Editor’s note: It’s a coast – not a beach, we forget that when our society talks about going to the beach. A beach is for basking in the sun, getting a drink, and dabbling in the water. But a coast is far more than an entertainment place for humans, it’s a habitat for a variety of animals and plants. Sand mining is a threat to these ecosystems and criminals operate it illegally. Construction companies need sand for their concrete as the demand for buildings soars. They seal the planet by destroying coastlines – and beaches.
While beaches are being stolen in poor places, they are being nourished(replenished) in wealthy places. Beach nourishment is the process of placing additional sediment on a beach or in the nearshore. A wider and higher beach can provide storm protection for coastal structures. Sediment is commonly dredged offshore and pumped directly onto the beach, dumped nearshore by a hopper dredge, or occasionally sourced from an inland location. It is an exercise in futility that destroys natural ecosystems and subsidizes wealthy beachfront homeowners at taxpayers’ expense, particularly as worsening storms resulting from climate change demand investment in more permanent solutions to beach erosion. The sea level will rise and people living there will have to move.
It is time to stop building infrastructure and trying to control nature.
By Melissa Gaskill/The Revelator
Coastal ecosystems — including oyster reefs, sandy beaches, mangrove forests and seagrass beds — provide important habitat for marine life and food and recreation for people. They also protect shorelines from waves and storms. But these precious systems face serious threats. This article looks at what put them at risk, along with examples of efforts to restore and protect important coastal ecosystems around the world.
Most people don’t realize that these humble grains — that ubiquitous stuff of vacations, ant farms and hourglasses — are the second-most used natural resource in the world after water. According to a 2019 report from the United Nations Environment Programme, we use more than 55 billion tons of it per year — nearly 40 pounds per person per day.
And a lot of that sand comes from illegal activity, involving criminal gangs who mine, smuggle, and kill for the precious material.
Sand — legal or otherwise — gets used to enhance beaches, extract petroleum through hydraulic fracking, fill land under buildings, and make computer chips.
But the biggest amount by far — an estimated 85% of the sand mined globally — goes into making concrete. Concrete combines two key ingredients: cement, a binding agent made from calcium or other substances, and aggregate, which is either sand or a combination of sand and gravel. Quality concrete requires jagged and angular aggregate grains — a quality found in only a tiny fraction of the worlds’ sand, most of it on beaches and in rivers. This sand also is easy and cheap to mine, and it’s located close to much of the construction taking place around the world.
According to the United Nations Environment Programme, world consumption of aggregate for all uses exceeds 40 billion metric tons (44 billion U.S. tons) a year — an estimate that’s likely on the conservative side and represents about twice the amount of sediment carried annually by all the world’s rivers. (Sediment from land rocks is the source of most coastal sand, which also comes from shells and marine organisms pulverized by waves, the digestive tracts of coral-eating fish, and the remains of tiny creatures called foraminifera.)
Not surprisingly, UNEP calls management of sand one of the greatest sustainability challenges of the 21st century.
The organization also warns about sand mining’s serious consequences for humans and the natural environment.
Removing beach sand leaves coastal structures more vulnerable to erosion even as climate change raises sea levels and makes storms more intense. Transporting sand generates carbon dioxide emissions. Sand mining has political and cultural consequences, including effects on the tourism industry, and creates noise and air pollution.
Coastal sand mining also destroys complex ecosystems. The microorganisms, crabs, and clams that live in beach sand are important food sources for birds. Sea turtles and several bird species nest on sandy beaches. Seagrass, an important food source and habitat for marine residents, needs sandy ocean floor to grow. Stretches of underwater sand provide habitat for sea stars, sea cucumbers, conchs, and other critters, and are feeding grounds for flounder, rays, fish, and sharks.
Removing sand also affects water quality in the ocean and depletes groundwater.
