The Sustainability Scam Artists
Author Bios:
Esther Afolaranmi is an attorney, humanitarian, researcher, and writer. She is co-executive director of the Fair Start Movement and founder and executive of Golden Love and Hands of Hope Foundation, a registered NGO in Nigeria that targets the needs of the vulnerable and underprivileged.
Carter Dillard is the policy adviser for the Fair Start Movement. He previously served as an Honors Program attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice and with a national security law agency before developing a comprehensive account of reforming family planning for the Yale Human Rights and Development Law Journal.
Mwesigye Robert is the founder of Rejoice Africa Foundation. He is focused on human and nonhuman climate mitigation and adaptation strategies and is passionate about investing in women and children to save future generations from the climate crisis.
Introduction
Amazon.com and the Bezos empire are replacing the Amazon rainforest, and the retail giant’s climate pollution is skyrocketing. Why? Many nonprofit leaders skirted the impacts of growth because it triggers a dangerous truism: Laws that protect the lives of beneficiaries of any political system derive their legitimacy from the prior act of including and empowering—in a measurable way—future generations. Most leaders—and the biggest beneficiaries—never came close to doing this. Instead, we are feeling the repercussions of a power grab by primarily white, wealthy families at the United Nations decades ago.
Compounding the problem, more recently, nonprofit leaders have chosen to enrich their children through work under Effective Altruism and other movements based on financial investments—not reparations, which are the best, most effective, and most immediate way to fix the problem.
We can see the imbalance in how the climate crisis disproportionately impacts those who are least responsible for causing it. In 2022, Seth Borenstein and Drew Costley of the Associated Press reported that “the data shows that the top carbon emitter over time, the United States, has caused more than $1.9 trillion in climate damage to other countries from 1990 to 2014, including $310 billion in damage to Brazil, $257 billion in damage to India, $124 billion to Indonesia, $104 billion to Venezuela and $74 billion to Nigeria. But at the same time, the United States’ carbon pollution has benefited the U.S. by more than $183 billion, while Canada, Germany, and Russia have profited even more from American emissions.”
Fixing that means not kicking the climate change can down the road to future generations but instead covering significant costs.
The Sustainability Scam
Sustainability has become a buzzword among environmentalists, CEOs, and politicians. Leaders often present themselves as guardians of a better future, bragging about eco-friendly projects and sustainable methods. However, a closer look exposes a darker aspect to these assertions. The rhetoric and reality frequently diverge significantly, with racial disparities, self-interest, and uneven growth undermining the projects’ ostensible benefits.
Many who claim to create a benefit may be undoing their work by not first ensuring the shared, inclusive equity of children born into the world. That means giving all newly born human beings an equal and influential capacity to self-determine the social and ecological influences that others have over them.
This is not just theory, but frames efforts to uncover fraud and corruption that will contribute to the death of millions. Amazon.com and other concentrations of wealth benefitted from specific decisions by animal rights advocates in the early 2000s to focus on profitable food reforms as a window-dressing form of animal liberation, rather than much more effective but expensive family reforms. This replicated a long history of charade social justice devoid of any democratic equity standards that could empower children, a charade that would continue - using the same exact familial wealth - even as the climate crisis escalates.
It's a story of wealth creating the illusion of producing value by treating people as means for commerce, not as ends in liberating political systems. This is not theory - these entities hold wealth subject to clawback reparations.
As a fundamental right, people who are made vulnerable by others’ actions—like fenceline communities put in harm’s way by petrochemical plants being built in their backyards—are owed compensation. But wealthy elites engaged in a scam that got those vulnerable communities to ask for charity.
As millions die in a climate crisis in which inequitable growth policies undid most mitigation efforts, questions arise as to how that happened and who should be held accountable.
The following story, from this article’s co-author, Mswesigye Robert, demonstrates the issue well:
An anonymous funder from the United Kingdom pledged $300,000 to support water projects of my charitable organization, Rejoice Africa Foundation, but not as an obligation to cover the harm caused by the actual costs of wealth.
Seeing our demands for reparation, the wealthy donor declined the pledge to support the water project in Uganda. I needed help finding funders willing to pay such obligations. Around this time, a child in a nearby village named Judith died of malaria. The acquisition of wealth, in part, drives the climate crisis. One aspect of the changing climate is the increase in mosquito populations, which exacerbates the prevalence of diseases for which mosquitoes are vectors, like malaria.
