It’s common to see public interest organizations and governments challenging greenwashing or humanewashing as a means of protecting the environment. But are they using arbitrary criteria for what is green, or humane? Relative to what standard have they been making progress if we have arrived at the current polycrisis?
At FairStartMovement.org (FSM) our research has shown that growth – and hiding the impacts of growth through growthwashing – are easily the largest driver of harm to animals and the environment.
Our research further shows that framing the issue as “growth” itself is inaccurate though helpful to begin to introduce audiences to the issues. Growth is not accurate because people are not reducible to numbers that ignore the more influential relations formed as children enter the world. Those relations present a primarily qualitative issue, one that first has to do with empowerment.
The growth of the past several decades was first enabled by antiquated “separate but equal” reproductive rights policies that illegally discounted and disenfranchised future lives by ignoring a “one person, one equal and influential vote” standard for intergenerational justice in favor of preserving status quo birth inequity and mostly white generational wealth – harming mostly lives of color. The codification of “separate but equal” between 1948-1968 by the emerging human rights regime represented a power grab by elites to protect generational wealth, and avoid intergenerational justice obligations.
The move removed any threshold for intergenerational justice that would have maintained empowering conditions, including birth equity, low climate emissions and reasonable representative-ratio levels. The move used a narrow misconception of what it means to be free from power – one that assumed political authority and existing entitlements rather than legitimating them by actually empowering the children born into the world.
The policies, by ensuring unsustainable growth that diluted the average role one has in influencing the outcomes of their political systems, commercialized human freedom – basing the idea of freedom around free-market isolation and the disembedding of the person from their political systems, rather than empowerment.
To understand Illegal discounting / equitywashing we can simply ask: How are we accounting for empowering children as they came into the world at a “one person, one equal and influential vote” level – enough for them to simply vote to end the climate crisis, autocracy, inequity, etc? The notion that they have that level of influence – that they are anywhere near self-determining – is ludicrous. And the fact is, our assessing value and reporting impact without this accounting hid the daily decline, and made it all worse.
Forget words like sustainable, green, humane, etc. Organizations appear to have never met a basic standard of legitimacy,
The problem thus goes beyond growthwashing, into something called equitywashing (or illegal discounting) – the act of 1) assuming children deserve what they are born with rather than what measureable empowerment and political legitimacy requires, and 2) omitting the role of inequitable growth in value assessments and impact claims.
The alternative was, and is, to treat children entering the world beneath a recognized threshold of measurable empowerment as a constitutionally impermissible cost. It’s treating no child as worth more than another.
Constitutions and treaties don’t create legal obligations, only actually empowering others does that.
And that empowerment depends on whether we account for its costs, assess value, and report impact accordingly – and thus engage in a truly constitutional discourse. One either accounts for the benefits one enjoys as requiring the measurable empowerment of others, or one does not – and the things we say give away whether we do that, or not.
We can use the things we say we test whether we are accounting for legitimacy, and AI-assisted tools can help that process.
Can you think of and describe conditions in which those relations would form that does not involve that accounting? No – that’s impossible, as is being self-determining without truly empowering others.
The fix? Because they do not do that, equitywashing leads to false claims that disvalue human and nonhuman lives, and by metrics we all use like safe temperatures, influence over our political systems, equality of opportunity, etc.
Anyone impacted by those false claims can use consumer protection law to target the claims, and because the underlying business model that causes the claims often violates civil rights and other laws, advocates can use those laws to block use of the underlying model itself. These equity actions trigger something unique: They force governments to decide whether they are are interpreting their laws and own authority as contingent on the measurable empowerment of those subject to that authority – on a one person, one equal and influential vote standard – or choose to use some other standard.
Those willing to pay the costs of legitimacy could never compete against those who refuse to, but the former don’t have to compete: governance requires empowering those subject to it, and interpreting laws to require the same.
In 2023 I published several Newsweek articles on illegal baselining / illegal discounting at U.S. nonprofits. I published the article after resigning from the Animal Legal Defense Fund, which had engaged in illegal discounting / equitywashing, and had withdrawn federal litigation that would have forced the organization to deal with the issue.
Again, the practice of illegal discounting derives from historic subversion of racial justice movements described above, and exponentially reduce environmental damage evaluations, a move that enriches some children – like the children of those funders driving nonprofit agendas – at illegal and deadly cost to the most vulnerable communities in the world.
