Almost all talk of climate and inequity ignores family policy. Ask the questions that bring out the basic truth, and identifies who – fundamentally – owes what.
Exploitative growth policies have now put the planet and millions of lives in peril. The climate and inequity crises we face today were caused, fundamentally, because as we described in a recent Newsweek op-ed, world leaders did not ensure every child an ecosocial fair start in life as required by the Children’s Rights Convention.
Many, in the face of the climate and inequity crises threatening so many lives, are pushing women to have more kids in order to profit from the growth it would create.
They are doing so with no minimum safeguards for the would-be mothers, or their children.
Solution
Require disclosure of past, present, and future family policies. Break the fantasy.
Ask anyone claiming to do any form of good, whether they are conservative, liberal or otherwise inclined, how they have accounted for children being born into the world, and whether they are investing in those children to give them a fair start, or exploiting them for growth. Do they support family planning entitlements that ensure parental delay and readiness, relocation, leveling the playing field for all kids, and smaller or more ecocentric families? Or are they putting millions of innocent lives at risk?
By knowing the truth, we can move from a paradigm of family planning where would-be parents just randomly have kids to one where they are able to plan based on the incentivizing availability of resources that would give their kids an ecosocial fair start in life. We can take the money some made on a system that created lots of people for shopping malls and use it to fund a system that invests in kids to empower them in democratic town halls.
Those blocking this change operate from a false premise, and a misunderstanding of freedom. Any obligation to follow the law – including respecting property entitlements – is contingent on the basic limitation and decentralization of power, which has to start with being empowered to control the law and obligation in the way we are created and reared. The first obligation has to do with our creation, not our behavior, and is based on child ecosocial equity, not procreative autonomy. That means first moving towards hard metrics for inclusive democracy, biodiversity and climate restoration via an ecosocial human right to birth equity and development.
We can get there through a simple discourse around resources, or the physical constituting of just communities, the sort of cooperative family planning that can create the equitable power relations that must precede legitimate constitutions. If we take the idea of freedom or self-determination seriously, it has to occur primarily if not exclusively through the ecosocial conditions in which we are born and raised – through things like what the Children’s Convention promises.
Free people will recognize their obligations to such a mutually empowering system – true human rights – as overriding obligations to downstream or more traditional legal/political systems that do not derive all the way back.
Instead – according to one Nobel laureate – that wealth went to the top and created the climate crisis and vast inequity. Those continuing that system are skewing the baseline for climate reparations, benefitting themselves at cost to others, and putting millions of lives at risk.
As the climate crisis manifests because we overran the nonhuman world how silly is it to talk about the success of animal rights?
Nicholas Kristof’s take on animal rights shows a total disconnection from the fundamental reality of human and nonhuman relations. While it’s easy to focus on popular icons like Singer and marketable and consumerist issues like diet change, the truth is that fundamental growth-based family policies that Singer, Kristof and others ignored not only caused much more animal suffering and death than their efforts prevented, those policies ensured a climate crisis that will cause untold misery for all.
I’ve worked at major animal rights organizations for years and, and often under pressure from funders who benefit from growth-based market we intentionally evade the growth issue. Singer and others likewise looked past the obvious source of animal oppression – our proliferation over the nonhuman world, and at a time leaders like him could have made a difference. if Kristof cared about animals he would embraced crucial family reforms that actually liberate animals, not treat a failure as a success.
What’s the biggest impact you can have to make the world better for all? It’s probably not what you think.
WHAT’S THE PROBLEM?
Food insecurity made worse by climate instability in Uganda.
WHAT’S THE CAUSE?
Wealthy nations disproportionately using resources that exacerbate climate change. There are specific men who benefit from this, and could save millions of lives by leading by example.
WHAT’S THE SOLUTION?
Distribution of seeds for fruit and vegetables, gardening for self-sufficiency and resiliency.
Opening basic bank accounts/saving plans for children at recognized financial institutions in Uganda.
Sensitizing local populations toward equitable family planning.
Moving wealth from the one percent wealthiest into family planning and ecorestoration entitlements as a form of climate reparations, and the first and overriding human rights. As described in Newsweek, we are unleashing underprivileged women’s and children’s rights with the Seeds for the Future campaign.
This moved wealth from women and children into the hands of relatively small group of men, and hid the way just family policies can override political processes and the entitlements they try to assign to the wealthiest and most powerful.
Who has more at stake in the act of creating a child – the adults or the kid? If we really think about it, children do. Adults can and do walk away from the children they create all the time. Children cannot walk away from their lives. So fundamental justice begins from the bottom, like democracy, with child-centric policies that include climate reforms, as described in this Newsweek piece. Prior political theories missed this, and did not account for our birth and development as the most basic power relations and obligations, because they treated power as flowing top down, not truly deriving from people and not about real relations to the extent they ignored ensuring the creation of persons in conditions – and with relations – consistent with minimums like the Children’s Rights Convention.
Not making this change and ending what we might call the #famscam means those least responsible for the crisis – including future generations – will be the most harmed. There is no greater injustice.
And because everything we do originates from the obligations to those around us, a process that is dynamic as persons enter and leave the world, we all have a choice to orient our lives from a relatively just, or child-centric, or unjust fundamental position – and to take direct action to liberate ourselves and others accordingly – as described in the Newsweek piece above.
