Those who would have to pay the most are trying to hide what the climate crisis is costing the rest of us and ignoring the fact that social justice begins with a fair start in life.

Climate change has already caused harm not only to mothers and children, but also to people of color, Indigenous and fenceline communities, and residents of the world’s poorest nations. These groups have been disproportionately impacted by environmental crises that, for the most part, stem from the pollutive, extractive, and consumerist behaviors of rich nations.

How will they be compensated for this long-term and ongoing harm? Wealthy nations will have to compensate less wealthy ones for the loss and damage, including effective reparation methods like direct payments to young women, mothers, and children through programs like Seeds for the Future family reforms. Family reformation is the key while compensating those affected.

Direct family-based reparations reverse economic systems based on unsustainable population growth and inequity—those that create wealth by fundamentally externalizing costs to others. They do so by robbing women and children of resources that would give children an ecosocial fair start in life and instead use children to create growth. Those who would be paying back the wealth they owe are now doubling down, creating hysteria around an idea that reduced fertility rates and degrowth are themselves a crisis, with key targets like Elon Musk (whose wealth was created through such externalization) even suggesting that child-free people should not be allowed to vote.

Such direct obligations and payments move beyond the governments that created the crisis, beyond an unfair, anthropocentric system of top-down coercion, and instead towards bottom-up empowerment. This is less about population and more about power, and whether each individual; has equity—or influence—in their political system (focusing on the relations between humans, and not just counting them). It is about whether individuals matter politically. Compensation is equity, and equity is freedom. Creating humans for economies rather than democracies is the opposite.

The extreme concentration of wealth at the top of the economic pyramid was created by externalizing its environmental and other costs—on the poor, future generations, and nonhuman animals—argues Nobel laureate Steven Chu, who served as the Secretary of Energy in the Obama Administration. “Increased economic prosperity and all economic models supported by governments and global competitors are based on having more young people, workers, than older people,” Chu said in 2019. “Two schemes come to mind. One is the pyramid scheme. The other is the Ponzi scheme.”

In this case, “justice for all” means that the wealthy must pay for the damaging, externalized costs resulting from their acquisition of that wealth. But how do we ensure a fair process for calculating the costs, recovering the money, and getting it directly to young women, mothers, and children to counteract the effects of the crisis today? And what about tomorrow? The future can be protected through family planning entitlements that most effectively benefit the majority of people, including future generations. The decisions we make will impact the baseline for climate reparations (i.e., what exactly was lost and damaged) by billions, if not trillions, of dollars.

We must ensure that those who are least responsible for the climate crisis and economic inequality (i.e., future generations), do not suffer their greatest consequences. Otherwise, future generations will be the victims of a great injustice.

“The world needs a new model of how to generate a rising standard of living that’s not dependent on a pyramid scheme,” said Chu. We believe that the “Fair Start Model” is that model.

The Fair Start Model: Properly Addressing Population Ethics Means Achieving Equitable Opportunities for All

Population ethics is a complex field that the United Nations and world governments must properly address if future generations are to live sustainably in a planetary ecosystem that is not damaged beyond repair. Having meaningful and effective discussions with policymakers includes setting standards that deal with the moral, ethical, and scientific considerations surrounding population size—relative to levels of consumption, growth, and the distribution of resources.

More than a third of Nobel Laureates are calling family policies and consumption-relative population the key driver of the crises we face today. Establishing population standards would reduce the overhaul of climate activities and begin the process of climate reparations from those who have benefitted the most from economic activities that have damaged climate conditions. These payments can fund optimal democratic and biodiverse communities, those envisioned by thought leaders like Sir Partha Dasgupta, where people are empowered.

Human rights are the rules that put limits on what governments can do so that people can live free, and the basic requirement for all rules is that they be fair. The fundamental problem is that the human right to have and raise children in conditions (including sustainable resources) that meet their needs—which is the first and overriding rule because it accounts for our creation and fundamental power relations—has been disconnected from that fairness requirement. Requiring fairness would have cost the wealthiest what it takes to invest in all children, and prevented the profits that come with explosive growth, This disconnect has benefitted a few at a great cost to many.

It is long past overdue to expose the truth and those who are hiding the truth, and urge them—and global policymakers—to change society’s course toward child-centric planning and development that adheres to fairness, justice for all, and human rights.

The Fair Start Model is an approach that 1) aims to provide every individual with an equal opportunity to lead a fulfilling life, and 2) treats this obligation as the first and overriding human right. It treats reproductive justice and freedom as occurring within the larger context of societal freedom, which starts with ecosocial birth equity. If governance derives from the people, then constitutionalism—or the limitation and decentralization of power—starts with the creation of relations, not written documents.

The Fair Start Model is based on five key principles:

• Equitable opportunities: Every person, regardless of background or circumstance, must have access to resources, education, healthcare, and other essential services necessary for a fair start in life.
• Sustainable population size: To ensure the long-term well-being of both current and future generations, society must consider the carrying capacity of the environment (i.e., natural resources) and support “eco-centric” (not “egocentric”) families to maintain sustainable population size, understanding that even large families in poor nations have less of an environmental impact than small families in rich nations.
• Resource allocation: Allocating resources equitably among the population involves addressing disparities and ensuring that basic needs are met for everyone, while also considering individual differences, such as disabilities or other vulnerabilities, to ensure fairness.
• Inter-generational equity: We must acknowledge the interdependence between present and future generations and emphasize the responsibility to ensure that the actions taken today do not compromise the well-being and opportunities of future generations. This consideration involves sustainable resource management, environmental conservation, and responsible reproductive choices.
• Ethical considerations in reproduction: Population ethics must involve ethical deliberation regarding reproduction. While individual reproductive freedom is generally respected, we must take into account the collective impact of reproductive choices on the overall population, the environment, and future generations. Balancing individual autonomy with responsible decision-making is crucial in maintaining a fair and sustainable population. High-consumption families in the past have made it harder for young women to have children in safe conditions. That reality means that, as a society, we have fundamentally misunderstood the true meaning of “autonomy” because we did not ask families to limit their reproductive autonomy so that it could be enjoyed in perpetuity. As a comparison, this is like limiting time at a podium in a room with many speakers: Future speakers will have less time to speak if previous speakers do not take the time of future speakers into consideration.

The Assumption Behind All Theories of Freedom

John Rawls’ theory of freedom starts with the assumption that we become free when our obligations—like following the letter of the law—are justified. The Fair Start Model suggests a flaw in such theories of political obligation and freedom that has blocked just such a process.

The first and overriding obligation, from which others (like laws) are derived, must be existential rather than practical because “we are before we do.” Former theories did not derive from this fundamental origination. Hence they never developed an objective and this justifying standard, like ecosocial fairness, for our existence—relational in nature —which is the form of justice that precedes before justifying our actions.