Yet this harm is not the only issue. Increasing demand for sand has created a vast illegal industry resembling the organized criminal drug trade, including the same violence, black markets, and piles of money — an estimated $200 to $350 billion a year. Of all the sand extracted globally every year, only about 15 billion metric tons are legally traded, according to a report from the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime.
Pascal Pedruzzi, director of UNEP’s Global Resource Information Database-Geneva, became aware of illegal sand mining when the Jamaican government asked UNEP in 2014 to find out why the island had a serious beach erosion problem.
“There was a lot we didn’t know about sand extraction, including how much was being taken,” he says.
Or from how many places: Sand is mined from coastal environments in at least 80 countries on six continents, according to the 2022 book Vanishing Sands, written by several geologists and other experts on coastal management and land rights.
The book outlines a litany of sand crimes, from seemingly small to massive. In Sardinia, Italy, airport officials have seized about 10 tons of sand over 10 years, much of it carried in thousands of individual half-quart bottles. In Morocco, criminals removed as many as 200 dump trucks of sand a day from massive dunes lining the Atlantic coast.
According to Africa’s Institute for Security Studies, illegal sand mining in Morocco is run by a syndicate second in size only to the country’s drug mafia. It involves corrupt government and law enforcement officials and foreign companies. Much of the Moroccan sand, for example, ends up in buildings in Spain.
In India demand for sand tripled from 2000 to 2017, creating a market worth 150 billion rupees, just over $2 billion. Multiple diverse and competing “sand mafias” run mining sites surrounded by armed private security guards. Their weapons likely are obtained illegally, given the difficult process of acquiring guns legally in India.
Photo by Sumaira Abdulali – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0
The NGO South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People reports hundreds of deaths and injuries related to illegal sand mining in India each year, including citizens (adults and children), journalists, activists, government officials, and law enforcement.
There are similar stories in Bangladesh, Cambodia, elsewhere in Africa, and in the Caribbean — almost everywhere sandy coastal areas can be found.
UNEP has begun tackling the problem of sand mining, putting forth ten recommendations that include creating international standards for extracting sand from the marine environment, reducing the use of sand by using substitutes, and recycling products made with sand.
While these recommendations target legal sand mining, more responsible management and reduced overall demand also should make illegal mining less lucrative and, therefore, less common.
“The good news is there’s a long list of solutions,” says Peduzzi. “We start by stopping the waste of sand. We can make the life of buildings longer, by retrofitting them instead of knocking them down. Maybe change the use of a building over time, as a school first and then 50 years later, a place for elderly people. When a building needs to be destroyed, crush and reuse the concrete. Build with wood, bricks, adobe, and straw.”
Building with straw also could reduce burning of crop waste. Every year, India produces 500 million tons of straw but burns 140 million tons as “excess.” One company there, Strawcture Eco, is using straw to create wall and ceiling panels that are fire resistant, insulating, and sustainable.
Alternatives to sand in concrete include ash from waste incineration and aluminum smelting waste. Peduzzi notes that ash creates concrete that is about 10% less solid, but points out, “that is still pretty good. You can use it to make buildings, but maybe not a bridge.”
The UNEP report notes that involvement from industry, the private sector, and civil society is vital in solving the problem. For example, shifting away from building with concrete will require changing the way architects and engineers are trained, acceptance by building owners, and new laws and regulations.
“We rely on sand, as a commodity,” Peduzzi says. “But we also need to realize its ecosystem services. We must be wiser about how we use it.”
UNEP hopes to collect solutions into a single, accessible online location (although it currently lacks funding for the effort). The idea is to create a hub for policies and technological solutions, Peduzzi says, and to develop best practices for them. The Global Initiative report on India also calls for a website for tracking illegal sand mining hosted by a think-tank or journalism agency — a sort of crime-spotters portal where people could anonymously upload evidence.
