Simply ask them: What are you doing to invest in resourcing young women to have their children in a time, place, manner, and with the necessary safeguards that protect those children and their rights, and avoids those children degrading their own environment in deadly ways?
By asking this question you are looking for policy scam that fundamentally created the climate crisis. You are looking for those who are willing to benefit by exploiting those children’s birth positionality for economic growth, thus benefitting at deadly cost to others. You are looking those who choose a fundamental political system/orientation system with no functional protections for children, and thus none for the ecologies those children would consume.
A classic example of this are funders backing the sale of vegan food products as a form of animal rights because they are invested in the companies that produce them, even when the family and growth policies they rely on does exponentially more harm to animals (and humans) than their food advocacy does good.
Investing in child-rights based political systems, and the young women who enable them, is the most just and effective way for us all to protect nature and offset through investment the harm the climate crisis is causing children. There are dozens of ways to invest and make the change towards child-rights based policy.
Instead, to avoid fundamental change, many organizations will choose less effective work – distractivism – that attracts wealthy donors who want to externalized the costs of their wealth. Our impact on the Earth, and how we experience that impact, fundamentally depends on when, where, how, with what resources, etc. women have children. Right now – according to this Nobel laureate – the system under which this all happens is exploitative.
We can change that.
Activists will find and through nonviolent protests make examples of high-profile scammers in order to change basic entitlements and save millions of lives.
This is what happened: Mostly white, wealthy world leaders in 1968 ignored universal children’s rights in designing the family planning systems successful implementation of those rights were contingent upon. They treated the act of having and not having kids as a matter of parental autonomy – solidifying a version of freedom that allows the powerful to harm the vulnerable. There are many times in world history to focus on, but this time was crucial because it dealt with the universal standard for how nations would physically constitute themselves, implementing the universality that became feasible with the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
That move violated international law and fundamentally allowed a system that benefitted some at deadly cost to others.
This is what those men enabled: Alaska now uses wealth made by killing children in the most vulnerable nations to exacerbate that process using family policy. They’ve found a way to increase fossil fuel production and then use the profits to subsidize larger families and the need for greater fossil fuel production.
That move in 1968 ensured:
- That wealthy elites could avoid funding child development rights, and could instead privilege their own children; at base, the standard showed that ,many elites reject political equity, or participating in and adhering to political/legal systems that actually represent the governed, where each has an equal influence on the outcome and thus maintains their relative capacity to choose or control who has power or influence over them.
- Unsustainable and disastrous growth-based cost/benefit models that created cost-externalized profits for the wealthy and forced enough persons through dismal educational systems so that few would even understand what was happening and how to stop it – or even what a baseline for cost/benefit analysis was;
- A framing of the issue of birth justice around population, which treated people as numbers and avoided justice – or the always-first-threshold question examining the power relations between them, and between them and their ecologies, as they are created. This is not about population as much as power relations, and not about growth as much as positionality and inequity, understood as an equal and influential role in determining the rules – formal and informal – one has to live under. Population framing evaded an analysis of relations and equity, and the possibility that property rights built on racist ecocide were not legitimately allocated – and it did so by ignoring the most basic logic of human rights;
- That would-be parents would have hegemony over creation – future children and nonhumans – as a trade for what would otherwise be an empowering role in their democracies;
- White supremacy by locking in generational wealth gaps derived from colonization and slavery, with black children disempowered by having 1/10th (and in many cases much less) the wealth of white children – which was something those involved in the decisions could have predicted;
- A cementing of the patriarchy in place by creating a wall of familial privacy and autonomy around relations in which there were massive power differentials;
Climate Emergency by Takver on Flickr
- The creation of sufficient vote dilution to ensure the average citizen – who was being slowly disenfranchised – would not have enough influence in their political system to change this. This was designed to treat people as economic inputs, not empowered citizens;
- The appropriation through family policy all of the nonhuman world and its inhabitants, setting ecocide and deadly feedback loops in motion;
- A hegemony of religious institutions in all of our lives, excusing inequitable birth positionality as an act of some god or fortune, which created democracy-degrading concentration of wealth and power. It allowed the use of positionality-obscuring terms like “we” and “us” as subtly obligating, without equally empowering, the listener.
- The creation of false political dichotomies, like the current paradigm of left versus right, by hiding the way equity (a value treated as left-leaning) in birth and development can ensure autonomy (a value treated as right-leaning) for all later in life. We can agree on children’s rights, on who we should be – and not hide a division that is more about wealth than ideology. Evading the ethics of our creation allowed elites to silo the protection of the vulnerable, like children, animals, and the environment, which are normally aligned, and to create watered down solutions to each area, heading off more effective and equitable solutions.