I engaged another wealthy person from the UK pretending to be working on population issues, but she was not interested in paying any percentage of her wealth to birth equity and overriding reparations that assure it as obligations. She said she wanted to keep and now enjoy the benefits she took at a deadly cost that is affecting poor children in developing countries.
After a while, another wealthy funder funded a conference with $50,000, continuing to ignore obligations. The conference did nothing for children like Judith and very little for the animals the funder wanted to protect. What could they show?
Many funders from wealthy nations have avoided funding Rejoice Africa Foundation because they want to pay as a form of charity, not as an obligation, causing a conflict of results in climate reality in avoiding climate liability. Rejoice Africa Foundation would double implementation and save the next generation using a grant of $50,000 as an obligation from global north wealthy funders. However, most funders are busy and do not accept funding for this initiative. Rejoice Africa Foundation would like to call funders to reconsider funding this initiative and invest $50,000 in women and children as the primary obligation to stop climate genocide.
Nonprofit leaders and funders urged attorneys to avoid the issue. Consistently, specific tactics were used to evade rather than respond to the problem because there are no serious counterarguments against today treating birth share-equity as a first and overriding human right.
Want to play a fun game?
Show those who claims to do good in the word literature on what is generally understood as the minimum threshold of well-being for creating a child, which is included in what each person needs to be self-determining. Ask them, given their stated or implied values (are they enjoying the absence of heat waves, the presence of food, a life free from torture by one’s caregivers, etc.), what they are doing to limit the entry of children into the world above that threshold.
Society must take drastic measures to ensure all children have the necessary resources. This could involve risking lives to seize these resources from well-defended enclaves of wealth. By doing so, potential mothers might be incentivized to plan for their children's future, knowing these resources would be available. Many will be on the verge of arguing that reduced economic growth, for example, is not worth that effort to prevent all cases of child neglect abuse or neglect, or the never-ending gulf between black and white children in terms of birth-based opportunities, or prevent avoidable BIPOC deaths. Understand that the person you are talking to falls outside the protection of the social contract because its first term is the threshold below which we would elect not to be created.
The person you are talking to is insufficiently “other-regarding” to constitute a just future. Even if they fall outside for lack of empathy, those who don’t care about empathy would fall outside because by not ensuring minimum thresholds —say to provide returns on growth-based investments—they would also ensure the chaos of growth-driven ecocide, authoritarianism, and the threats to sovereignty—personal and collective—filling the world with people who did not get what they need growing up leads to. They fall outside because they reject the first term of the contract—who we should be, invest rather than exploit, and as such, threaten our freedom.
It’s physically impossible to have a legally obligating “we” that precedes all legitimate national constitutions without measurable birth equity. As work before the United Nations shows, no one gets to use authority and state violence to benefit at a cost to others, much less deadly cost, without incurring significant risk. Still, wealthy families and churches scammed us all between 1948 and 1968 to hide this fact and make us think that national sovereignty is magically inherent rather than having to derive from the measurable sovereignty or self-determination of its subjects.
The only way to ensure share-equity is to entitle would-be parents to bring children into the world only above a certain threshold of planned conditions measurable on eight metrics. Given that wealth was made at deadly climate costs to future generations, that wealth must be used to ensure the conditions.
Young would-be parents have a first and overriding claim to societal resources if used to parent us into a better future. Why? Without this, it would be physically impossible to be free because we could not limit who has authority, power, and influence over us. We could only try to limit who represents us. Free persons will see themselves as first obligated to persons who will parent and empower their children into emancipation, rather than first ruled by those at the top of the influence pyramid—officials, politicians, the wealthy, CEOs, celebrities, etc.—because all entitlement to influence derives from the governed and their primary and equitable positioning to self-determine, rather than government and current influencers, which have no inherent authority.
Would-be mothers who will physically constitute the future have the first right to use the most effective means to obtain the resources they need, to ensure freedom for all, and more of a right than the men with guns in government who masquerade as their representatives because there is no coherent, and necessarily primary, “we” without this override function.
The United States prides itself on being a free nation, but it uses a conception of freedom that starts by exploiting the most vulnerable at the nexus of our creation. Look for a minimum threshold of well-being for future children and animals, and you won't find one because they are both already earmarked for use in growth.
We are talking about concentrations of wealth and power, choosing to retain wealth at a deadly cost rather than use it to save the lives that would be lost because of those costs. Many will resort to extreme action in the face of this evil.