William Neal, an emeritus professor at Grand Valley State University in Michigan and one of the authors of Vanishing Sands, suggests in an email that finding sand substitutes is not enough. Coastal communities, he says, need to retreat from rising seas rather than build more hard structures such as seawalls. This “shoreline engineering” often destroys the very beaches it is intended to save, he explains, and the long-term cost of saving property through engineering often ends up exceeding the value of the property. Seawalls also tend to simply shift water elsewhere, potentially causing flooding and significant damage along other parts of the shoreline.
Peduzzi also espouses shifts in thinking, including how we get around in cities.
“Instead of building roads for cars, build subways,” he says. “That moves people faster and gets away from fossil fuels. The icing on the cake is that when digging subway tunnels, you are getting rocks, generating this material instead of using it. Cars are not sustainable — not the material to make a car itself or the roads and parking lots.”
Without systemic changes, the problem of sand removal is only going to grow bigger as the population increases and people continue to migrate from rural to urban areas, increasing the demand for infrastructure like roads and buildings.
“The problem has been overlooked,” Peduzzi warns. “People need to realize that sand is just another story of how dependent we are on natural resources for development.”
The Revelator is an initiative of the Center for Biological Diversity.
Title photo: Calistemon/Wikimedia Commons CC-BY-SA-4.0
Editor’s note: Sharks are beautiful, intelligent creatures, but they have been overexploited for decades. Because of their “high market value” industrial fisheries hunt sharks for their fins and other body parts. But it’s difficult to control the protection of the sea predators when they move to unprotected zones or international and local fleets fish in other countries’ fishery zones. The brutal killings of adults, babies, and even pregnant sharks happen while our culture is focused on buying more stuff and attending distracting events.
If sharks went extinct, it would set off a chain reaction. Sharks play an important role in the food chain. Smaller animals like shellfish may go extinct if there were no sharks to eat seals, for example. That would create a ripple effect, causing mass die-offs of otters, seals, and many types of fish due to food scarcity. The chain reaction would continue until its effects were felt on land, with fisheries collapsing in a matter of years. When will humanity wake up and start living with – not against other precious beings?
by: Assaf Levy, BioDB via Pressenza
Every year on July 14th, we celebrate Shark Awareness Day. It is not just a tribute to one of nature’s most misunderstood creatures; it is a call to action. Sharks have cruised the oceans for over 450 million years, playing a vital role in keeping marine ecosystems healthy. But today, these apex predators find themselves under increasing pressure, with many species teetering on the brink of extinction.
Hollywood might portray sharks as mindless killing machines, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. Sharks come in a staggering variety of shapes and sizes, from the filter-feeding giants like the whale shark to the sleek and speedy blue shark. They possess incredible senses, like electroreception, that allows them to detect electrical fields emitted by prey, and an amazing ability to navigate vast distances.
As apex predators, they help maintain the balance by regulating the populations of species below them in the food chain. This includes controlling the numbers of mid-level predators and helping to ensure species diversity among smaller fish and invertebrate populations. Their feeding habits help keep marine ecosystems healthy and functional. For instance, by preying on weak or sick individuals, sharks help prevent the spread of disease and ensure a healthier gene pool within the prey population. Their disappearance could have devastating consequences, leading to population explosions of prey species and ultimately, the collapse of entire ecosystems.
Despite their importance, many shark species are alarmingly close to extinction. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), over one-third or 30% of shark species are either vulnerable, endangered or critically endangered. Some of the most threatened species include the Great Hammerhead, the Oceanic whitetip, and the Basking shark.
The main culprit behind this is overfishing. Driven by demand for shark fins (a prized ingredient in shark fin soup) and meat, millions of sharks are caught every year, often through unsustainable practices like finning, where fins are removed and the body discarded.
Another major threat is habitat loss. Sharks rely on healthy coral reefs and mangroves for breeding and feeding. However, these vital ecosystems are being degraded by pollution, climate change, and coastal development.