- The enabling of prenatal eugenics that could drive inequity beyond anything the world has seen;
- The avoidance of the issue of whether fundamental fairness in our creation precedes and overrides property rights. In fact it does because nations cannot constitute, i.e. create their authority and subjects’ obligation, without starting from ecosocial children’s rights because they would bypass the first obligation/relations, e.g., what your creator owed you in terms of your and their mutual self-determination. Who we should be, the legitimating force of children’s rights to control fundamental power relations, comes first. We should not be distracted by the threat of unjustified violence as power – we would do that at threat to our own children.
- The assurance that rights to bodily autonomy, including to using contraception and terminating one’s pregnancy, would not be safe from attack and rollback.
The override is key because it means we can ensure the taking of the resources needed for ecosocial fair starts in life by all means effective. It would be physically impossible for the authority to govern to derive from an empowered governed, with each person empowered as ends rather than means, and equitably under a one-person, one-vote rule, without starting from such rights, including climate and biodiversity restoration via ecosocial birth equity as the fundamental and overriding human rights. Free ersons will make authority of the state contingent on their being actually and equitably empowered
The climate crisis, and the risk to millions of leaving wealthy at the top, shows all of this well. Much of this surfaced in legal research looking for the first human right or most basic norm, and finding that all the literature on human rights regarded what we should do because the powerful had hidden injustice in the true first human right – who we should be.
Ask them the question above, both their position now and what they have done historically. You will find they fundamentally orient from a system with no functional protections for children, and thus none for the ecologies those children would consume. Whatever values they claimed to further, they used minimalist and inequitable child welfare and family policy to undo them, filling the world with power relations defined by child abuse and neglect, ecocide and animal suffering, massive influence differentials that are the antithesis of human equality, and the illusion of democracy where the average person has little influence over the rules under which they are forced to live.
We can reverse what these men did and try to minimize harm with family policies that ensure minimum levels of wellbeing, equity, democracy, nature, and a sustainable right to have children for all, through birth equity entitlements and wealth GMI distributions that ensue parental delay and readiness, equal opportunities for all children, and smaller or more ecocentric families.
We can start by targeting these men’s children – who benefitted from the scam – to cover the costs they owe.
One can imagine modifying GMI systems via a progressive scale of democracy-building payments, inverse to wealth and income and contingent on positionality, that either charged wealthy young women for having a child before their 27th birthday and/or without certain parental readiness benchmarks, or on the other end of the wealth spectrum, covered significant incentives consistently paid out for them to build birth equity and ensure delay.
Most of the academics in these debates contradict in their writings the basic values they exhibited throughout their lives, e.g., seeking minimum thresholds of personal welfare, expecting equal access to opportunities, participating in and adhering to political/legal systems that purported to represent the governed, using and enjoying an environment relatively conducive to human and nonhuman health, etc.
You can identify these academics because they will avoid discussions of how shared values interrelate to the actual creation of power relations. Given their privileged intergenerational positionality, and the fact that they sent their lives generally relying on and participated in legal/political systems of coercive obligation that benefitted them at cost to others, they should at least begin from a default or provisional position of extending those values to future generations.
This scale could be combined with other factors that amount to “survive, self-determine, and thrive” financial kits for the most vulnerable children funded by the parents of the least vulnerable children. These are self-determination reparations that would offset the impact of the climate crisis, and be measured using standards of birth and development that would allow maturing children control their own lives rather than be controlled by others.
Ask the hard question, and identify and help us target those risking millions of lives to profit from the fundamental system – exploiting future children and the nonhuman world they were created to consume – that created the climate crisis and ensured billions would not be resilient enough to resist it.
Everyone has used terms that expressed or implied public benefit that were inaccurate. Measured against the true north of human and nonhuman health, the background systems they usually did not question and in fact implied the legitimacy of, were benefitting the claimant while unleashing significant and increasing harm to infant humans and nonhumans alike because of all of the factors described above. That true north – the harm – is what we can use, regardless of dysfunctional human political processes and language, to assess damages and create new policy.
Avoid this untruth by asking the right questions. Look for words the persons and organizations you engage use – words like green, eco, sustainable, equitable, democratic, human-rights based, humane, restorative, regenerative. These and many other terms are inaccurate if not backed by consistent family policies that ensure minimum levels of wellbeing, equity, democracy, nature, and a sustainable right to have children for all, through birth equity entitlements and wealth GMI distributions that ensue parental delay and readiness, equal opportunities for all children, and smaller or more ecocentric families. Many are getting paid to omit the truth at deadly cost to others. Knowing these things – you can demand the truth.
Ask the person or organization whether they are working towards a safe and healthy future for all, or avoiding investing in kids to exploit them as economic inputs.
