What fundamentally caused the situation unfolding in Gaza and Israel today?
Fact: While the United Nations urges the idea of human rights, the reality is that they have intentionally embraced destabilizing economic growth-based family policies in the Middle East that violate those rights. Instead of ensuring children’s basic rights, the policies created more and more people, with greater levels of inequity and hatred, in an area that is already an environmental nightmare.
The wealthiest and the charities they fund want to pretend the world was always meant to look like a massive shopping mall, and that climate damages should be evaluated on that basis. The truth is human rights guaranteed functional town halls in biodiverse nature. That is what was lost. That is how we measure the harm.
While charities were touting the benefits of saving a particular forest, ending certain diseases, or enlarging cages for laying hens, they were also ignoring the growth-based economic systems that were enriching their largest billionaire funders. Those same growth-based systems have undone three quarters of the climate crisis mitigation attempts made over the last several years.
That growth, from which these charities and their funders profited, now threatens millions of lives. That growth will cause more animal suffering and ecocide than many of the myopic, window-dressing campaigns these organizations ran and used for fundraising actually prevented.
The wealthiest and the charities want to pretend the world was always meant to look like a massive shopping mall, and that climate damages should be evaluated on that basis. The truth is human rights guaranteed functional town halls in biodiverse nature. That is what was lost. That is how we measure the harm.
But if the basic condition for any rule is that it be fair, and the first rule is that which accounts for our creation and development, e.g. the right of parents to freely have kids, then that rule must be made fair. And fairness begins with all children’s rights to a restored climate and ecosocial birth equity – true relative self-determination.
And we need not wait for governments to recognize and fix the issue. Many are using the correct baseline to cover effective reparations already.
Why don’t we have to wait?
Free people will condition compliance with the law on their being fundamentally empowered by it, and that’s physically impossible without treating an ecosicial fair start in life as the first and overriding human right, a right that includes actual participation in governance – being created for town halls, not shopping malls. Governments cannot assign property rights – to Musk or others – without first ensuring the human rights that justify governmental authority.
Today’s freedom fighters move beyond the outdated idea of national borders and fight for fundamentally liberating family policies that free us all ensuring climate and biodiversity restoration through birth equity entitlements that ensure parenting delay, a level playing field for all kids, and smaller or more eco-centric families.
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.
*Note – we changed the content on May 11th based on advice from a social change leader urging that we should be less confrontational, and more collaborative. This was the advice:
I think framing John Raymond as a bad person who needs to have his money removed from him is not a angle that readers can get behind, since he is just doing what ambitious capitalist Americans do. Let’s face it, if most Americans were in John Raymond’s shoes, they would have done the same thing. The argument would be that John Raymond’s son or daughter will have to do differently, as our world cannot continue having this economic system that it does. And if Raymond loves his children, he will change his ways NOW since we do not have time to waste. So instead of us preying on John and taking things from him, framing it as John giving to the world by changing his ways because he loves his kid might be a better tactic.
And because he is in the business of fossil fuels, the wealth he “owns” was made at cost – through the climate crisis – to those in the future. The cost of much of his family’s wealth could be the death of millions.
John T. Raymond is great example of the climate trolley problem, recently covered in Newsweek. What if you could save millions by engaging one man? You can. John. T Raymond is worth hundreds of millions of dollars, money made by externalizing costs and risks on others.
One could argue that the positive law entitlements described in the first link of this paragraph must control in the absence of agreement otherwise, but unpacked that boils down to doing what the government – the men with guns – says, because it is the government. But that, as a reason, is the opposite of the ideal of American freedom.
This is all beyond liberalism or conservatism. We might equally target the lead at the New York Times – Joseph Kahn – for his role, his use of power, in holding up the family system that created John’s wealth.
TAKE ACTION: Contact John here through his agents, and urge him to do the right thing, or find and reason with him lawfully and peacefully in person and we will publicize your bravery. Free persons will limit and decentralize the influence others have over them (including climatological influence) by physically constituting just communities, relative to a neutral baseline like a restored climate and nature, such that we are not interfering with the freedom or relative self-determination of others.
John, using some of his wealth to give back to future generations and reorient what we mean by being free, could lead in this regard.
Want to be effective? Target other choke point high-value targets like Vladimir Putin (who financed western oil companies) or Joseph Kahn, lead editor at the New York Times, who urges women to have kids to in order to further grow the economy that is ensuring the climate crisis.
On India’s Independence Day on August 15, 2019 India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi called on the central and state governments to implement policies to control the country’s population growth rate: “Population explosion will cause many problems for our future generations. We have to be concerned about population explosion. The central as well as state governments should launch schemes to tackle it,” Modi said in his Independence Day address before the nation’s iconic Red Fort in Delhi according to NDTV. The prime minister also called on Indian couples to have smaller families and praised Indian citizens who have already embraced smaller family norms, saying that having fewer children is “an act of patriotism.”