The silver lining in the story of sharks is the growing awareness and effort towards their conservation. Governments, NGOs, and international bodies are working together to protect these magnificent creatures:
Another example is the Jardines de la Reina National Park in Cuba, which has been particularly successful in conserving shark populations. This MPA provides a refuge for several species of sharks and has implemented strict no-take policies and eco-tourism guidelines that help maintain the health and biodiversity of its waters.
Deadly predators,
Under the sea and on land
But, what’s more deadly?
A razor sharp, swimming shark
Or the end of marine life?
Poem by @saf_begum
This Shark Awareness Day, let’s not only admire the majestic Great Whites and the elusive deep-sea dwellers but also ignite a global commitment to safeguard their future. Every shark species plays a pivotal role in marine ecosystems, balancing marine life and ensuring the health of our oceans.
Today, we must transcend admiration and take decisive action. Let’s pledge to protect these magnificent creatures, understanding that saving sharks is fundamentally about preserving the entire marine ecosystem. By protecting sharks, we are not just saving individual species; we are investing in the health and sustainability of our entire ocean. Join us in this crucial mission—educate, advocate, and participate. Together, we can turn the tide for sharks and secure a vibrant future for our blue planet.
by Mike DiGirolamo, Rachel Donald on Mongabay 11 June 2024
Editor’s note: A pandemic in our backyards – The squirrel walked a bit wobbly, it wasn’t as agile and funny as these small creatures often move. It had its eyes rather closed which gave it a tired look. I was concerned and called a squirrel rescue station, luckily there was one closer to me. The poor squirrel got worse meanwhile and couldn’t jump anymore. Lastly, it just sat in the corner of the roof with its head down.
When I brought the tiny animal to the rescue station, its leader Mrs. Heimann told me that the symptoms she saw were those of an unknown virus. She said it was terrible for her to watch two cute squirrels per week die in her care because of that virus. In the last years the health of squirrels got a lot worse, she explained to me – broken bones, malnourishment, paralysis, or DNA damage. Sick animals are more prone to get infected than healthy ones. As I can see the pandemic isn’t over for birds and mammals, it’s right in our backyard and should concern us all.
Diana Bell/The Conversation
I am a conservation biologist who studies emerging infectious diseases. When people ask me what I think the next pandemic will be I often say that we are in the midst of one – it’s just afflicting a great many species more than ours.
I am referring to the highly pathogenic strain of avian influenza H5N1 (HPAI H5N1), otherwise known as bird flu, which has killed millions of birds and unknown numbers of mammals, particularly during the past three years.
This is the strain that emerged in domestic geese in China in 1997 and quickly jumped to humans in south-east Asia with a mortality rate of around 40-50%. My research group encountered the virus when it killed a mammal, an endangered Owston’s palm civet, in a captive breeding programme in Cuc Phuong National Park Vietnam in 2005.
How these animals caught bird flu was never confirmed. Their diet is mainly earthworms, so they had not been infected by eating diseased poultry like many captive tigers in the region.
This discovery prompted us to collate all confirmed reports of fatal infection with bird flu to assess just how broad a threat to wildlife this virus might pose.
This is how a newly discovered virus in Chinese poultry came to threaten so much of the world’s biodiversity.
Until December 2005, most confirmed infections had been found in a few zoos and rescue centres in Thailand and Cambodia. Our analysis in 2006 showed that nearly half (48%) of all the different groups of birds (known to taxonomists as “orders”) contained a species in which a fatal infection of bird flu had been reported. These 13 orders comprised 84% of all bird species.
We reasoned 20 years ago that the strains of H5N1 circulating were probably highly pathogenic to all bird orders. We also showed that the list of confirmed infected species included those that were globally threatened and that important habitats, such as Vietnam’s Mekong delta, lay close to reported poultry outbreaks.
Mammals known to be susceptible to bird flu during the early 2000s included primates, rodents, pigs and rabbits. Large carnivores such as Bengal tigers and clouded leopards were reported to have been killed, as well as domestic cats.