Freedom begins with human rights and democracy, or the limiting of subjective human influence with objective norms. But because of our failure to orient family policies more around what children need than what parents want, this crucial limiting never occurred.
If you support a child welfare organization: Does it urge communities and parents to ensure minimum levels of welfare for kids, before they are born, in order to avoid less effective interventions later in life?
If you support an environmental or animal protection organization: Does it promote sustainable families, by far the most effective way to ensure a healthy environment, biodiversity, and less animal suffering?
If you support social justice organizations working on racial, economic, gender, or other forms of equality: Do they promote family planning policies that a) level the playing field for all kids so that they truly have equal opportunities In life, and b) advance gender equity by eliminating all forms of pronatalism, or pushing people to have kids?
If you support organizations promoting human rights and democracy: Do they promote family planning policies that will ensure each person has an effective voice in their political systems and is not lost in the crowd?
Eloísa Trinidad is Executive Director of Chilis on Wheels and a well known liberation activist, drawing all forms of liberation into one form of activism that furthers the interests of all vulnerable entities.
Listen to her vision and methods here:
People can follow Eloisa and connect with her here:
Eloisa is working on food justice, among other things.
TAKE ACTION:
The USDA is inviting public comments from US-based organizations, schools, and individuals on its once-every-five-years proposed revisions to the child nutrition meal patterns. There is a real opportunity for these new rules and regulations to facilitate more nutritious, plant-forward, and culturally appropriate menus. We know this is your goal, so I am providing a resource to help you share your position with USDA by its May 10 deadline for public comments.
The Healthy Future Students and Earth Coalition has created an extensive set of template comments for allied organizations centered on how the updated child nutrition meal patterns can support plant-forward menus and plant-based, climate-friendly, and culturally appropriate options. Additionally, we created a shorter template and toolkit geared toward parents and students.
There are two major ways you can help:
Include some or all of the asks in our template comment to USDA in your organization’s comments by May 10. The top of the template includes instructions for how to submit your comment.
If you have students or caregivers in your network, share the caregiver/student toolkit with your network as soon as possible. The toolkit includes a sample outreach email and social media posts. Personal stories and challenges accessing healthy food are of the utmost importance when submitting comments.
We greatly appreciate your partnership with these two actions. Additionally, please let us know if there is anything our coalition can do to support your efforts around the meal patterns or school food advocacy more broadly.
Please feel free to share this email with partners, organizations, groups, and individuals in your state and across the country.
Greenwashing is generally when someone conveys a false impression or misleading information about how a company’s products or services are environmentally sound. Often it involves using terms like green, sustainable, humane, safe, or regenerative, etc. when those making the claim are on balance harming the environment.
One of the worst forms of greenwashing is called growthwashing, or hiding the impact of population growth when making a claim. When a company or nonprofit makes any claim related to the environment, check to see if they are accounting for the way outdated family policy, and the growth it creates, is undoing that progress. The claims usually omit the fact that population growth is undoing the what is being claimed, increasing demand and consumption in a way that is causing ecocide. That means those making the claims chose family policies that put more animals in factory farms, research labs, and puppy mills, ensured more children would be born and raised in conditions of abuse, suffering and deprivation, and policies that also ensured each person had less of a voice in their political systems – the systems many groups point to as the best source of change.
They growth many claims hid (and sometimes promoted) undid roughly three-quarters of the reductions in carbon emissions achieved since 1990 by increased efficiency and alternative energy production.
The growth in the chart below – at the most fundamental level – made some rich, some poor, and ensured the climate crisis would fall hardest on those least responsible for it.
I have sat and chatted with wealthy funders backing vegan food companies and nonprofits that made wildly misleading claims about the social and environmental benefits of the products, and who were making money on population -driven growth in markets. They knew what they were doing. I have seen national nonprofits bury research showing the harm growthwashing does, for fear of what their funders – many of whom are moving massive and unearned privilege to their rich white kids – would do if it were revealed. No only were they lying about the impacts of their philanthropy, but they were doing so in a way that harmed poor kids to enrich their own kids through growth-based investments.
TAKE ACTION: One way to address growthwashing is by requiring the Environmental, Social and Governance reporting requirements include family policies and their impacts. Urge the Biden Administration to require this.
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.
While many environmental organizations call for ways to reduce consumption to protect the environment, inevitably they are undoing the progress by accepting and even promoting growth-based family policies that undo the progress.
What’s the solution?
The mass consumption that created the climate-crisis is baked into our political system because we are all – on the left and right of the political spectrum – accepting of family polices that create many consumers and workers for shopping malls, rather than investing more, and more equitably, in children so that they can comprise town halls – functional democracies – where they can be free.
And it’s important to frame this issue in terms of our political role, because while environmental protection is important, it only happens (as all things do) in the context of political systems – in the process of choosing democracy over economic growth.
We can change that, and one step involves targeting the executive directors of large environmental organizations to admit the harm their quiet approach to family policy has caused, and to do better.
TAKE ACTION: URGE HEAD OF SIERRA CLUB BEN JEALOUS – @BenJealous – TO ADMIT THE CLUB CHOSE FAMILY POLICIES THEIR UNDERCUT THEIR MISSION AND CLAIMS OF SUCCESS, AND WHICH – PER STUDIES LIKE THIS – EXACERBATED THE CLIMATE CRISIS.