Converting democracies into unsustainable growth economies that enrich a few by diluting everyone else’s equal and influential equity shares in our political system is a subtle form of oppression, yes, but tie it to millions dying as the growth triggers catastrophic heat waves and you have the makings of a justified resistance movement. They would be reacting to what might be called the “authoriscam,” where those at the top of the economic pyramid benefitted from a law-and-order society premised on an inclusive democracy while undoing it with share inequity, paying the low costs of an unsustainable economy.
A complaint before the United Nations Human Rights Council seeks to standardize public benefits claims and climate loss and damage evaluations in the face of fraud and authorize specific crowdsourced enforcement measures to ensure compliance.
The filing says the UN has already implied the existence of a preemptive and crowd-sourceable right to the self-defensive and defensive-of-others moving of illegitimately entitled resources instead to young women in the form of life-saving and reparative planning accounts, matched to debt carried by the wealthiest. The demand is nonviolent but also accounts for violence by countries and within countries, as the product of the illegitimacy of not prioritizing bottom-up empowerment on eight metrics before now but exploiting growth and disenfranchisement.
The filing and the reflections above highlight how even well-intentioned leaders can fall into the trap of prioritizing optics over genuine equity, often driven by self-interest and external pressures or, in some cases, retaining positions and passing privilege and influence to their children long after they had given up on the cause.
There is no conspiracy here. It’s more banal. Humans evade liability and burnout in nonprofits and universities but retain their paychecks and positions and see their future as privileging their children. But birth equity override saves lives, and banal or not, those who owe their wealth must be forced to act, and spotting their tactics is a good place to start.
“While there is no ‘optimal’ human population, the evidence suggests that a sustainable global population of 3 billion is an optimistic number given that we long ago entered a continuously intensifying state of ecological overshoot, accumulating ever more massive amounts of ecological debt that must be paid down if we are to avoid the ongoing (and ever-worsening) climate catastrophe, ecological destruction, and the resulting human misery,” Dr. Christopher K. Tucker, chairman of the American Geographical Society, said in an email.
“Adding 80 million additional people to the planet each year—the equivalent of 10 New York Cities or an additional Germany each year—is not a recipe for addressing this polycrisis,” he said. “Fortunately, simply investing (heavily) in empowering strategies focused on women and girls worldwide can hasten the already inevitable demographic transition that would relieve the unrelenting pressure we have foisted on our planet—and help us meet our commitments to the next generation under the UN’s 1959 Declaration of the Rights of the Child.”
The wealthy among us got the obligation of legal systems where each of us was forced to act through threats of state coercion and violence. Still, they never paid the costs to ensure each had an equal and influential voice that would have legitimated (made inclusive) those systems.
Instead, when it came to having children and the children’s rights that make human rights and legitimacy make sense, they treated the systems not as legalities or town halls but as growth-based shopping malls from which they and their progeny would profit.
They owe the difference between the two for the harm caused, and they will evade that liability using some of the moves below. Many involved in prioritizing birth equity have seen a pattern in how many react to it, not offering counterarguments to the idea that restoring nature through ecosocial birth equity must be the first and overriding human right, but rather tactics to evade the issue.
These share a common trait: They attempt to block themselves from accounting for the deadly costs and lush benefits of their birth, developmental, and emancipatory positionality. The phrasing is something like “I’m just trying to save these animals” or “I’m just trying to focus on this area of research.” That kind of myopia destroys atmospheres.
After detailing how to spot the scam, which amounts to racist ecocide, we arrive at a test—and a method for ending it. The following are some tactics used in the scam.
Tactic 1: The Philanthropist
A philanthropist will treat birth and developmental equity as charity or altruism when, in fact, it is owed as a matter of human rights because of flaws in the system through which the funder made their money. This tactic involves burying an assumption in the frame of the issue.
Effective altruism, the term, implies wealthy families holding millions of dollars, with trust fund kids, can choose to give to birth equity causes or not. They are hiding that their wealth was built by not ensuring the birth equity that would have fundamentally—in terms of who we should be—evaded the climate crisis. They owe the equity money for having externalized deadly costs in violation of children’s rights. You can’t create a problem—a system that seemed to be a democratic town hall—and then get credit for fixing it.
