Today children are being born in a way that harms their environment and deprives them of the resources they need to deal with that as well as crushing social inequity, a fact that reverses the impacts claimed by almost anyone claiming to do good.
And fossil fuel heirs, like John T. Raymond, are making it worse.
Can we take back the wealth, and by what nonviolent means? In1948 the legitimacy of nations to protect wealth and property rights of those who benefited most from the political systems was made contingent on nations complying with human rights that empower their subjects, the subjects from whom all legal authority derives.
With a billion deaths forecast from the climate crisis, its clear nations have failed to comply – fundamentally because they flouted human rights in the laws and policies surrounding child welfare, exploiting children for economic growth rather than investing in them heavily to make them self-determining citizens in functional democracies – measurable on simple equity metrics.
Nations have no legitimate authority to defend concentrations of wealth and power built at deadly cost to others when demands are made to use portions of the wealth and power to save the lives they threaten.
This is new news to many because universal paradigms around child welfare ignore the obvious fact that justice would begin with children’s rights. Why? Wealthy families and governments at the United Nations in 1968 treated the act of having children as more personal to the parents than interpersonal for the children and the communities they comprise. They did it to avoid having to cover the high costs of ensuring future children’s rights as the basis for reproductive rights and to make money on the growth that a lack of protection would ensure.
That not only set environmental catastrophe in motion, but in ensured the mostly white, rich children of investors benefitting at deadly cost to millions of black children. It also prevented changing things through democratic processes – which again is like equity in a company, where you have a measurably equal and influential role in outcomes – because each person’s share was reduced and their capacity for impact diluted. And even in the last few decades, when the crisis was unfolding, those families funded dishonest charities to lie about what was going on.
Why is this not commonly understood? In part because concentrations of wealth and power used the money to fund charities that greenwashed, creating a false sense of progress.
The animal rights movement in the United States was one of the worst sectors, in this regard – with organizations lying about animal liberation that was being undone by growth from which they were profiting. Many now working with the Fair Start Movement, under reassure from their employers, omitted crucial facts while claiming to create public benefit. This helped illegally enrich mostly white children at deadly cost to millions of children of color.
This is a level of disgusting cynicism justifying direct action.
Because your share equity in a democracy – which again is like equity in a company, where you have a measurably equal and influential role in outcomes – is the basis of legitimacy and any obligation to follow the law (including laws that protect wealth made at deadly cost to others), some are moving to preempt law and policies that interfere with family planning reparations/incentives/entitlements for young women, inverse to wealth and income, that ensure they only have children at a time, place and with resources that offset all the harm the externalization of the wealth’s true costs caused.
Whether individuals back that ask and admit their own greenwashing and benefitting at deadly cost to others, or not, is a litmus test for which side of this fight they are on. Knowing and acting on that is the most just and effective work anyone can do.
To start with legitimacy, or the inclusion of all as political equals in a measurable way, is to be free. Work to free you and your children by peacefully engaging those harming you.
