This year Fairstartmovement.org will engage in the Tell the Truth campaign, urging prominent social justice figures to admit failure as the climate crisis accelerates and kills millions.
At the base of all of the failures is their not having accounted for children entering the world, or the actual creation of power relations, when they urged reforms. That factor was undoing, every day, the benefits their reforms would have ensured. Instead, that factor resulted in the enrichment of a small percentage of mostly white families at deadly cost to countless families of color.
I and many others were encouraged to ignore that issue in our activism, for decades, so that the wealthy funders could take advantage of the growth and inequity driving the crisis.
This is not a debate. Tell the Truth means just urging key figures to disclose how the values they championed were undone – over the last three years – as children entered the world without the resources they need, and in ways that degraded their ecologies and disenfranchised them politically.
For example, we can urge Peter Singer to disclose how his animal liberation work, from the numbers of animals suffering and general impacts on welfare to daily violations of rights, was undone in the last three years by growth that benefitted his backers.
Ask him to relate the numbers to zero baselines that account for actual harm including the value of self-determination, like these, and not projections for food investments.
Singer’s work on Effective Altruism reiterated his mistakes in framing animal liberation without accounting for the reality of animals’ lives, which are shaped by the creation of the persons who impact them. His vision of altruism is taking massive wealth made at cost to animals lives, the environment, and children’s rights, and doling it out as band-aid charity to increase welfare. Given the growth-based climate crisis, his framing of the field has done more to enrich a small percentage of mostly wealthy, white kids at deadly cost to countless children of color than increase welfare.
If he cares about animal liberation, wouldn’t he be eager to account for animals lives in the cost/benefit analysis that accounts for the fundamental – birth-based – creation of wealth? He never has, but he can start now.
If we account for the climate crisis the numbers – in both fields he championed – will show him enriching vegan food and other investors, not benefitting animals or vulnerable humans. It’s not about intent. Yes, Exxon and others’ supply-side work drove emissions, but only in response to the same growth-based demand that Singer and others enabled (even if done so simply as a matter of negligence). And Exxon never claimed to be liberating animals.
Animal rights claims are the most falsifiable when we run the numbers. Is hype and a questionable legacy more important than staving off deaths in the crisis?
A better way? Back reforms at the UN that would entitle future generations to the wealth the failures created.
This goes beyond greenwashing towards fraud, and as deaths mount legal systems are evolving to prohibit drivers of the crisis like moving wealth in deadly ways through omissive messaging.