If we are truly concerned with how to be relatively self-determining and less controlled by others, and have the capacity for consent or choice, we would logically start with deontological population ethics, and a creation norm/first principle and obligation that looks to create groups akin to 0123...0, with 0 being non-polity/non-humanity or nature, and self-determination for each being offset equally as new persons enter, up until division or subdivision is required. Nations can subdivide through federalism into states and local jurisdictions. Some would argue that corporations and clubs, etc. are subdivisions, so if we imagine we need many nations for all to have a voice, subdivision complicates this, whereas, for example, Catalan seceding from Spain is just division.

We would have to invest enough in the birth and development conditions of each person to achieve this outcome—with power flowing from the bottom upward. In other words, absolute self-determination among political equals is inverse to population growth and relative to a nonhuman world.

This axiom can expose the fact that many individuals and groups—hiding behind “private” families and family planning—do not want political equality, but would rather exploit children as economic inputs than invest in their being born and raised in conditions likely to make them highly educated, resilient and politically confident citizens that who challenge concentrations of wealth and power. The Fair Start Model still reserves a private right to have children to would-be parents, but it would be more limited—like the right to speak freely is (we can’t defame or incite violence, and we all get a turn, etc.), and be geared around birth equity. So there is still autonomy for the would-be parents but balanced against other interests.

As early as the middle of the 20th century, when international law was coming into true effect, family planning could have been determined by incentives and entitlements that ensured children’s ecosocial birth and development conditions. That did not happen. Instead, that money went to the top of the economic pyramid.

Family policies could have been determined by the presence of incentivizing and equalizing resources. In fact, they were hidden behind the idea of privacy. The Fair Start Model argues that one’s perspective on whether procreative decisions should be personal or interpersonal, private or public, should be influenced by a consideration of the climate.

Is there a way to see this more simply? Who do you have to be—minimally—to exist in a social contract and hence be free because you are willingly part of an enterprise? You have to be—minimally—“other-regarding” enough to ensure that family planning, as well as birth and development conditions, is consistent with the Children’s Rights Convention (particularly Articles 5, 6, 12, 13, 17, 19, 24, 26, 27, 28 31, 32, 34, 35, and 36)—interpreted as first requiring climate restoration via birth equity. This thinking aligns deference to majorities, with individual rights, by giving those rights to the future majority first and foremost as a fair start in life. To the extent that these things were in conflict and not aligned in the past, the opposition justified top-down governance (based on a lack of common trust) rather than relative self-governance.

Why should we trust one another if we accepted a system that was fundamentally unfair? The easiest way is to say that democracy and social contracts, or any form of consensual cooperation, require trust. It is hard to be trustful when you have not been treated fairly, and without a fair start in life, something which is now not part of how we are created.

Some theories of political obligation, having to comply with the law, require that everyone who participates in a reasonably just, mutually beneficial cooperative practice—philosopher H.L.A. Hart’s “joint enterprise according to rules”—has an obligation to bear a fair share of the burdens of the practice. Understandings of what constitutes “fairness” are where political theories frequently diverge. The contingent obligation may be, according to some, owed to the others who cooperate in the enterprise, for cooperation is what makes it possible for any individual to enjoy the benefits of the practice. Thus, the obligation is contingent on the capacity to participate, which is and should be contingent on the norms which account for our creation.

Those norms would not crowd speakers out of getting meaningful time at the podium; rather, they would make sure we respect each other enough as equals to listen, and we would be surrounded by ecologies not already determined by others—like Exxon destroying our climate—so that very idea of “relative self-determination” makes sense. This is a claim that is driven home in the recent film Artifice Girl, a story about what we owe—in the act of creation—to AI that might develop a capacity for autonomy.

In other words, to properly assess costs and benefits, we have to first become groups of people capable of doing so in a way that is inclusive and reflective of the group constituents (the very thing implied by the preambles to constitutions and international covenants). Those who refuse to give children an ecosocial fair start in life as the first and overriding human right are opting to leave the resources there, undercut their claims, risk millions, and undercut U.S. national security.

It is better to use things like climate reparations to fund equity than to react to disempowerment in violent ways (and maybe because inequity is backed by legal systems that rely on and legitimize violence), the way some have and will, hitting innocent victims rather than those who benefited from the disempowerment.

Divided Perspectives: The Controversy Surrounding Climate Reparations

Climate reparations (or climate justice) refer to the concept of compensating communities and countries that have been disproportionately affected by climate change and its impacts. The idea is rooted in the recognition that historical emissions and unsustainable practices of developed nations have contributed significantly to climate change, while vulnerable communities and countries that did little to contribute to the crisis bear the brunt of its consequences.

While the concept of climate reparations has gained traction and support from various organizations and advocates, not everyone is on board.

We suggest several reasons for this divide:

• Disagreements on Responsibility: Some argue that assigning blame and responsibility for climate change is complex and that the historical emissions of developed countries alone do not contribute solely to the consequences of climate change. No doubt they have contributed significantly to the damage.
• Economic Concerns: Implementing climate reparations requires significant financial resources—a cause for concern for many countries and individuals—which many feel they do not owe and see as an unfair burden.
• Political Challenges: Climate reparations involve global cooperation and agreement, which can be challenging to achieve. Negotiating and implementing a fair and equitable system of reparations would require consensus among nations with diverse economic interests and priorities.
• Resistance to Change: Some individuals and organizations may be resistant to the idea of climate reparations due to ideological or political reasons. They may oppose the redistribution of wealth or view it as an unfair burden on their own countries or communities.

Despite the disagreements, it is essential to recognize the urgent need for action on climate change and the disproportionate impacts it has on vulnerable communities. While the specific mechanisms and approaches for climate reparations may vary, the overall goal is to ensure fairness, justice, and support for those who have been most affected.

Ultimately, finding common ground and fostering dialogue among stakeholders is crucial to developing effective climate justice frameworks and achieving a sustainable and just future for all. This is what the Fair Start Model does.

Leveling the Playing Field: The Importance of Birth Equity in the Fair Start Model

The Fair Start Model advocates birth equity because the circumstances into which individuals are born can significantly impact their life outcomes. Birth equity refers to ensuring that all children—regardless of their background or socioeconomic status—have an equal opportunity to thrive and reach their full potential from the moment they are born.

By advocating for birth equity, the Fair Start Model addresses the disparities and inequities that exist among children and prevents every child from having a fair start in life.

