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:
1) Those who are actually accounting for children’s rights as the first form of justice in the creation of actual, bottom-up, human power relations. They may do it through practical things like using birth equity payments as a human right to force reparations that restore the climate and nature.
This is the most just and effective form of social justice.
And 2) those who are not, among whom many are knowingly undoing their own fundraising and other claims by embracing growth, and exploiting future generations and nature to benefit a few. They undermine freedom for all because they never really orient their behavior from an objectively fair and just position and cannot create political obligation.
Continuing this #famscam – what one Nobel laureate called a pyramid scheme – will skew the baseline for reparations, and ensure those least responsible for climate, inequity and other crises – future children in the Global South – suffer their greatest consequences.
The self-serving, pro-growth policies they hid undid roughly 3/4ths of the climate mitigation attempted in the last few decades, and ensured there are more animals in factory farms, less wildlife and nature, more children tortured and killed by their parents, and greater inequality, than ever before. That undoing – all done under coercive legal systems – will kill millions in the climate disaster.
TAKE ACTION:
- Target concentrations of wealth that were created by using unsustainable and inequitable growth to externalize costs on future generations to now pay those costs back in form of family planning entitlements. Those payments are a human right.
- Urge the United Nations to adopt Fair Start as the first and overriding human right, and use it to accelerate climate reparations and increase the amount owed to fully compensate the victims.
- Target directly those most responsible to pay what they owe. Truth starts with using questions like the one above to call out liars, those who use fake versions of social justice that – when examined – actually start by using future generations to convert the nonhuman world into wealth for a few men.