The practice is part of a historical trend of nonprofits setting low environmental standards and engaging in performative work, something that now exposes them to liability as the climate crisis unfolds. The situation is exacerbated by a lack of accountability mechanisms – like market forces or constituencies – in philanthropy.
As part of a 2024 fellowship I did with the MAHB at Stanford University, and based on extensive peer-reviewed research, FSM began to publish popular articles on interventions to end the equitywashing/ illegal discounting, and using animal liberation (where one finds the most falsifiable claims) as a vector for change.
In 2024 my employer, the University of Denver, consistent with their funders’ illegal discounting, retaliated by removing me from a grant I had developed for the University, including extensive planned litigation, and I resigned my position. The animal law programming, including how it assesses and reports value, represents the use of wealth made through a birth-inequity system to create a charade version of animal liberation, one that by preserving the status quo, does vastly more harm to animals than the program does to benefit them.
It provides a window into how the polycrisis formed, and at the most fundamental level: How we value others, and assess and report our impacts on the world.
In 2025 around litigation I helped bring against Coca Cola, Inc. for equitywashing, I began a fellowship at Emory University based on a forthcoming book on using a “preemptive constitutional discourse” about what it means to empower future generations as a requirement for national legitimacy. The research is built into a tool: FalseClaimsChecker.org. This work is designed to use clearly out-of-context impact claims to get at and preempt the underlying modeling using a simple “one person, one vote” standard to block the illegal discounting and equitywashing under state law, using unfair competition litigation.
Said simply, the tool looks for fake numbers in claims, which originate from the false assumption that there is any form of freedom outside of being birth-empowered to a level of political self-determination. It’s accurate to call those numbers “fake” or “false” because they derive from the legal fiction that having children is more determinative for the parents than the children born or communities they come to comprise, with no level of infant-health-as-enfranchisement (relative to a neutral or zero position) required. Infants arbitrarily born into deprivation relative to others – racially, generationally, nationally, etc. – are not constitutionally positioned to be relatively self-determining, or part of a legitimate, inclusive, and empowering system.
Our research now shows false claims by prominent public interest advocates dating back decades.
In 2026 the funder I had brought on at the University of Denver and various allies made public demands on the University of Denver – including threatening the first ever political equity /constitutional injunction litigation.
In 2026 the Coke litigation terminated in-part because of a lack of funding from animal protection philanthropists avoiding the equitywashing issue, but the University of Denver returned key donor funds, and TruthAlliance.global is now making renewed public demands on the school to end its illegal discounting – in part because it constitutes unfair competition, and violates state and federal civil rights laws.
This work has now culminated in an open letter and forthcoming campaign to urge Coca-Cola, Inc. to end illegal discounting.
The efforts, unlike other campaigns, account for how the the public interest sector – from government, to philanthropy, to nonprofits – enabled many of the current crises because the sector used no fixed baseline or goalpost in assessing public interest outcomes and equitywashed by failing to adhere to the legal “floor”of a one person, one equal and influential vote standard. This is evident in looking at simple metrics like permissible climate emissions, minimum standards for early childhood development, functional representative ratios for political systems, etc. against the legitimacy, or legitimacy/child empowering, standard.
Instead public interest organizations use and have used constantly moving goalposts to ensure the ability to claim progress, and justify their positioning. That’s illegal, and flows from the racist “separate but equal” standard and policy embedded in near-universal reproductive rights systems which acted to protect generational wealth (particularly at foundations), and which accepted as a given that children of color deserve fewer resources, more risk, and diminished influence in their political systems.
Key public interest organizations face serious liability for decades of false claims, and are now taking actions to hide it. FSM activists have been removed from public interest fora, seen Wikimedia pages deleted, have had funders drop their funding, have seen their social media posts censored – and many other forms of retaliation – all for raising these questions.
Our experience has shown that like any sector, public interest entities will not only avoid admitting their mistakes, and as detailed in current proceedings before the African Union, will in many cases attempt to sabotage revelations of those mistakes.
TAKE ACTION: If you are supporting a public interest organization, assess their claims using FalseClaimsChecker.org and urge them to end illegal discounting.
In most cases, the discounting does more to harm their stated missions than they do to further them. An easy way to start the process is through the Tell the Truth and Commit Campaign – in which we simply admit that illegal discounting did more to harm our values than we did to further them, and commit to treating children entering the world beneath a threshold of legitimating empowerment as constitutionally impermissible.