Birth equity aligns with the principles of social justice and equal opportunity. It recognizes that some individuals and communities face systemic disadvantages and barriers that hinder their ability to provide their children with optimal conditions for growth and development. By advocating policies and initiatives that promote birth equity, the Fair Start Model seeks to level the playing field and ensure that every child has a fair start in life.

By prioritizing birth equity, the Fair Start Model strives to create a society in which all children have access to essential resources and opportunities that support their physical, cognitive, and emotional development. That is why we support RAFUG’s Seed for Future (Uganda) Project and seek to partner with the Golden Love and Hands of Hope Foundation on the Seeds for Africa (Nigeria) Project.

Ultimately, the Fair Start Model recognizes that birth equity is not just a matter of fairness, but also a crucial step toward building a more equitable and just society and helping to mitigate the effects of climate change. By addressing disparities early in life, the Fair Start Model seeks to break the cycle of intergenerational poverty, improve overall health outcomes, empower individuals to reach their full potential (regardless of their circumstances at birth) and help protect the climate world.

Questions to Identify Those Who Reject Equity

What is your stance on the basic connection between children being born, and things like child welfare, the climate crisis, animal rights, or anything else you might claim to care about? Does your answer prohibit violations of children’s rights?

In the answers given, we will be looking for an inversion related to growth, evidence of an intent to actually empower people as they enter the world, taking democracy seriously, and considering non-Eurocentric instances of democracy that might have been more inclusive than their later counterparts.

In the Fair Start Model, the best response to climate change starts with using an alternative version of social justice that does not use future generations to convert the nonhuman world into wealth for a few. This idea of justice does not ignore our day-to-day relations and how they are determined by our birth position but flows from a place of bottom-up vulnerability, not strength.

While some inquiries into climate justice and social equity focus on the idea of population we can think of these matters as the relations between people as they are created. Humans are defined by their relations and obligations to others, and our birth position, in terms of nationality or class, largely defines our impact on the ecologies we all share and our disparate influence in our relations with one another.

If you are empowered at all—as part of the source of legitimate government and sovereignty—then the first question you ask is: “Are children being born into the world because they will have fundamental power over me in every sense, politically from the governance, and daily in their impact (impact which largely depends on nationality and class, as cited above)?” You will limit the power of others at the base, and not accept obligations to follow rules in a system that does not allow me to limit and consent to that power, so that you are objectively (mathematically) obligated, based on deriving back all the way to the most fundamental obligation. Free people will condition compliance with the law on that norm empowering them.

Bending from Growth to Justice and Relative Self-Determination

This gives us a formula (which qualifies at least as a provisional baseline for climate reparations) to determine, qualitatively, optimal population ranges, and the method to achieve them: Shift unjust concentrations of wealth and power, built by not having to pay the costs of ensuring birth and development conditions consistent with the Children’s Rights Convention (CRC), towards funding all children with equal opportunities in life and a natural, biodiverse environment. The CRC is a standard because it tells us who, minimally, we should be. And the formula above applies to any grouping of people, from states to companies, to clubs, to spontaneous gatherings.

Funding, resources, and incentives, should have been the factors in determining family planning behaviors for the last century or so, and had it been, we could have evaded climate disasters and other crises we face today. Instead, we lived under a system of growth economics that created many people raised in inequitable conditions for shopping malls, rather than investing in them as equal members of a town hall; i.e., creating consumers, not citizens. This is the fountainhead of what some call the economization of life.

What are the practical ramifications of all of this? As “climate loss and damage” reparation formulas are assessed, we should correct this flaw and use true relative self-determination as the baseline—a move that could increase what wealthy countries owe by trillions of dollars. Moreover, correcting this mistake ensures that we can override current property rights to ensure that all children get enough of what they need in order to physically compromise legitimate democracies, capable of actually and fairly assigning property rights. That comes first. No theory of obligation to follow the law works unless it accounts for the creation of just power relations, and all power relations are fundamentally created at birth. Overconsumption (the power of wealth) relative to population size is the issue, rather than population alone.

Moving wealth into family-based reparations catalyzes the trend that is already having the greatest impact on the climate crisis and our chance for a better future—women choosing smaller families or a child-free life. This is a sea-change in our species and how we relate to our ecologies, and despite the best attempts of those at the head of the economic pyramid to resist, this change is here and something we can accelerate.

Do we need official governing processes like the United Nations, or Congress, to authorize this wealth transition? Thinking so commits the fallacy described above: that governmental authority derives from a prior obligation to ensure the capacity to participate. Many individuals are already disclaiming property rights to portions of their wealth in favor of family planning entitlements and will target concentrations of wealth and corrupt politicians to do the same. They should do so nonviolently, but be aware that acts of mass violence may very well arise from the same sense of disempowerment, and just be directed at the wrong targets rather than those who actually benefited from fundamental injustice.

The “FamScam”

When this research was brought to wealthy funders in the animal rights space—who would have been obligated to help pay to correct the mistake and would have been potentially liable for years of greenwashing under the standard (the climate crisis means their claims of being green, sustainable, humane, eco-friendly, etc., were false)—they ignored it, then quietly backed the elimination of litigation that was designed to correct the mistake. They blocked the solution, for their own benefit, at a deadly cost to others.

They did this while many organizations—including the ones they were funding—were simply filling the public domain with fundraising noise designed around low-impact campaigns that did not threaten the fundamental power structure.

Their reaction mimics other concentrations of wealth and power—like the editor of the New York Times—who appear to want to further liberal values while quietly undoing them with family policy to maintain their position. A peremptory norm that would avert the birth of billions of people because we have new and expensive obligations to anyone born has ramifications for nonhumans that makes iconic animal rights battles, like Proposition 12, look fairly irrelevant.

How can we possibly think we are protecting animals while ignoring the creation of humans who will harm them? Organizations avoid this issue because it is hard to navigate since they do not make the connections above, or because they don’t really believe in justice and they can make money on low-impact and less risky campaigns instead by relying on donor ignorance.

It’s bad enough to not do what one says, but skewing the baseline and process for climate reparations, by ignoring a right to nature and equal opportunity as the basis to judge what the climate crisis cost us, risks a grand injustice. Humans face the climate crisis because we did not recognize exactly who we should be—minimally, in order to be free. Future generations deserve a world in which that mistake is corrected, and those who benefited from the mistake must pay the amount they benefitted.

One concrete tactic to do this is through greenwashing litigation, challenging humane, environmental, ESG, DEIJ, and other value-based claims. Misleading claims in this area obfuscated the impacts companies, media, and nonprofits (some of which intentionally hid basic obligations that would have shown they were knowingly undoing their own claims) were having, forestalling reforms and risking millions of innocent lives. Suing the bad actors can bring forth the truth, and enable things like truly green certification systems, and family-based climate reparations. Using the Fair Start Model—and nurturing critical discourse about actually distributing power to constitute democracy—is one standard for this important and essential work. It requires climate restoration and biodiversity and accounts for empowering children to thrive by improving their birth and development conditions.

