Years of unrefuted research shows that as early as 1948 any form of authoritative governance would have had to be investing enough in each child to offset their influence equally, relative to a neutral position like Dasgupta’s / Tucker’s biodiverse optimality.

Of course that would have required children’s share equity in democracy be treated as the first human right. To use the concept of a  “we” or impliedly invoke any collective authority would require that. Otherwise you would be engaged in third party fraud – identity and capacity theft – because you can’t use the invocation without the equity.

That investment never happened.

And as early as 1968, wealthy, while families – mostly from the U.S. – had settled at the Tehran conference on the contradiction-in-terms of procreative autonomy.

This was a sleight of hand:

Define power as the violence of the state and conflate bodily autonomy with the capacity to harm (bring beneath a threshold of some value) others, and freedom becomes the resistance of wealth and other existing entitlements to that power of the state, entitlements that can benefit from growth and evade equity.

This created a fraudulent anthropocentric (versus ecocentric) standard for words like “green” “democratic” “sustainable” etc., and the birth inequity and growth we have seen for decades.

Of course that’s not what power is. It’s any form of human influence, from abusive parenting to emitting pollutants. The border of human power is not represented by lines on a globe; it’s the threshold beneath which no child should be born.

To account for that form of influence, we would probably have to assure all family planning occurs in a collective. Mwesigye and Esther developed and are pioneering that model, an Afrocentric model of women’s circle democracy that well predates John Locke.

The only fix, from our perspective, is to treat the wealth built on the sleight of hand as subject to a very specific metric for climate reparations payable to young women via wealth-tied debt/reparations accounts to delay fertility, relocate if needed, and get any child they would have above a threshold that represents the child’s share equity.

Moreover, because constituting as free and equal persons is the prerequisite for legitimate (inclusive and empowering) governance, there is a preemptive right to the resources, obtainable by all means effective. This work of overriding allocation would be limited to the most polluting nations, especially the United States.

One way to implement the fix is to ask anyone making any claim of doing good to reassess it, relative to children’s equity needs as they enter the world on the day the claim is made.

For example, we think philosopher Peter Singer consistently omits children entering the world as a factor when he makes claims, and thus uses the anthropocentric standard.

Concentrations of wealth and power, including philanthropic funders, in those nations most responsible for the climate crisis often use institutions and individuals – media, nonprofits, universities, agencies, think tanks, celebrities, etc. – to create a fantasy world of social justice impact that hides liability. The fantasy world ensures  wealthy whites benefit at deadly cost to mostly persons of color.

As early as 2003, activists now involved with Fair Start were urged by the nonprofits in which they worked to promote Singer’s food reforms as a means to benefit animals, reforms they and their employers knew were being undone by growth and inequity which enriched only a few.

The discourse of dividing all into the fair, and unfair, will identify those who will insist on using the fraudulent standard, and those who will not. The Defiance anti-apartheid movement rose by resisting the most influential drivers of the lie, and that could occur here as well.

If we want to be free, we owe others as much as they give children entering the world. We owe them that level of protection.

In years of doing this, we never found an effective counterargument, but have seen lots of moves to sabotage our work.

This is who we are.