Are the charities you fund undoing their own good? Find out before you give, and if organizations do not promote climate restoration via birth equity, and admit mistakes that led to the climate crisis, find out why. Where do your organizations fit in the timeline below?
Recently an article in a progressive publication challenged claims made by the Animal Legal Defense Fund (Fund) about their work, revealing that if one were to factor in family policies, the organization’s support for status quo family inequity was actually undercutting animal rights and exacerbating the climate crisis – putting many more animals in harms way than the Fund was saving with low-impact “distractivism” lawsuits, and skewing the baseline for climate reparations to at-risk nations in a way that risks millions of lives. The organization made claims, good for fundraising, that created a fantasy world of progress, forestalling life-saving climate reforms that would have challenged white supremacy and ecocide.
This issue had been brought to management, who ignored it, and went as far as quietly withdrawing litigation that would have changed that status quo, and would have set the stage for a very specific birth-equity based policy change that could save millions of lives and trillions of animals. Many funders had objected to the suit, refusing to admit that the growth economics through which they benefitted has done more harm through climate impacts than than their philanthropy had done good, and refusing to recognize the way child welfare and human rights claims limit property rights.
Many other organizations are implicated in this scam.
But there is a fix. The Tell the Truth campaign.
Just ask the right questions of any person or group claiming to do good: 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 to make money?
Find out where the organizations – from foundations, to companies, to media, to political parties etc. – you support fit into the FamScam timeline below. Some will claim this is not their issue. How can we do anything that does not involve other persons, and the relationships created through family policy? We can’t. What those insisting on ignoring family reforms really mean is that they are choosing status-quo policies from which they benefit at deadly cost to others. They are choosing injustice, often to benefit their rich kids at cost to others.
Timeline:
2008-2018: Multiple peer-reviewed research articles published showing a baseline error in climate policy that meant three-quarters of the mitigation efforts were being undone with pro-growth family policies that exacerbated inequity, policies the actually violated human rights obligations (actually reversing reproductive justice and autonomy for future generations) and risked millions of lives. Research showing the error is consistent with criticism by Nobel laureate Steven Chu, and many other laureates, regarding cost externalizing systems, and evidence that economic channels had fundamentally replaced democratic ones in terms of allocation of power, raising fundamental questions of legitimacy. The error simply involves the failure to derive political obligation back towards intergenerational justice, rather than stopping the analysis at static baselines. The error involves the failure to connect family planning to child rights and welfare systems, a move that ensured sufficient population growth to fundamentally create the climate crisis and vast inequity. That underlying fact, and the failure to address it, means most claims of sustainable, green, regenerative, ecocentric, humane, etc. activities were false, creating a fantasy world of progress that never existed.
2018: The Animal Legal Defense Fund files a federal suit to reverse this process, using an animal liberation or ecocentric standard for climate reforms. The claim is simple – to constitute a free and just society first requires climate restoration via a right to ecosocial birth equity, and this is consistent with guarantees of a right to autonomy in the U.S. Constitution. The suit calls for ppm reductions a third or more greater than the Paris Agreement.
2018-2021: The anthropocentric-based Paris Agreement on climate reform is seen to be a failure, as average temperatures as expected to well exceed 1.5C. At the same time the Fund comes under sustained pressure from Our Children’s Trust and many funders, both of whom embrace an anthropocentric over ecocentric policies for climate reform and climate reparations, to drop the litigation.
2021-2022: Leadership and funders at the Fund are repeatedly advised that ecological baseline and family policies are undoing the organization’s beneficial impacts, making fundraising and other claims suspect, as the climate crisis accelerates and the cost of inaction rises. They are also advised in peer-reviewed publications that they are creating commercial noise in the space that drowns out messaging on effective work, The threat of climate change to U.S. national security interests becomes clear in a widely read GAO study. It’s evident institutions can leave money wrongfully taken at the top, and many will die, or it can be used to change the way we plan families and save lives.
Spring 2022: The Fund and other organizations quietly withdraw the litigation, choosing status quo policies that minimize climate reparations, and hide their priority over property entitlements, putting millions at risk while many in leadership at the organizations personally benefit. That same year WHO reports rising deaths from an accelerating climate crisis.
January 2023: A whistleblower piece is published in Newsweek, detailing the events. The writing discusses reparations that are not theoretical, but already being paid out.
January 2023: Mainstream media, under pressure from funders, continue to urge growth policies, including abortion bans. In some cases media like the New York Times did more stealth advertising than covering how family policy was exacerbating the climate crisis. The Wall Street Journal and different factions of Effective Altruists (EA) at Vox emerge as a major driver of this messaging, redirecting attention and decoying audiences away from discussions of climate change liability and the possibility of direct action-based demands. In the case of (EA), many advocates who undercut equity turn out to have paid for the proliferation of their philosophy with money that they made externalizing costs on then most vulnerable. The discourse affirms the laureates’ claims, that family policies were the fundamental source of economies quietly replacing democracy as centers of influence, with citizens slowly being disempowered through those policies.
February 2023: Direct action activists whose work had been exploited by the Animal Legal Defense Fund begin to assert actual animal personhood via a right to rescue, and to win cases, which show limitations to property rights similar to the Fair Start child welfare-based limitations on macro propertyhood in the nonhuman world inherent in anthropocentric policy.
June 2023: Additional allegations about the Fund come to light in a long-form article, including an investigation into the Executive Director who withdrew the litigation and was subsequently replaced. The article affirms racism and other issues consistent with the organization’s refusal to promote racial equity in family and environmental policies.
June 2023: Climate reports show disastrous warming and total failure of anthropocentric policies. Infants are shown to be significantly harmed by temperature and other changes as the crisis accelerates.
July 2023: Fair Start Movement, in conjunction with the California’s Green Initial Public Offering (IPO), announces a pilot Fair Start Certification standard, and green/growth-washing filings targeting nonprofits, companies, foundations, etc. engaged in the FamScam for deadly harm caused to at-risk victims in nations around the world. The standard 1) uses international human rights law, not purely domestic standards, which is required for the climate crisis – but in a way that includes domestic remedies, 2) sets the highest standard for climate reparations rather than undercutting victims’ claims, 3) mandates direct family-based reparations, which have the greatest impact, and 4) corrects the baseline error or fallacy discussed above, including climate migration and pro-labor/equity employment policy changes.
The Fair Start certification program is a fundamentally a human rights certification. It’s standards track capital itself, and forthcoming state attorney-general complaints, Lanham and other tort litigation – tied to climate loss and damage cases – will target relevant green/growth-washing claim, in many contexts. Because green/growth-washing comes from business, charities, media, politicians, academics, etc., all of whom are responding to capital which is predisposed to green/growth-wash. Our lives and freedom are determined by obligation, and the dominant one is law. The fundamental creation of power/obligation relations – our birth and development – should have been determined over the last several decades by incentivizing resources that would have ensured birth equity for all children, and equal influence over the laws under which we must live. That never happened, but climate reparations are a chance to change.
Companies, like Huggable, have supported reform. Others can also make the family connection now and use their truth-telling to reverse course. They can support climate reparations as equity-based family planning entitlements and effective role modeling to ensure not only reduced pollutants, but migration and resource-backed resilience in the children that will be born to ensure the highest form of climate justice, one called for by a slew of Nobel laureates, and the only one compliant with human rights norms.
TAKE ACTION: 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 to make money?
