three quarters of attempts to mitigate the crisis has been undone by pro-growth policies, policies that exacerbated the one-tenth wealth gap between black and white families. This is happening because a handful of largely wealthy white men chose economic growth as the baseline for policymaking, rather than equity and democracy-building children’s rights that would actually legitimate – through inclusivity – nation-states. They chose to exploit a false sense of autonomy to exchange participatory democracy for economic growth.
Investing in women rather than exploiting and isolating them without equity funding would have significantly mitigated the climate crisis. Changing family outcomes by paying young women delay and readiness entitlements would have worked and saved many lives. Instead these men evaded investing child-rights based family planning, and further birth-privileged their own wealthy progeny while profiting from the unsustainable growth that allowed lack of child-rights allowed.
This divided social justice / public interest movements into less effective silos – like misperceptions of animal rights – that did not threaten the status quo the way birth-equity (equally empowering shares in your democratic system of voting) would have. This in turn undercut democracy, leading to the oligarchic threats the United States faces today.
This now means they – the disenfranchised – will suffer the brunt of a crisis for which they were least responsible, including violations of their right to have even one child in healthy and safe conditions. And because of basic vote dilution, voter suppression, and other factors, they will be unable to use democratic processes to protect themselves, and may rationally choose other measures. And in the face of all of this, many governments driven by industry are paying women to have more children with no easy safeguards like “survive and thrive” baby bonds in place, while wealthy families and foundations reliant on growth fund charities engaged in distractivism.
