The climate crisis creates a serious problem for anyone claiming to do good public interest work. What’s public interest about a system that will result in the deaths of millions of innocents as heat waves grow?
Those funding public interest work – the wealthy families at the beginning – were not using a system that ensured their wealth reflected true value, relative to an objective standard like a healthy climate.
Instead they first used poor family planning to create their own audiences and artificial demand by ensuring dismal standards for child development and education, violating 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, while the average vote was actually being diluted by inequitable growth to uselessness. A system of fundamental entitlements likely to kill millions of innocent persons, one that could instead have achieved better outcomes by actually investing in children, is generally considered a failure.
In essence they used an anthropocentric standard to define things “sustainability,” and “green,” a welfare standard designed to benefit their investments and rich children, not designed to ensure the ecocentric or freedom-based children’s rights of those most vulnerable children in places like Uganda.
Wealthy funders in the U.S., for decades, used a clever sleight of hand to benefit while forcing costs on others in ways that would ensure the crisis. They objectified the problems they seemed to be fixing, treating things like one’s share equity in democracy as “population,” a thing outside of subject-subject relations of a “we the people.” Note that Fair Start still uses the word in some areas as the only means of having audiences link from what they were taught to our work, though this could wane.
They started by assuming entitlements in ways that benefitted themselves at deadly cost to others. Fair Start activists themselves had made similar assumptions, about the authority that officials like judges claimed, in the former employments these activists held. In fact judges, and all officials, like those private citizens claiming to own wealth, must derive their authority back to actually empower those constituents they claim to represent.
Where else would their authority derive from?
Fair Start activist have had to deal with many seeking to sabotage our work, including fundraisers who made a lot of money making those false assumptions and urging us to do the same in order to get funding. She urged us to seek as charity what is owed as reparations – in violation of the dignity of human rights, and to not criticize the funders from whom she wanted business, even when they were making false claims about their impacts.
Alternatively, we’ve dealt with grassroots activists who insisted on having no obligations to empower even their own future children, even when doing so was necessary to live consistent in their impact claims and activism, and to be accountable for promises made to vulnerable communities.
That thinking, from philanthropists and activists alike – not caring about the future and the most vulnerable – is what fundamentally caused the crisis.
We can’t get to justice, legitimacy and obligation to follow the law, from injustice.
How did that system fail?
World leaders had privatized freedom in the birth-creation of political relations after 1948 by conflating the act of having and not having children under a singular umbrella of autonomy, rather than treating the former as requiring political equity for the child. This led to measuring / assessing and reporting based on standards meant to take oneself out of one’s birth and development context, ensuring children of color were treated as deserving less and placing them at increased risk.
Leaders conflated by defining power 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. This reality derives from the slow conversion, over decades in acts of child creation, of political empowerment to commercial exploitation.
At bottom, leaders used family law to slowly subvert all other civil rights reforms, training us to think of ourselves / the body out of context. If you ask anyone claiming to do good to account for children having entered the world, and entering now, this constant undoing relative to children’s rights can be shown.
We are building the Fair Start Movement to watchdog what has happened and who should be held accountable. Many are hiding birthright white supremacy and massive death debt with a fraudulent assessment and reporting standard that takes the self out of positionality and creation context because to talk about ourselves relative to children entering the world will show our reproductive rights systems assume children of color are worth significantly less and are dying in growing numbers.
Fair Start activists, in their work with nonprofits, assisted in creating a fantasy world of positive impact – through things like the promotion of vegan brands – that never existed if one were to account for children entering the world. This fantasy world allowed the slow conversion of democratic relations into the commercial ones we see today, often through a shell game that used concepts – like an abstracted version of animal liberation undone every day by growth – designed to hide positionality.
How do we watchdog?
We use the Tell The Truth and Act Campaign, in which we urge all to admit our work is being undone every day as children enter the world in conditions that violate their rights, and that violating children’s overriding birthrights to political equity has done more harm to our missions – all of our missions – than we have done good.
Here are some examples:
Basic Fact/Value Checking the organization “Mercy for Animals.” Take Action.
Urge Justice Expert Martha Nussbaum to Back Fair Start Reforms
Factchecking Wikipedia and the Center for Biological Diversity. Take Action.