It demands these things as the first peremptory norm under international law, and can thus ensure a fundamental truth and reconciliation process for the climate crisis that actually compensates the victims directly. It may also reduce growing acts of mass shootings and other violence, which may be unfolding as many feel keenly disempowered.

We will also be outing those described above who were involved in hiding the research—including research that showed their own fundamental mistakes and liability—and moving the goalposts for what nature and freedom mean. Doing so skews the baseline for compensating future generations for the climate crisis by making it seem that the anthropocentric standard that caused the climate crisis is the only standard available. That skewing also hides the idea that truly free persons will make their obligation to follow the law on being empowered to control it, and with it, the influence others—like Exxon—have over them, and over their children.

We are urging those who care about basic justice to help make examples of those blocking these truths, publicly urging them to use their massive wealth—in dozens of effective ways—to bend the arc of who we are becoming towards being just and empowered people. If they do not believe in a coherent system of political obligation that accurately assesses costs and benefits, it’s unclear why they should deserve its benefits and protections.

The Fair Start Movement is the story of—and solution for—this struggle.

Author Bios:

Esther Afolaranmi is a co-executive director at the Fair Start Movement and the founder of Golden Love and Hands of Hope Foundation, which works to strengthen vulnerable and underprivileged communities in Nigeria.

Mwesigye Robert is the founder of Rejoice Africa Foundation.

Carter Dillard is the policy adviser for the Fair Start Movement. He served as an Honors Program attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice and also served with a national security law agency.

There is a conflict between ecocentric people struggling for freedom, and anthropocentric people threatening that freedom. This conflict, which happens beneath the surface of most media, constitutes a "secret war" for what the future of Earth will be.

This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

This secret war involves groups of people across the world using ecocidal pro-growth and inequitable family policies, as well as anthropocentric environmentalism, to quietly undo the progress that the world seemed to be making on multiple fronts: child equity, climate crisis mitigation, animal protection, as well as ensuring functional democracies. These groups involve many nonprofits that are knowingly undoing with one hand the success they claim to be making with the other. This last category of undoing—regarding our democracies—makes these family policies a secret war on freedom as well.

The Conduct of War

Is it hyperbole to say war? The almost five children a week murdered by their own parents in the U.S. alone, some slowly tortured to death through beatings, starvation, burnings, etc. because of our pro-growth approach to family policy with no parental readiness standards are victims of that war. So are the children who lose the birth lottery bad enough to be born into horrific poverty, at best statistically destined to work for the children of millionaires and billionaires who will control their lives based on a system of random birth inequity that is backed by violence. That's the servitude of a war.

It would feel like a war to be part of the non-human animal families and communities, parents and their children, exterminated by the trillions as the wave of human growth rolls over them. And who has the ability to change any of this? Not the average citizen. It's irrational to even vote in things like national elections where, thanks to family policies, there are so many voters that each vote is pretty much irrelevant. In such cases, money—made on the same unsustainable growth—is what speaks.

Constitutive Policies Counter the Children’s Rights Convention

These family policies (which might be called constitutive or de-constitutive) do nothing to ensure that all children are born into conditions that comply with the United Nations Children's Rights Convention—the minimum children need to comprise democracies—but instead push children into horrible conditions with no minimum levels of welfare, something done to ensure economic growth and to avoid "baby busts" or declining fertility rates. This puts wealth in the hands of a few, argues Nobel Laureate Steven Chu.

These policies operate under the lie that the act of creating other persons is a matter of the personal freedom or privacy of the creators; i.e., parents. In fact, creating new human beings is not personal; rather, it is interpersonal in nature. Bringing new people into the world shapes the future we all share. The notion that this is a private matter was created by the wealthy and powerful elites who do not want to pay their fair share to ensure children's equality of opportunity.

Unsustainable Growth

These policies, designed around a system premised on unsustainable growth, aim to prepare children, already suffering from vast inequality, to become consumers and workers for shopping malls rather than preparing them equitably to grow up to become effective citizens in democratic town halls. These inequitable policies have created a fantasy world of self-determination—freedom to take part in markets—while stealing the power each voice should have in true democracies.

Groups like Fair Start Movement (where I serve as policy adviser), Stable Planet Alliance, Rejoice Africa Foundation and others are blowing the whistle on these policies and their devastating impacts, and treating the right to an ecosocial fair start in life for all children now and in the future—as an overriding basis to take back the wealth—by all means effective—in order to fund better family policies as the most effective way in the long run to protect children, non-human animals, democracy, and the environment.

Why "by all means effective?" Before some of the recent literature delving into the history of population policy, most academics and policymakers assumed political obligation—the need for citizens to follow the law—came from top-down systems like constitutions or the United Nations. But if systems of governance should actually derive from the people, that would make no sense. Instead, the systems that account for how we are born and raised would primarily or even exclusively account—bottom up—for our power relations, power rising up from the people themselves. And it’s very clear the top-down systems in place now have failed to protect us from things like the climate crisis and vast inequality. Why did they fail?

Constitutive Fallacy

They committed what is called the constitutive fallacy—basing our obligation to follow the law on things like written constitutions rather than just and sustainable family policies that actually empower people to constitute just nations. To do that, to constitute, means being sufficiently other-regarding or ecocentric enough (perhaps using the baseline test below) to respect the agency of, rather than to exploit, other people and the nonhuman world our mutual thriving requires.

They assumed the borders of human power were defined by lines on a map, rather than the norms that account for our creation and rearing. The latter is what constitutes us. They never accounted for actual power relations because they never accounted for their creation, through functional family policies (based on a simple baseline test) meant to actually empower people while disempowering no one.

For example, these top-down systems never dealt with children’s need for nonhuman habitats protected by climate restoration, nor the vastly disparate impact on impoverished children of color from refusal to meet those needs. People like Peter Singer have relied on these top-down systems that begin with the appropriation of the nonhuman world and future generations, even when they undo the sort of outcomes—like animal liberation—Singer promotes.

It's Not About Population, but Choice

What is the hallmark of these systems? Some are empowered by disempowering others, robbing the latter of the capacity to consent to the influence others (greenhouse gas emitters, bad parents, the uber-wealthy, etc.) would have upon them.

For free and equal people to constitute a nation they must be acting, before setting down the basic rules, in one very particular way. They must be seeing growth in numbers as directly inverse to the absolute self-determination of each individual. That proves that people are actually being empowered as they join, and thus politically obligated, and sets a baseline for equitable child development and optimal population ranges.