Philanthropists love to use a false dichotomy, comparing themselves to bad actors on the other side of the political spectrum, with “green” funders decrying industrialists and conservative funders badmouthing “tree-hugging” foundations for limiting their freedom. In reality, who we should be should never depend on how awful others are, which can make us seem good, but rather be benchmarked to objective standards—like ensuring children are born into conditions that meet the Children’s Rights Convention.
How could a prominent animal rights activist become a Department of Defense contractor and still have an on-balance positive impact? He backs the threshold reform and thus orients from an equitable and less exploitative position.
Other environmental and animal rights leaders, the performative types, do not and instead choose the false political-anthropocentric dichotomy of using other humans as markers for impact—non-vegans, for example—rather than a more objective threshold. How many old white men are in the process of retiring with slaps on the back for a life of service, having overseen and benefited from a failed environmental protection system now killing innocent people? Chat with these men and you will inevitably find them contrasting themselves with the likes of Donald Trump. Using other humans as measures of a just life, rather than things like birth equity linked to physical and social thresholds, is dangerous.
How dangerously embedded is the fallacy of looking to other persons to standardize values like equity or mercy, as concentrations of wealth and power flood the public interest sector with decoy versions?
One nonprofit executive with more than two decades of experience said, “Fundraising for nonprofits is incredibly difficult because of widespread dishonesty. The vast majority of nonprofits lie to funders. In my experience, funders know it but claim they are powerless. Despite knowing specific nonprofits have lied to them, they continue to fund them because they believe they are effective overall. But what about the opportunity cost and counterfactual? What else could the money do if it supported honest nonprofits? How do they know the organization wouldn’t do better with an honest leader? Running an honest nonprofit in this environment is almost impossible.”
In one case, Fair Start activists worked with Black liberationists keen to join a coalition with tax reformers claiming to orient from Black equity. The reformers did not require a preemptive threshold for all children to enter the world (and hence continue to punch down on the most vulnerable). Still, the liberationists were inclined to treat the reformers as ends, deserving of an equal vote regarding the meaning of equity. That inclination is well-intended, but against the fact that we were not created and do not live as ends and that deviation from the threshold only further halts reforms that would empower us as ends. We are the products of a process of disempowerment and disenfranchisement, begun through corruption. That is the brutal reality of the political Anthropocene.
We look to others to measure who we should be because equitable birth, development, and emancipation is not a “thing” for most of us. Our ignorance derives from the historic hiding of the ability to answer questions like “Who should we be?” by reference to the line or threshold of genuine self-determination below which children should not be born and above which children may be born. Note this is also the line to judge climate and other compensation and that it moves or gets harder to get all kids over the longer we wait to make it the fundamental obligation.
Instead of self-determination in this sense, law and policy forced our thinking into an immediate focus on other humans that veiled our creation. How? Our legal and political systems treated having children as an act of autonomy, bundled up with the act of not having children, because that form of autonomy would define the concept of power in a way that avoided questioning certain entitlements.
The dangerous and powerful were the men with guns in government, and the castle of the home was an autonomous zone to be protected from it. That’s not the definition of the conception of power that makes democracy work. Power is any form of human influence, the mass aggregate of human activities that is killing millions in the climate crisis, and it begins as we—and our relations to others—are created fundamentally through birth and development. Watch for others entering the world, not the leaders with money and guns they will become.
This was power over others, not self-determination for all, and the misconception mainly operated by taking the element of time out of the equation and assuming certain relations rather than requiring birth and developmental self-determination. However, families are not just part of the social contract but constitutive of it.
Instead of racing others to the bottom for how bad we can act or be, the natural and temporalized threshold for being is based on hard metrics linked to physical conditions in the world, and it is much easier to see and achieve in a collective setting, like care modeling, than a nuclear family. This is a binary choice between acting obligated towards bottom-up systems of investment and inclusion, or top-down systems of governmental violence that exploit low levels of child welfare to create growth that kills animals and destroys nature.
One chooses higher climate and related damage assessments (on eight levels at least) based on true freedom or lower assessments that continue the powerful determining the vulnerable paradigm. The former is the standard for terms like “green/sustainable,” “democratic,” or “inclusive” that would have saved those dying in the crisis. The latter is the standard wealthy investors use to make money.
For truly free persons who wish to orient their lives based on a system of being empowered with share equity rather than living under extreme wealth entitlements made via inequity, backed by state violence that cannot be justified, no obligation comes before ensuring the thresholds for being and development, described below. Doing so constitutes freedom at the first border of power, a border that overrides and precedes national borders.