We ask all to admit their work was based on a separate but equal system of family entitlements that subverted the civil rights and anti-apartheid movements. And we then require contextualized impact claims, with neutral fact checking. We focus on the combined suffering of infants and animals, and specific disclosures contrasting impact claims with children entering the world without equitizing rights, beneath the line of their entitlements.
We ask: How much was good was undone by inequity, how far were the ecological baselines degraded, and how disenfranchised were the actual voices? That is the measure for what is owed under equity reparations, and if we take our values seriously we will use them to form subject-level relations with others as equally empowered, not just subject-object relations that derive from the failure of reproductive rights ignoring children’s rights.
The former is what makes a political system truly liberating.
If those Fair Start engages truly value the things (like biodiversity, or animal wellbeing) they took credit for protecting, they will be eager to now cover the costs to others of not having previously included the value in our basic language and systems of constitution and obligation, and to include the things they claim to value as we constitute relations going forward.
Certainly, they have already received the benefits.
If they do not they are frauds, willing to benefit at deadly cost to others, and they deserve the same level of protection as they choose to give. Where else would any obligation to them come from?
Legally, those benefitting at deadly cost can be held accountable because nations cannot create their own standards for what constitutes harm in order to hide liability.
Harm is measurable based on objective standards.
For example, many wealthy families have used the subversive standard and their money to try to define the field of animal law and rights in a very narrow way that does more to benefit them and their children than benefit animals. This field is of interest because claims regarding a legal system able to protect the most vulnerable, on a level that values them as individuals, are the most falsifiable, and in many ways.
Under those narrow conceptions legal systems neither had the capacity to benefit animals, nor be representative of their constituents. Under the preemptive standard discussed in the articles below, we have a right to the truth about their on-balance impacts, and what they might owe to truly do what they got credit for claiming to do.
We have a right to know what entities are doing to the physical capacity for all to self-determine.
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. In many cases they will have spent more on lavish travel and events, or other incidentals, than actually furthering their mission.
We can ensure the needed resources to save lives by using the extreme wealth in the world today made at cost to others to fund reparative justice, because that wealth was made by not paying the costs of avoiding climate, autocratic and other harms to future generations. The legitimate and reparative standard – being fair – will save millions of lives, and trillions of dollars. However there are entities now funding charities, media, politicians and academics who silo social justice issues away from birth equity, and use omissive and fraudulent messaging that hides their liability and the entitlement systems ensuring the death of millions as the climate crisis accelerates.
Calling out targets can ensure change, for example, in statements made by leading British family members after this intervention.
We can overcome the fraudulent withholding of reparations, withholding that uses a historically racist and unsustainable model – not benchmarked to actual harm – that illegally bypasses children’s rights as the basis for reproductive rights and intergenerational justice. This is an arbitrary model, a limited view of reproductive autonomy that simply assumes children of color are worth less in terms of the birth and development conditions they deserve. That assumption will now condemn millions of children, mostly of color, to death as the climate crisis intensifies.
Fair Start outs those using the fraudulent standard, which is inherently omissive, by simply asking targets to account for the entry of children into the world relative to things like the Children’s Convention when making impact claims and to adjust their claims accordingly.
The results are often shocking, with many public interest organizations having spent more on lavish travel, events and other performative things than on furthering their mission. Fair Start then assists communities impacted by the fraud to seek clawback reparations. We can focus on the specific harm from the fraud itself as a trimtab lever, and linguistic model of admission and reconciliation, to create larger systemic change and the physical constituting of legitimate relations through accurate language of obligation and the changes in behavior that follow it.
The funds from this process can drive changes in the existing sexual health and reproductive rights field, which has failed, changes that would treat mothers and infants as the priority class among vulnerable entities under existing child welfare / civil rights laws.
Without accurate language obligation is not possible.
An analogy?
All life occurs on a floor defined largely by the conditions in which we are born and raised. That floor is falling apart, and some want to keep going while others fall through. These free riders threaten us all. Why? It is physically impossible for any of us to be relatively self-determining – to be free, if we cannot ask for truth and then assure that persons are created, developed and emancipated in ways that offset equally their capacity to influence political systems, 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 the degradation of the environment around us.