This is not about population, it's about choice, power, and the inseparable and antecedent nature of choices to be part of unjust and nonconsensual systems of political obligation that originate with our creation. We cannot think of or say anything that does not start with and orient from some form of political obligation, from a choice to be part of some form of power relations. And we cannot further anything we purport to value without possibly undoing the value based on our choice of fundamental political relations.

Each of us is inevitably choosing to be or not be part of such systems, given that we pay taxes, participate in a variety of official processes, benefit from these systems, etc. That is what it means for the government to derive from the people, and not from groups but rather from individuals, whose consent legitimates governance.

What Would Truly Free People Do?

Human rights compliance justifies governance, but if the first human right—the right to have children and the family policies that precede government—is not developed fairly so as to make a functional social contract, that justification never occurs. It has to come from the people, who must come from the conditions in which they were created and reared. The creation norm, and our decision to make it just or unjust, comes first and accounts for who we are and everything we do. We cannot claim to be just without making it just. A key aspect of the secret wars involves those responsible hiding this simple fact, its role in limiting the property rights of concentrations of wealth and power, and those concentrations impeding all children's right to an equitable beginning in life.

If you want to know whether you are free, assess what it would mean to break your nation into a constitutional convention in order to make new basic rules. How functional—or self-determining for its participants—would that process be, honestly? And while the capacity to engage in functional town halls is vital, it is the day-to-day experience of having such relations that we should truly value, versus the chaotic commercial relations—based on exploiting and imitating one another—we experience today.

Truly free people will exist in systems where such conventions are easily viable. To ensure that state of affairs they will override dysfunctional systems of rules to actually limit and decentralize the power others have over them, and to build just and consensual communities organically, through things like deeply scaled baby bond payments that move resources from rich to poor kids and that help restore equality and nature, so that obligation flows bottom-up—from the people.

Truly free people will condition their obligation to follow the law (including recognizing property rights) on actually being empowered, and there is no other way to do that but through changing how we have and raise children to actually—in a measurable way using a simple baseline test—empower them. They will focus on empowerment in the creation of people and their actual relations, the people from whose consent things like constitutions derive their authority. That condition—of needing to empower—enables significant civil disobedience to achieve, something preferable to the violence disempowerment causes, the violence usually impacting the least culpable rather than the most.

Fair Start Planning

We can also effectively move towards fair start planning, and optimal population and power relation ranges as envisioned by Partha Dasgupta and others, through things like constitutional litigation meant to ensure climate restoration through birth equity "loss and damage" redistributions, steeply progressive baby bonds, corporate reforms that level the playing field for employee’s kids, requiring family policy and related conflict of interest disclosures (including having to change positioning) as part of ESG frameworks, furthering labor reforms to eliminate child inequity, a discourse and role modeling that centers family planning on birth and developmental equity, and by urging leaders to adopt a fair start as the first and overriding human right.

One clear step towards compliance with the best interpretation of these norms would be to urge that programming around the education of young women—around the world—begin with ensuring they understand that all children's right to an ecosocial fair start in life (defined by concrete climate restoration and birth equity measures), overrides all competing rights and interests as the first and peremptory human right, including any conflicting property rights. This truth, which reverses the lie about family policy at the base of the misunderstandings of freedom that plague our world, shows a true unity of value to students.

That right must become the standard or baseline for cost/benefit analysis (using concrete metrics), and the guide for priority use of evolving loss and damage payments for climate crisis impacts—with a key use being socially equitable and ecologically restorative family planning entitlements that capture the true cost of all wealth. The standard for knowing whether something is good or bad is being a group of people capable of determining the question in a fair and inclusive way. That's freedom through democracy.

Disclosure Is Key

How do we win the secret wars? The easiest path may simply be to urge everyone to disclose their views on these issues—including their views on climate restoration, birth equity redistribution, and other matters discussed above. Those blocking freedom for future generations win the secret wars by keeping them secret.

It's trite to say that all things are interconnected. It is not trite to say that this is so not because of what we do, but because of who we should be. Changing the way we plan families is the only way to ensure that connection is just.

Author Bio: Carter Dillard is the policy adviser for the Fair Start Movement. He served as an Honors Program attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice and also served with a national security law agency before developing a comprehensive account of reforming family planning for the Yale Human Rights and Development Law Journal.

There is a conflict between ecocentric people struggling for freedom, and anthropocentric people threatening that freedom. This conflict, which happens beneath the surface of most media, constitutes a “secret war” for what the future of Earth will be.

This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

This secret war involves groups of people across the world using ecocidal pro-growth and inequitable family policies, as well as anthropocentric environmentalism, to quietly undo the progress that the world seemed to be making on multiple fronts: child equity, climate crisis mitigation, animal protection, as well as ensuring functional democracies. These groups involve many nonprofits that are knowingly undoing with one hand the success they claim to be making with the other. This last category of undoing—regarding our democracies—makes these family policies a secret war on freedom as well.

The Conduct of War

Is it hyperbole to say war? The almost five children a week murdered by their own parents in the U.S. alone, some slowly tortured to death through beatings, starvation, burnings, etc. because of our pro-growth approach to family policy with no parental readiness standards are victims of that war. So are the children who lose the birth lottery bad enough to be born into horrific poverty, at best statistically destined to work for the children of millionaires and billionaires who will control their lives based on a system of random birth inequity that is backed by violence. That’s the servitude of a war.

It would feel like a war to be part of the non-human animal families and communities, parents and their children, exterminated by the trillions as the wave of human growth rolls over them. And who has the ability to change any of this? Not the average citizen. It’s irrational to even vote in things like national elections where, thanks to family policies, there are so many voters that each vote is pretty much irrelevant. In such cases, money—made on the same unsustainable growth—is what speaks.

Constitutive Policies Counter the Children’s Rights Convention

These family policies (which might be called constitutive or de-constitutive) do nothing to ensure that all children are born into conditions that comply with the United Nations Children’s Rights Convention—the minimum children need to comprise democracies—but instead push children into horrible conditions with no minimum levels of welfare, something done to ensure economic growth and to avoid “baby busts” or declining fertility rates. This puts wealth in the hands of a few, argues Nobel Laureate Steven Chu.

These policies operate under the lie that the act of creating other persons is a matter of the personal freedom or privacy of the creators; i.e., parents. In fact, creating new human beings is not personal; rather, it is interpersonal in nature. Bringing new people into the world shapes the future we all share. The notion that this is a private matter was created by the wealthy and powerful elites who do not want to pay their fair share to ensure children’s equality of opportunity.