Our 2006 paper showed the ease with which this virus crossed species barriers and suggested it might one day produce a pandemic-scale threat to global biodiversity.
Unfortunately, our warnings were correct.
Two decades on, bird flu is killing species from the high Arctic to mainland Antarctica.
In the past couple of years, bird flu has spread rapidly across Europe and infiltrated North and South America, killing millions of poultry and a variety of bird and mammal species. A recent paper found that 26 countries have reported at least 48 mammal species that have died from the virus since 2020, when the latest increase in reported infections started.
Not even the ocean is safe. Since 2020, 13 species of aquatic mammal have succumbed, including American sea lions, porpoises and dolphins, often dying in their thousands in South America. A wide range of scavenging and predatory mammals that live on land are now also confirmed to be susceptible, including mountain lions, lynx, brown, black and polar bears.
The UK alone has lost over 75% of its great skuas and seen a 25% decline in northern gannets. Recent declines in sandwich terns (35%) and common terns (42%) were also largely driven by the virus.
Scientists haven’t managed to completely sequence the virus in all affected species. Research and continuous surveillance could tell us how adaptable it ultimately becomes, and whether it can jump to even more species. We know it can already infect humans – one or more genetic mutations may make it more infectious.
Between January 1 2003 and December 21 2023, 882 cases of human infection with the H5N1 virus were reported from 23 countries, of which 461 (52%) were fatal.
Of these fatal cases, more than half were in Vietnam, China, Cambodia and Laos. Poultry-to-human infections were first recorded in Cambodia in December 2003. Intermittent cases were reported until 2014, followed by a gap until 2023, yielding 41 deaths from 64 cases. The subtype of H5N1 virus responsible has been detected in poultry in Cambodia since 2014. In the early 2000s, the H5N1 virus circulating had a high human mortality rate, so it is worrying that we are now starting to see people dying after contact with poultry again.
It’s not just H5 subtypes of bird flu that concern humans. The H10N1 virus was originally isolated from wild birds in South Korea, but has also been reported in samples from China and Mongolia.
Recent research found that these particular virus subtypes may be able to jump to humans after they were found to be pathogenic in laboratory mice and ferrets. The first person who was confirmed to be infected with H10N5 died in China on January 27 2024, but this patient was also suffering from seasonal flu (H3N2). They had been exposed to live poultry which also tested positive for H10N5.
Species already threatened with extinction are among those which have died due to bird flu in the past three years. The first deaths from the virus in mainland Antarctica have just been confirmed in skuas, highlighting a looming threat to penguin colonies whose eggs and chicks skuas prey on. Humboldt penguins have already been killed by the virus in Chile.
How can we stem this tsunami of H5N1 and other avian influenzas? Completely overhaul poultry production on a global scale. Make farms self-sufficient in rearing eggs and chicks instead of exporting them internationally. The trend towards megafarms containing over a million birds must be stopped in its tracks.
To prevent the worst outcomes for this virus, we must revisit its primary source: the incubator of intensive poultry farms.
is a Professor of Conservation Biology, University of East Anglia
Editor’s note: Most Indigenous economics or land-based communities appreciate nature in its complex lifegiving and intelligent values it provides – for free – to all forms of creatures on earth. Yet we live in a century where shareholders and voracious businessmen and women on Wall Street want to put not only a monetary value but tradable assets on nature.
In this podcast episode by Mongabay Newscast, you’ll learn why this fails to recognize the intrinsic value of biodiversity and how the principles of Indigenous economics would lead to balance and harmony towards biological and physical reality.
By Mike DiGirolamo, Rachel Donald/ Mongabay
Last year, the New York Stock Exchange proposed a new nature-based asset class that put a price tag on the global nature of 5,000 trillion U.S. dollars.
Though the proposal was withdrawn in January to the relief of many, Indigenous economist Rebecca Adamson argues that an attempt to financialize nature like this — which doesn’t account for the full intrinsic value of ecosystems, and further incentivizes the destruction of nature for profit — will likely be revived in the future.
