To avoid greenwashing scams and see the truth about what is impacting your and your family’s future you can ask one simple question of any person or group claiming to do good:
What have you been doing to deal with the basic connection between children being born, and things like child welfare, the climate crisis, animal rights, or anything else you might claim to care about?
This one question helps us spot the #famscam. It’s a scam run by nonprofits, advertising-driven media and big businesses – making it seem like we are reducing or refining consumption, and reducing climate emissions, through abstract top-down reforms, while quietly, bottom-up increasing the number of consumers to maintain profits margins. Animal “rights” organizations that do nothing about animal-killing growth, while making money on it by partnering with vegan food companies who rely on that growth, is a great example of the scam.
That process, rather than investing more in children, degrades the natural, nonhuman world you and your children need to thrive, creates vast inequality, and dilutes your voice in town halls that make the rules under which you live.
There are essentially two answers to this question:
Fact: The New York Times spent more time reporting on falling fertility rates as a threat to economic growth over the past several years than covering either the beneficial impact of that fall on the climate crisis, or on peer-reviewed research that showed the change in fertility rates could catalyze fundamental changes in United Nations’ policy that could would have the greatest long-run impact on child welfare, inequity, and climate/biodiversity restoration.
In other words, to properly assess costs and benefits we have to first become groups of people capable of doing so in a way that is actually inclusive and reflective of the group constituents.Find and engage Kahn in person to #TellThe Truth and pay what he owes. Freedom entails converting the family norms that created today’s crowding shopping malls into policies that instead build democracy, converting concentrations of wealth and power into universal family planning entitlements that ensure all children have what they need to comprise town halls of self-determining citizens.
Many nonprofits raised billions of dollars over the last several decades claiming to have protected various ecosystems, saved animals from factory farms, hauled children out of dangerous conditions, or improved human rights and democracy.
Businesses sunk hundreds of millions of dollars into advertising their green, sustainable, environmentally friendly, and other claims.
Fair Start reforms work by taking the wealth made through unsustainable growth – which externalized costs on the most vulnerable – and using that wealth to invest in equitable family planning that creates smaller, more equitable and biodiverse communities where each person is empowered with an effective voice in their democracy.
None of those claims told the whole story, and they almost always omitted a crucial fact.
Those claims hid the fact that those making the claim maintained policies simultaneously increasing demand in a way that was undoing the claims, and ensuring ongoing and unsustainable population growth. That growth – the whole time – was reversing the beneficial impacts underlying the claims being made, growth that was enriching leadership at the entities described above, and exacerbating the climate crisis – reversing roughly 3/4ths of the climate emissions reductions the world was attempting.
The climate crisis will cause extreme suffering and death to the vulnerable many nonprofits and others claimed to be protecting.
The claims almost always left out the fact that the claimants’ family and population growth policies were putting more animals in factory farms and other horrible places, ensuring more children were born and raised in conditions of suffering and deprivation, and ensuring each person had less of an effective voice in their political systems – the systems that might have otherwise prevented the crisis. The claims at the same time hid the need for fundamental family reforms that, through family planning incentives/entitlements, could have saved millions of lives.
These claims all hid the impacts of what one Nobel laureate called a pyramid scheme of unsustainable but profitable overpopulation in rich, industrialized and high climate emissions nations, growth all of these entities knew was simultaneously undoing the majority of climate change and other environmental protection efforts, and ensuring dangerous and destabilizing vast inequity between rich and poor. The claims hid the fact that the entities described above – or really their senior leadership – chose self-serving family policies that were undoing the claims by increasing demand for ecocidal, but profitable, production and pollution.
And the wave of deadly climate emissions that flowed directly from the population growth and expanding inequity these claims routinely omitted and covered up will now help ensure the death of millions as the climate crisis accelerates.
Why cover up these growth-based or fundamental impacts? The family reforms that would prevent them, when correctly researched and assessed, ensure all children a fair start in life by overriding current property rights to ensure that all children get enough of what they need in order to physically compromise legitimate democracies cable of actually and fairly assigning property rights. Fair starts come first.
If justice and systems of justice (that obligate us) start with fairness to all, how do we get there without fair starts in life for all kids? We do not. Being free means being obligated only to follow laws which begin by empowering each person, to be relatively self-determining, in a measurable way.
These lies disempower us at the most fundamental level.
That growth has also been converting the freedom of functional democracies comprised of citizens who were born and raised with what the Children’s Rights Convention promises them into a system of overcrowded shopping malls filled with people born and raised in conditions that fell well below the Convention standards and who are all the while destroying their own ecosystems.
I’ve sat with uber-wealthy funders who were making money on growth through things like their plant-based investments, growth which was doing more harm to animals than the nonprofits, media and businesses they funded were doing good through their low-impact campaigns, and these funders simply decided to continue what they were doing. I’ve sat with foundation managers given the position by their wealthy parents who refuse to fund campaigns that simply urge conversations about birth equity. I’ve seen tenured professors at leading law schools choose to promote funding for family models that undercut everything they proclaimed to value because those models gave their kids – their rich, white kids – underserved head starts and massive privileges in life.
We can reverse this process by moving the wealth that was made at cost to others into programs like the Seeds for the Future campaign, a process of reforesting the land, and creating savings accounts for kids in a way that pays them back for what we did, and sets a norm of smaller and more equitable families as the first human right and obligation.
We can also target those, like Lee Raymond, as well as his son John T. Raymond, who both converted our freedom – in nature and functional town halls – into their wealth, to return the costs they foisted on others to give back the costs and, do so by all means effective.