Unsustainable Growth

These policies, designed around a system premised on unsustainable growth, aim to prepare children, already suffering from vast inequality, to become consumers and workers for shopping malls rather than preparing them equitably to grow up to become effective citizens in democratic town halls. These inequitable policies have created a fantasy world of self-determination—freedom to take part in markets—while stealing the power each voice should have in true democracies.

Groups like Fair Start Movement (where I serve as policy adviser), Stable Planet Alliance, Rejoice Africa Foundation and others are blowing the whistle on these policies and their devastating impacts, and treating the right to an ecosocial fair start in life for all children now and in the future—as an overriding basis to take back the wealth—by all means effective—in order to fund better family policies as the most effective way in the long run to protect children, non-human animals, democracy, and the environment.

Why “by all means effective?” Before some of the recent literature delving into the history of population policy, most academics and policymakers assumed political obligation—the need for citizens to follow the law—came from top-down systems like constitutions or the United Nations. But if systems of governance should actually derive from the people, that would make no sense. Instead, the systems that account for how we are born and raised would primarily or even exclusively account—bottom up—for our power relations, power rising up from the people themselves. And it’s very clear the top-down systems in place now have failed to protect us from things like the climate crisis and vast inequality. Why did they fail?

Constitutive Fallacy

They committed what is called the constitutive fallacy—basing our obligation to follow the law on things like written constitutions rather than just and sustainable family policies that actually empower people to constitute just nations. To do that, to constitute, means being sufficiently other-regarding or ecocentric enough (perhaps using the baseline test below) to respect the agency of, rather than to exploit, other people and the nonhuman world our mutual thriving requires.

They assumed the borders of human power were defined by lines on a map, rather than the norms that account for our creation and rearing. The latter is what constitutes us. They never accounted for actual power relations because they never accounted for their creation, through functional family policies (based on a simple baseline test) meant to actually empower people while disempowering no one.

For example, these top-down systems never dealt with children’s need for nonhuman habitats protected by climate restoration, nor the vastly disparate impact on impoverished children of color from refusal to meet those needs. People like Peter Singer have relied on these top-down systems that begin with the appropriation of the nonhuman world and future generations, even when they undo the sort of outcomes—like animal liberation—Singer promotes.

It’s Not About Population, but Choice

What is the hallmark of these systems? Some are empowered by disempowering others, robbing the latter of the capacity to consent to the influence others (greenhouse gas emitters, bad parents, the uber-wealthy, etc.) would have upon them.

For free and equal people to constitute a nation they must be acting, before setting down the basic rules, in one very particular way. They must be seeing growth in numbers as directly inverse to the absolute self-determination of each individual. That proves that people are actually being empowered as they join, and thus politically obligated, and sets a baseline for equitable child development and optimal population ranges.

This is not about population, it’s about choice, power, and the inseparable and antecedent nature of choices to be part of unjust and nonconsensual systems of political obligation that originate with our creation. We cannot think of or say anything that does not start with and orient from some form of political obligation, from a choice to be part of some form of power relations. And we cannot further anything we purport to value without possibly undoing the value based on our choice of fundamental political relations.

Each of us is inevitably choosing to be or not be part of such systems, given that we pay taxes, participate in a variety of official processes, benefit from these systems, etc. That is what it means for the government to derive from the people, and not from groups but rather from individuals, whose consent legitimates governance.

What Would Truly Free People Do?

Human rights compliance justifies governance, but if the first human right—the right to have children and the family policies that precede government—is not developed fairly so as to make a functional social contract, that justification never occurs. It has to come from the people, who must come from the conditions in which they were created and reared. The creation norm, and our decision to make it just or unjust, comes first and accounts for who we are and everything we do. We cannot claim to be just without making it just. A key aspect of the secret wars involves those responsible hiding this simple fact, its role in limiting the property rights of concentrations of wealth and power, and those concentrations impeding all children’s right to an equitable beginning in life.

If you want to know whether you are free, assess what it would mean to break your nation into a constitutional convention in order to make new basic rules. How functional—or self-determining for its participants—would that process be, honestly? And while the capacity to engage in functional town halls is vital, it is the day-to-day experience of having such relations that we should truly value, versus the chaotic commercial relations—based on exploiting and imitating one another—we experience today.

Truly free people will exist in systems where such conventions are easily viable. To ensure that state of affairs they will override dysfunctional systems of rules to actually limit and decentralize the power others have over them, and to build just and consensual communities organically, through things like deeply scaled baby bond payments that move resources from rich to poor kids and that help restore equality and nature, so that obligation flows bottom-up—from the people.

Truly free people will condition their obligation to follow the law (including recognizing property rights) on actually being empowered, and there is no other way to do that but through changing how we have and raise children to actually—in a measurable way using a simple baseline test—empower them. They will focus on empowerment in the creation of people and their actual relations, the people from whose consent things like constitutions derive their authority. That condition—of needing to empower—enables significant civil disobedience to achieve, something preferable to the violence disempowerment causes, the violence usually impacting the least culpable rather than the most.

Fair Start Planning

We can also effectively move towards fair start planning, and optimal population and power relation ranges as envisioned by Partha Dasgupta and others, through things like constitutional litigation meant to ensure climate restoration through birth equity “loss and damage” redistributions, steeply progressive baby bonds, corporate reforms that level the playing field for employee’s kids, requiring family policy and related conflict of interest disclosures (including having to change positioning) as part of ESG frameworks, furthering labor reforms to eliminate child inequity, a discourse and role modeling that centers family planning on birth and developmental equity, and by urging leaders to adopt a fair start as the first and overriding human right.

One clear step towards compliance with the best interpretation of these norms would be to urge that programming around the education of young women—around the world—begin with ensuring they understand that all children’s right to an ecosocial fair start in life (defined by concrete climate restoration and birth equity measures), overrides all competing rights and interests as the first and peremptory human right, including any conflicting property rights. This truth, which reverses the lie about family policy at the base of the misunderstandings of freedom that plague our world, shows a true unity of value to students.

That right must become the standard or baseline for cost/benefit analysis (using concrete metrics), and the guide for priority use of evolving loss and damage payments for climate crisis impacts—with a key use being socially equitable and ecologically restorative family planning entitlements that capture the true cost of all wealth. The standard for knowing whether something is good or bad is being a group of people capable of determining the question in a fair and inclusive way. That’s freedom through democracy.

Disclosure Is Key

How do we win the secret wars? The easiest path may simply be to urge everyone to disclose their views on these issues—including their views on climate restoration, birth equity redistribution, and other matters discussed above. Those blocking freedom for future generations win the secret wars by keeping them secret.

It’s trite to say that all things are interconnected. It is not trite to say that this is so not because of what we do, but because of who we should be. Changing the way we plan families is the only way to ensure that connection is just.