On this episode of Mongabay’s podcast, Adamson speaks with co-host Rachel Donald about Indigenous economic principles based on sustainable usage and respect for nature, rather than relentless exploitation of it for profit.
“The simplest thing would be to fit your economy into a living, breathing, natural physics law framework. And if you look at Indigenous economies, they really talk about balance and harmony, and those aren’t quaint customs. Those are design principles,” she says.
Putting a dollar amount on a single species, let alone entire ecosystems, is a controversial idea, but creating a tradable asset class based on that monetary value is even more problematic, experts say.
https://open.spotify.com/embed/episode/1SQb8A3tNirMsZA4RBAneI?utm_source=generator
In 2023, the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) applied to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to establish a list of Natural Asset Companies (NACs) that would hold the rights to ecosystem services, which they valued at $5,000 trillion, essentially creating a new nature-based asset class. The SEC withdrew the application earlier this year following intense opposition from 25 Republican attorneys general.
On this episode of the Mongabay Newscast, Indigenous economist Rebecca Adamson argues this financialization of nature comes with perverse incentives and fails to recognize the intrinsic value contained in biodiversity and all the benefits it provides for humans. Instead, she suggests basing economies on principles contained in Indigenous economics.
While the natural asset class’s withdrawal was for “all the wrong reasons,” says Adamson, it was nonetheless a “relief.” She tells podcast co-host Rachel Donald why she thinks the financialization of nature is the wrong approach to protecting and sustainably using nature in the global economy, and why Indigenous economic principles offer a better path forward.
“If you look at the way an Indigenous economy is designed, it’s designed to meet the most needs for the most people” via sophisticated redistribution of wealth principles, says Adamson, who is a director emerita of Calvert Impact Capital and founder of both First Nations Development Institute and First Peoples Worldwide, an Indigenous-led organization making grants to Indigenous communities in more than 60 countries. “Throughout the society, there’s customs and cultures and rituals about sharing [and] redistribution of wealth. And we’ve mapped this,” she says.
Subscribe to or follow the Mongabay Newscast wherever you listen to podcasts, from Apple to Spotify, and you can also listen to all episodes here on the Mongabay website, or download our free app for Apple and Android devices to gain instant access to our latest episodes and all of our previous ones.
Rachel Donald is a climate corruption reporter and the creator of Planet: Critical, the podcast, and newsletter for a world in crisis. Her latest thoughts can be found at 𝕏 via @CrisisReports and at Bluesky via @racheldonald.bsky.social.
Mike DiGirolamo is a host & associate producer for Mongabay based in Sydney. He co-hosts and edits the Mongabay Newscast. Find him on LinkedIn, Bluesky, and Instagram.
Photo by Leonel Barreto from Pixabay
Citations:
Kemp-Benedict, E., & Kartha, S. (2019). Environmental financialization: What could go wrong? Real-World Economics Review, 87, 69-89. Retrieved from http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue87/whole87.pdf#page=69
Editor’s note: Our current society is based on standards that lobbyists, financial markets, and industries target. That way the powerful can lead secret wars against human and non-human animals without the majority questioning their strategy. Any political or economic decision is based on these standards, not on the values of functioning ecosystems or healthy families. If our society wants to maintain and build a brighter future for young people, it needs to put the wild world as its basis to flourish. It also needs to prevent domestic violence from happening in the first place and make sure that babies have the birthright to a thriving ecocentric society in which informed people have the actual freedom to consent. Power to the people not to a few mighty people at the top requires civil disobedience, something that only empowered people can implement. But without civil disobedience, we won’t end the secret wars against our living planet.
Inequitable family planning and illogical pro-growth policies are taking away every child’s right to a fair start in life.
By Carter Dillard
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 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 for 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 the state of affairs 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 in 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.
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.