These are the facts, and they are not in dispute.

1) All reasonable people agree reforms are needed to respond to the climate crisis.

2) All reforms, with a few small exceptions – from the Paris Accords to more conservative carbon markets – assume an environmental baseline where the nonhuman world is a human resource, and protecting human health and safety is primary and exclusive of animal protection.

3) That baseline, or standard, is offensive to the animal rights movement – the nonhuman world should be nonhuman habitat where others species are free. That is what animal liberation means.

4) Had world leaders, including environmentalists, embraced that higher, animal rights-oriented baseline in the mid-Twentieth Century the way deep ecologists had advised we not be facing a climate crisis because that standard prohibits many things – including explosive population growth and ecocide – that precipitated the climate crisis. That failure will cause untold suffering – hence seeing the nonhuman world as a resource is also offensive to human rights.

5) There are things we can do to change our approach to the environment, nonhumans, and future generations to reverse the mistake world leaders, including environmentalists, made. A large coalition of groups has sued to use the higher or nonhuman baseline because the Constitution, and its surrounding literature, imply it is constitutionally required.

6) Part of the suit involves changing the way we plan families, an urgent requirement of intergenerational justice that is also implied in our constitutional principles. In democracy, what matters most is the people with whom we share and will share our communities and the world, and those people don’ fall from the sky. Let’s protect and invest in them.

Get real – and fight for your and your kids’ right to nature and all children’s right to a #fairstart in life.