In September 2022, an international group of climate scientists published a study showing that the world was close to, or in some cases had even surpassed, key tipping points in the climate crisis that would trigger irreversible changes in the world’s ecosystems. These include the collapse of the Greenland and West Antarctic Ice Sheets, tropical coral reef die-off, the abrupt thawing of Northern permafrost, the loss of Barents Sea ice, the melting of mountain glaciers, the dieback of the Amazon rainforest, and changes to the West African monsoon that will impact the Sahel region of Africa.

This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

These points launch the world into the unknown and unknowable, as they engage feedback loops the consequences of which we cannot accurately predict. And yet those predictions concern the mass suffering and death of tens of millions, and maybe more. We are at a tipping point. And President Biden has yet to declare the climate emergency he publicly pondered in July 2022. He likely (and legitimately) fears a political backlash; populism is seen now as a barrier to climate reforms.

What’s wrong? Threats to our species as a whole, and to our survival, are amorphous things. They are too large, and too slow, for us—for the slowly evolving human brain—to see properly. But threats framed as originating from other persons, from the people around us are not. Our species is quite accustomed to dealing with such threats—this is the history of war. And in the case of things like pandemics, where amorphous threats like contagions were framed as threats by the government to deprive us of liberty, they have triggered terrifying populist responses.

The climate crisis certainly is a form of oppression, exacted upon a vast majority of middle and low-income folks by a wealthy few in a fossil fuel industry that knew and hid the facts of what it was doing, and the relatively few politicians and world leaders that authorized and enabled their acts. And while we are accustomed to scientists and those same politicians framing news regarding the crisis, or very young persons like Greta Thunberg with their angry but relatively muted responses centered on the rights of future generations, we can imagine other framings.

What if the news that climate crisis-driven heat waves are killing people were not framed as a study or science at all, but the still true vision of a handful of wealthy elites and the few thousand political cronies that protect their profits by committing the indiscriminate killing of children, of grandmothers, and of pregnant women. Why not see it this way, in the terms our brains might react to? Why not frame it in terms of class, which triggers action on the right and left, often beyond the margins? Yes, climate change is an ethereal thing we cannot touch, like the bullets of Putin’s army, but that’s merely a choice of how we perceive it. Who pays the price of the crisis and who benefits from it, and the science that shows such a flow of responsibility, is a fact.

It could be that we do not frame it in this way because that framing does not present any particular solution, any better solution, than more amorphous frames. We still need to go to courts and other bodies to determine liability. We still need governments, and their processes to regulate emissions or build systems of sequestration. We still need massive regulatory networks to implement climate mitigation plans.

All of this is true, but it is also true that—like the trials at Nuremberg—the world has faced unprecedented threats and the situations that followed them with unprecedented systems of justice. Perhaps climate change is such an unprecedented threat, justifying solutions—like the demanding particularly culpable corporations follow the lead of companies like Patagonia—and begin to transform their structure accordingly to start to repair the damage they have caused.

That sort of demand, regardless of governments, would be particularly appropriate were the repairs treated as reparations and the beneficiaries future generations—the most likely class of persons to be harmed. Future generations could be best compensated through effective family planning incentives, entitlements, and reparations awarded to their parents through novel devices like private baby bonds that encourage sustainably sized families likely to maximize the resilience of their children. If we believe that government derives from the people, these solutions—ones that involve the creation of those people—precede and exceed the ability of governments, and the companies they protect, to refuse.

Moreover, how we frame the crisis can trigger the governmental processes described above by motivating officials to act, much the way the framing of the pandemic created massive political backlashes. There are many other examples of amorphous threats transformed into tangible ones. Certainly, the harms caused by the crisis, and the irreversible harms the tipping points promise, are cause for a populist backlash, if we just find a way to see it as the oppression of many by a few that it is.

Author Bio: Carter Dillard is the policy adviser for the Fair Start Movement. He served as an Honors Program attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice and also served with a national security law agency before developing a comprehensive account of reforming family planning for the Yale Human Rights and Development Law Journal.

It’s time to rethink our broken and unfair family planning systems.

July 11 was World Population Day, an observance established by the United Nations aiming to highlight population issues, particularly how the human population relates to the environment. The UN’s Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA) marked the occasion by releasing its World Population Prospects 2022 report, which announced that the global human population is on target to reach a new milestone: 8 billion people on the planet by November 15, 2022.

This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

While this staggering figure should alarm even the most casual observer of the various environmental and health crises stemming from the overpopulation that is emblematic of the Anthropocene—like climate change, deforestation, ocean acidification, food and water shortages, plastic pollution, air pollution, biodiversity loss, and the sixth extinction—the UN has advanced a false narrative, trumpeting the “story behind 8 billion and how we’ve got here… [as] a story of triumph,” saying that reaching this milestone is “a cause for celebration” with “infinite” possibilities for growth.

“We must celebrate a world of 8 billion people,” writes Dr. Bannet Ndyanabangi, the East and Southern Africa regional director for the UN Population Fund, the UN agency tasked with improving reproductive and maternal health. Others are picking up that upbeat messaging.

The truth is that growth is undoing the progress we made in our response to the climate crisis. Also, our near-universal family planning systems have been based on a lie—that having kids is more personal for the parents than interpersonal for the future child, our communities, and our planet—a lie that maintains the generational privilege of the wealthy, and promotes unsustainable growth over birth entitlements that would have ensured all kids were born in conditions that comply with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC).

The interrelated ecological and public health crises facing humanity and the planet—fundamentally driven by the Anthropocene and the population growth that defines the era—have already been causing massive harm to countless species, including people, and perhaps most problematically, children who will carry with them lifelong impacts. And we are on track to make things even worse. “The effects of human-caused global warming are happening now, are irreversible on the timescale of people alive today, and will worsen in the decades to come,” warns NASA.

We will add billions more people to this catastrophic scenario—around 10.4 billion by 2100—with the UN itself projecting widespread famine. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) the State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2022 report, around 670 million people (8 percent of the world population), are expected to face hunger by 2030. Sadly, as FAO points out, that figure is the same figure from 2015, when the goal of ending hunger, food insecurity, and malnutrition by the end of this decade was launched under the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Over this 15-year period, humanity would have made zero progress in the fight to end world hunger.

More People, More Inequality

Another concern is that the multitude of environmental and health impacts are not shared equally but depend on hard-to-grasp levels of inequality. Moreover, as the UN reports, inequality is growing for “more than 70 percent of the global population.” The people least responsible for the climate crisis—the poor and the vulnerable—are set to suffer the most, and yet the rich world is pushing for more humans that will exacerbate the crisis, with abortion bans on the rise across the United States, and wealthy nations like Australia, Estonia, Finland, Italy, and Japan offering their citizens financial incentives to have more babies.