In November, 2022, the Supreme Court refused to entertain the petitions seeking directions to control the population, saying it is for the Central government to look at the issue of population control. The Supreme Court also said that it was not an issue where the court should interfere.
However, in November the Court also ruled that under India’s Medical Termination of Pregnancies Act, 1971 (MTP Act), and its related rules, all women are entitled to safe and legal abortion, regardless of their marital status. This enables legislation that would seek to reduce family size.
At the same time, India shows great disparity in equality of opportunity among children. A recent study used two rounds of Indian National Family Health Surveys and concepts of Inequality of Opportunity and Human Opportunity Indices to measure inequality arising out of unequal coverage of full immunization and minimum nutrition for Indian children. The results suggest overall high level of inequality of opportunity with substantial geographical variations. Changes in inequality of opportunity in the two services during 1992-1993 to 2005-2006 were mixed with some geographical regions outperforming others. The findings also call for substantial policy revisions if the goal of universal full immunization and minimum nutrition has to be achieved. See https://www.jstor.org/stable/41487420
Modi’s call for a smaller family policy can thus be recast as a promoting equity, through measures which mimic calls for reforms to U.S. tax policy using devices such as “baby bonds” which create savings accounts for children, and could be used to incentivize delayed fertility.
More specifically:
1) Cut all benefits to wealthy families who don’t need the funding.
Moreover, these policies can override conflicting rights and policies because family planning is the first norm from which others derive, accounting for the creation and existence of persons, from whom governance and all of its practical norms derive: See https://bolognalawreview.unibo.it/article/download/13299/12829
The actual policy changes would flow from 1) the UDHR and International Bill of Rights, and a correct interpretation of Article 16, see https://fairstartmovement.org/fair-start-file-update-to-un-human-rights-council-petition-our-overriding-right-to-nature-and-equity/, to 2) mandate scaled family planning entitlements, like baby bonds, through India’s current family incentives progam. In an effort to encourage Family Planning (FP) adoption, since 1952, the Government of India has been implementing various centrally sponsored schemes that offer financial incentives (FIs) to acceptors as well as service providers, for services related to certain FP methods.
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.
Countless media stories today are flooding our brains with stories of an underpopulation crisis, falling fertility rates, and women liberated from being mothers-in-waiting.
You would not see many abortion bans either. These conversations are premised on the idea that we can exploit children as cheap labor and voracious consumers.
But the truth is we do actually have to invest that level in kids, at least the minimum spelled out by the Children’s Rights Convention.
People like Elon Musk may be bemoaning falling population numbers, but the children of his native South Africa – and intending mothers – actually have a claim to his wealth to bend the arc of de-growth even further. He certainly owes it, born a rich white kid who fled South Africa with wealth during apartheid.
How those families take what they deserve, the distraction of effective altruism aside, is another matter.
When you’ve done something wrong it’s easier to distract than make amends. And when it comes to family and population policy, a lot of influential people did a lot of wrong.
Here are three types of men pushing that lie. And we can stop them by telling the truth: We have the right to take back the wealth they took, and compensate future generations, by all means effective.
The Investor
Rather than create value, say through true innovation that creates real value, some men rely on women to have kids to grow economies by literally adding bodies. Elon Musk is a great example, though there are many others that qualify.
The Politician
Politicians generally sit atop a pyramid of people, and they expand their power by growing the base. Mitt Romney is a great example of this, and they generally serve the Investor-types, not the people under them.
The Economist/Academic
These are the men who promoted unsustainable systems because it would create amazing short-term benefits while foisting the costs on women, and future generations. Paul Morland and Will MacAskill are great examples of these sorts. They provide legitimacy for the Investors and Politicians.
How do we stop them? We can make them tell the truth: The climate and inequity crises facing the world today are causing, and will cause, immense suffering. These crises fundamentally flow from the policies that enriched these men by putting costs on others. Because family policies are primary, we do not need governments permission to take back the wealth these men took.
Researchers in Ohio and North Carolina recently published and publicized research that suggested policy changes could increase birthrates by making it easier for Americans to have larger families, consistent with the desire many people have to do so.
That suggestion ignores that way population policies fundamentally drove the climate crisis, on many levels, and created a situation in which large families in the past interfered with the right of families today to have any children without having to condemn them to the threats of the climate crisis and other threats driven by family policy.
Caring about children means caring for the conditions in which they are born.
TAKE ACTION: Urge leadership at the universities in Ohio and North Carolina to admit these mistakes, and pivot research to promote all children’s right to a Fair Start in life.