It’s common to see nonprofits fundraising with pictures of sad dogs, hungry children, black people being disenfranchised, people dying in crackdowns on democracy by dictators, or polar ice melts in a climate crisis that is ravaging the world.
But does giving money to groups that silo – that focus on these individualized forms of justice – really make the world a better place? Not really. Usually nonprofits ignore the intersection that binds all forms of justice together – not what we could do – but who we could be.
That is the baseline for all justice, the one fundamental thing always present in and underlying all claims: People, and people who are disproportionally a product of the conditions in which they are born and develop. We cannot separate our values, like climate restoration, from who we should be. I’ve worked in well-known national nonprofits that made millions while knowingly undoing their work by choosing unjust policies – in what they thought were unrelated areas.
Ask anyone making claims of progress in creating a better world to tell the #wholetruth by disclosing their approach to families:
What are they doing to ensure all children in the world birth and development conditions consistent with the Children’s Rights Convention, like birth equity, backed by climate/biodiversity restoration?
Are they ensuring minimum levels of welfare for all kids, and equality of opportunity?
How are they ensuring all children born will have an effective voice in their democracies?
Chances are the person or organization making the claim is quietly undoing their progress by using an outdated approach to families, one that hurts kids, deepens inequity, destroys the environment, and makes sure the voice of most people does not matter in politics.
That’s exactly what many businesses and the nonprofits they support have been doing of late and the climate costs to our freedom, and to future generations, are astronomical.
How do we stop the #Famscam?
TAKE ACTION:
Target companies like Exxon to admit their role in this, and to pay the reparations they owe future generations. Bad family policies that disempower people are causing extreme violence in our communities, hitting innocent victims rather than those at the top who are responsible for and who benefit from the policies.
Urge any nonprofit you support to tell the #wholetruth, and to disclose their family policies – including internal employment and benefit policies – and how they have impacted and will impact the organization’s work and claims of success.
Scan the headlines of news today and you will see stories about celebrities hard working while also having kids.
These stories are not news, if we assume news should be about what really impacts readers’ lives.
Instead it’s content to carry advertising. In normal circumstances this is fairly benign stuff. But the world we live in today does not reflect normal circumstances. Media highlighting families – reinforcing different choices – without reporting the impact on our environment and communities is imposing costs – on at least five levels including exacerbating the crisis and expanding vast inequity – on you and your children.
That means children will die as the climate crisis unfold, and other species will die in mass extinction, because these people lied. They lied because that growth makes money for people like Elon Musk.
In her reporting on parenting Jessica Grose has an audience of millions, including policymakers around the world. She could choose to promote family reforms that could save millions from the climate crisis, more easily enabling climate migration and incentivizing effective family planning that prevents the death.
She does not.
She’s stuck in a frame of unjust family policy that outs parental autonomy over child equity, breaking justice for the majority:
Yes, we can take the privilege her white children gained by externalizing the costs of inequitable and unsustainable family policies in places like Uganda. Denying that involves a logical fallacy: Basing one’s obligation to follow the law on coercive top-down instruments like written constitutions rather than a bottom-up creation (or procreation) norm that can empower and liberate people – in terms of their actual/physical relations and equity stake in their democracies – in a measurable way involving an array of six factors. Resolving the fallacy entails limiting and decentralizing power at the top to empower and liberate, and by all means effective.
TAKE ACTION: Urge Grose via Twitter – @JessGrose – to explain how she plans to ensure all children birth and development conditions – including climate restoration – consistent with the Children’s Rights Convention, not just for her kids but all children. Urge her to explain why exactly, given that the Convention purports to spell out the minimum all children deserve in order to become obligated to others in society, she and others with power deserve the protection of a system of justice they seem to refuse others.
Farhad Manjoo wrote a great piece on the right to rescue farmed animals recently in the New York Times. He just needs to add a sentence or two more.
It’s misleading to omit the impact of family policy, which is hiding behind the story. FACT: Pronatal policies, which intend to push population arcs upward, will put more animals in factory farms than animal activists, or veganism, will ever take out – by far.
Most of the billions of people that will be born in the near future will not be vegan. So saving animals first involves family policy, not food choices. This is not rocket science. We think of the latter because companies control the narrative and want to sell products, not help animals.
This is not a separate issue from anything – family policy is the foundation of everything else.
FACT: The New York Times has run more stories pushing women to have kids because of an “underpopulation” crisis (a myth that Elon Musk helped start), and supporting pronatal policies like expanded child-tax credits rather than Fair Start planning entitlements.
Writers like Ezra Klein routinely push women to have more kids because he is anthropocentric, the antithesis of animal liberation.
FACT: Your cannot omit this impact from any form of writing or advocacy. Try to think, say, or do anything that does not derive from some set of theoretical or actual power relations, relations that would have had to derive from whatever norm created the people between whom those relations exist. It’s not possible to do, and for those relations to create obligations between people they must be created fairly and in a way that measurably empowers people.
FACT: Farhad and the New York Times show a conflict of interest when omitting these issues, because the family reforms would decentralize the concentrated power they have in controlling media – and the New York Times is exceptional in this regard. Their semi-monopoly on information is backed by a system of state violence. They have a conflict because they would be otherwise obligated to pay for their role in creating the climate crisis now devastating places like the Amboseli.
We don’t want to live in a fantasy world where we pretend to help animals with one hand, and increase their suffering and death with the other. The fix? Simply promote better family policies that actually liberate animals while doing the downstream work of how we should treat them.