Even the Pope doesn’t grasp the reality of our situation. In his 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’, the pontiff lamented ecological degradation and global warming, writing that Mother Earth “cries out to us because of the harm we have inflicted on her by our irresponsible use.” Yet he has failed to recognize that unchecked human population growth is not only damaging to the environment but also to the welfare of future generations. That failure is made clear by his encouraging young people to have more children.

Failed Family Planning

Designed in the 20th century, near-universal family planning models and systems treated the act of having children as personal rather than interpersonal, which caused human and societal growth to arc too high for the planet’s carrying capacity. Currently, humanity is using 1.8 times the ecological resources that the Earth is able to generate in a single year. This year, according to the Global Footprint Network, humans will hit “Earth Overshoot Day” on July 28. Put it another way, the current human population is so high that we need the resources of 1.8 Earths to sustain us for just one year.

The world’s broken family planning models have prevented a fair distribution of wealth among children, in particular, protecting pockets of extreme wealth and privilege and ensuring the gulf between rich and poor we see today. While many laud the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which ensures the protection, survival, and development of children without discrimination, the fact is that world leaders have never applied it to the majority of children or to future generations as a standard for birth and development conditions. Billions were born over the past several decades in conditions that blatantly violated the convention’s standards—standards we recognize as universal to develop functional societies. They were born under the myth that whether a child is born rich or poor was determined by fortune or the will of some invisible force.

What went wrong? Past models viewed children as economic inputs to grow economies, rather than empowering them to become citizens to run the town halls that must precede and regulate economies. The impact was existential: It is now a zeitgeist to see falling fertility rates as a “baby bust” or threat to economic growth and the further commodification of nature, the children’s convention be damned. The UN’s World Population Day rhetoric reflects this old modeling, and deference to the wealthy who wish to provide an advantage for their own kids. This old modeling—treating the act of having children as more personal than interpersonal—is based on what legal theorists call a baseline error.

Externalizing Costs to Women and Children

Many companies and governments worked together to adopt the Paris Agreement as the key standard for climate policy. It allows for significant emissions and global warming despite current changes in the climate causing massive harm to infants and children. The entities behind the agreement were making decisions about what the world should look like. And that vision, for them, sets a baseline against which to measure what’s the cost and what’s the benefit.

There is something wrong with that picture. If you believe in freedom under any theory of liberalism, it’s impossible for a group of people to define what the world should look like for everyone. The baseline, or what the world should look like, is instead itself a group of relatively self-determining (i.e., free) people. How can we know what’s the cost or the benefit, or the rules that allocate them, without being organized as participatory groups capable of making such decisions? How can we be self-determining or free in a world dominated by a singularly anthropocentric viewpoint in which some humans consent to the power of other humans, rather than a more logical and ethical nature-centric viewpoint?

Population growth-based economic gains were created by intentionally violating the standards represented in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, ensuring children would be born and raised in unfair and unequal conditions. A small minority of mostly wealthy white men have waged a war on women’s health, made abortion less accessible, and profited by externalizing massive costs on women and children decade after decade.

In short: 1) Humans overshot, 2) the profits went to some and costs to others based on the lie that having kids was more personal than interpersonal, and 3) justice requires we compensate those harmed.

Finding a Solution

What can we do? First, we can pressure the UN to switch to nature- and child-centric family planning model as the first and overriding human right. We can give future generations a voice in their democracies, rather than just jobs in economies. Democracy—the only form of true empowerment—comes first, and groups are already asking the UN to move in this direction. The voices of young women from the Global South, some of whom are most at risk, are rising, speaking about their concerns for their future and the future of the world.

One step toward better, more sustainable, and equitable family policies involves resolving the baseline error discussed above and urging the Global North to make just climate reparations to the Global South that—rather than focusing on population—ensure that we begin moving toward a system in which all children are born into conditions that comply with the UNCRC.

The climate crisis is already causing lifelong harm to infants and children, harm that must be stopped and compensated for. Given the efficacy of family planning and climate migration reforms, one option would be family planning incentives or entitlements or reparations that will allow parents to best provide their children with the ecosocial rearing and development conditions required by the UNCRC. These payments can be funded by eliminating expensive and counterproductive pro-natal incentives (as well as expensive limits on programming for long-acting reversible contraceptives and access to abortion) in low-fertility countries in favor of climate migration reforms. Any incentivizing effect the payments might have toward large families can be offset by the universal promotion of a “smaller and more sustainable” family ethic.

We can also urge lawmakers, decision-makers, and thought leaders to publicly admit that conventional family planning models—built on a baseline error—are broken because they miscalculate the way costs and benefits are measured. We must ultimately recognize that the wealth of many was built on a system of explosive and unsustainable growth at a great cost to children, a cost that increases as the climate worsens. Because that wealth was produced under a system that externalized its costs, disadvantaged children have a moral and legal claim to part of the wealth that was accrued at the expense of their current and future health and the environment in which they live. This is a form of restorative justice. Without this change, we risk a future where the system by which many made their wealth will have done more harm to future generations than any well-intentioned philanthropy can do to help them.

Time to Recalibrate, Not Celebrate

Voices in the Global South—those with the most at stake and the least responsible for the crisis—are now joining in the call for family planning-based entitlements and reparations. It’s a just demand that will compel many to action. There are many steps we can take to recognize that something went wrong in our universal family planning and population policies and to move toward better modeling. Nothing would have a greater impact on a larger number of people.

Population expert Alan Weisman, the author of the best-selling book The World Without Us, spent two years visiting 20 countries to investigate the issue and impacts of human population growth. In an interview with Orion Magazine, he said that one of the questions he set out to answer was, “[H]ow many people can fit on the planet without tipping it over?” If we don’t fix our broken and unfair family planning systems, we will soon find out.

In 1989, when the UN established World Population Day, there were 5.1 billion humans on Earth. Since then, more than 2.5 billion humans have been added. (To put that into perspective, over the 140-year span from 1800 to 1940, we added just a little over half of that number—1.3 billion people—to the population.) As the Earth approaches its 8-billionth human, we don’t have “infinite” possibilities for growth, as the UN claims. Instead, we have infinite possibilities for environmental degradation, attacks on reproductive rights, and public health crises. It is not time to celebrate, as the UN urges. Instead, it is time to recalibrate around the ecosocial birth and development conditions that the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child has long required.

Author Bio: Carter Dillard is the policy adviser for the Fair Start Movement. He served as an Honors Program attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice and also served with a national security law agency before developing a comprehensive account of reforming family planning for the Yale Human Rights and Development Law Journal.