Don’t get scammed.
Fact check your charities to see if growth is undoing their progress. Nonprofits that claim to help children, animals, the environment, as well as human rights and democracy, are obligated to account for the impact of poor family planning and unsustainable population growth on their missions and strategic progress.
Many organizations are moving in the right direction of family reform. Why? Because the impact of family planning determines all progress. If charitable outcomes depend on people, they depend on family planning policies.
But not all charities are being truthful. Some ignore growth impacts because their funders rely on population-based economic systems, though that growth fundamentally created the climate crisis and is setting back success in moving towards sustainable development goals. Or funders often want to avoid paying to change family systems to give all kids a fair start in life, and instead choose to give their own children a massive head start in life. By evading the key or fundamental issue of growth, and forestalling policy reforms, many nonprofits helped exacerbate the climate crisis.
Many charities that make claims regarding helping children, animals, the environment, as well as furthering human rights and democracy, are seeing their progress undone by growth. More children are being born into horrible conditions than are being saved from them. More animals are dying from increased demand than are being liberated. And both our environment and our democracies are degrading because of that same growth.
Downstream measures do not offset this.
Work upstream
Fair Start family reforms are the most just and effective way to protect children, animals and the environment. Join our Tell the Truth campaign urging corporations and charities to disclose their family policies, past and present, and the impact of those policies on things like inequity and the climate crisis.
This is the scam that created the crises: That the act of having children, the base “we” from which all our language proceeds, should be determined by top-down parental autonomy rather than bottom up, and future child-centric, justice. No other form of justice, or freedom, precedes this. That kind of justice – and the emancipatory freedom that comes with it – is existential, requiring minimum levels of welfare approaching birth equality (eliminating the black/white birth wealth gap), an effective voice in democracies where each voice matters, understanding efficiency as starting with maximizing each person’s capacity to flourish, and the restoration of the nonhuman world or nature.
It’s a lie that we are politically obligated to follow laws and to play fair – without having been created fairly. We can’t be created in that way until we de-appropriate the most vulnerable and numerous groups of entities: future generations and the nonhuman world. And that depends on how we plan families and have kids.
Act effectively
It’s time to apologize to younger generations and act effectively. How do we actually ensure an ecosocial fair start in life for every child? The science is clear: Equitable family entitlements that encourage delayed parenthood work. But instead of going forward into future generations – into women and children – wealth has historically gone into the hands of a few at the top, though there was easily enough wealth available to prevent the crises we are experiencing today.
Instead elites in each nation hid the complexity of power behind shell legal systems, never paying the full price of freedom. To make the change towards justice we will have to create enough demand to take the wealth back for women and children. We can’t solve problems without also empowering future generations to constitute as free and equal people.
This is not about population – it’s about initial and fundamental power relations. Help us bend the arc of who we become towards freedom and justice.
