Problem:
Organizations and individuals are making claims that hide the impact of family policies – especially in wealthy nations, and are delaying universal family reforms, moves that exacerbate the climate and inequity crises and put millions of lives at risk.
In the case of Singer, the impacts of his work for animal liberation through tactics like dietary reform have been vastly undone by the inequitable and growth-based family policies he endorsed and lived personally, policies that benefitted him and his three children at deadly cost – through the climate crisis and inequity – to others. In this regard Singer is precon, choosing not to actually constitute a just world, despite being highly influential over a crucial span of time where lives could have been saved from the growth-based climate crisis.
Many promote his dietary focus because they are invested in plant-based companies, companies that embrace growth even though it does more harm to humans and nonhumans than these companies do good. His mistakes here, turning animal liberation into mass consumerism, bleed into his work on Effective Altruism, risking millions of lives with misleading information about entitlements and what has impact. His work siloed off animals from social justice, and the natural alignment we find there.
If Singer wants to save animals, both human and nonhuman, he should admit this fact, reverse course and simply admit that human rights obligate us to prioritize climate restoration via birth equity as the first and overriding human right.
He will admit that the inequitable family systems under which he had his three children did more harm to animals than his work has done good. Direct family planning reparations can reverse this, changing greatest injustice and power imbalance in the history of the world: Systems that began by empowering child-makers over the vulnerable children they would have, and the nonhuman world that having would destroy. But we can stop it, and target those who choose to benefit at cost to others.
He should embrace true animal liberation, and not mislead as to what that means. We don’t liberate animals by humanizing the world.
Solution:
Ask anyone – like Singer – claiming to promote certain values about how their approach to families and child welfare undid and is undoing the values they otherwise promote. Exploiting children to ensure economic growth is the system we are all used to and largely ignore. We do this, rather than requiring equitable investments in their birth and development conditions. That move has now reversed most of the progress in fighting the climate crisis, and inequity. That fundamental injustice, which made a small percentage of mostly white men wealthy by violating human rights, will kill millions.
In the climate crisis reparations in the form of family planning entitlements save lives and restore biodiversity. They return wealth to those who deserve it. We can leave wealth at the top of the economic pyramid, and millions will die, or we can pay it back to the future generations – those on which its true costs are being imposed.
Investing more in children’s birth and development conditions is the most just and effective way to protect them, animals, the environment, and human rights and democracy all at the same time. Don’t get scammed by greenwashing, where organizations subvert their own mission at massive cost to others and skew the baseline for climate reparations.
As early as 1974 family planning should have been universally determined by the presence of resources to assure ecosocial birth equity, as the first human right and fundamental baseline for cost and benefits. The failure to ensure these birth and development conditions means we have children in a way that benefits some at deadly cost to others. Paying back those costs in the form of family planning reparations is the most effective way to solve these crises, and many are leading by example and paying what they owe.
We can leave that money where it is or move it into birth and development reparations and save millions.
Don’t let anyone stand in your way. We can have justice, and in getting it we don’t have to follow rules and laws that do not start by actually empowering us.