The delay in ensuring all children enter above the self-determination line has degraded our environment and created more hardship for billions of would-be mothers. It is now much more challenging and more expensive to ensure future children enter over the line.
We owe our first obligations to the governed and the future majority, and never the government, which has no inherent authority—especially not to protect concentrations of wealth and power and those that lie for them. Animal liberation and the legal system necessary to achieve it is perhaps the highest ideal of human progress to date. Defining that idea in a way that evades critical protections for nonhumans and enables today’s catastrophic state of affairs causes harm by decoying efforts away from effective work.
Suppose you use that standard (hidden by the anthropocentrism of the current reproductive rights system). In that case, the division transforms into the powerful versus the weak, with liberals and conservatives eager to exploit humans and nonhumans through growth over equity.
A closely related tactic is to treat birth equity as a matter of morality. Legal theorists know the fundamental difference between law and morality is the “social sources thesis”—that law comes from processes that include and can represent the persons subject to the law. Morality does not require this, but it’s hard to imagine how anything derives from social sources without first accounting for the persons—and fundamental power relations—comprising the society at issue.
All of this lets funders and those they fund silo off different strands of social justice from a primary and unifying view of social justice, at a cost to them and immediate benefit to us.
Birth equity entitlements are hardly a liberal issue, and conservatives react strongly to the child abuse and neglect that comes without them and the threats to national and local security inevitable with growth. To the extent conservative reactionaries are the ones likely to commit violence and finally link rich investors colluding with governments to use low child welfare standards and migration pressures to leech wealth from rural towns and into cities, they may choose less peaceful means against a handful of wealth holders who could otherwise halt massive suffering and death.
Tactic 2: The Futurist
A futurist will treat birth and developmental equity as a complex matter of futurism rather than an immediate concern. This tactic exploits a cognitive dissonance in the human brain that psychologists call “temporal myopia”—a natural tendency to focus on the present and short-term benefits rather than the future and long-term consequences. Intergenerational equity issues involve the future, but they also include children entering the world—right now—in horrific conditions that could be vastly improved—and saved—by moving wealth from the heights of the economic pyramid.
Many who benefitted from privileged birth positionality and who used systems of truth and value like economic growth now threatening a billion persons will avoid these immediate questions to focus on the future to prevent their liability—today—for race-based birth inequity.
How is it not racist to back a system of birth entitlements where children of color get a tenth or less of the wealth as white children and bear the deadly cost of an ecocide they did not create? We would and should ostracize anyone who refused to hire Black people. Why not identify, reform, or, if they cannot be reformed, ostracize anyone backing (largely) old white male billionaires whose wealth was acquired at a deadly cost to millions of (primarily) BIPOC children? Indeed, could that wealth be used to save people instead of killing them? There is a bright line test for this sort of racism, based on whether one supports universal birth equity or not, now pending before the United Nations.
The filing sets the stage for lawsuits and direct actions to preempt any law or policy not orienting from birth equity as fundamentally illegitimate (how are children included in a democracy without equity shares?) and likely to kill untold numbers of innocents as billions are born without resources and temperatures soar.
Esther Afolaranmi devised the argument being made before the UN that women’s birth equity planning circles as self-defense, which aligns with the view that the “we” in every constitution should have been based on eight values (including animal liberation) emanating from women’s collectives to make sense when in reality it was just men with guns declaring a “we,” next to other men with guns across the border doing the same.
In this data age, it will be what many said in the past, how it was recorded, shown to be wrong and self-serving—how it killed innocents, that will matter more than murky visions of some future.
Tactic 3: The Distractivist (aka the Noise Machine)
A distractivist will throw out a decoy or off-ramp that divides less influential persons. Many funders will subtly redefine equity equality and urge the representation of persons of color in leadership rather than birth equity. Others will urge halved versions of bodily autonomy, like the right to terminate a pregnancy while ignoring the risks to the mother of dying in a heat wave because she cannot afford air conditioning to battle the growth-based climate change the “pro-choice” funders created and exacerbate by enjoying their own air-conditioning.
This can trigger those on the right and evade unifying questions like child welfare and equity. Other funders may provoke a reaction from the left by framing birth equity as an issue of overpopulation. This approach avoids addressing the more profound, qualitative questions of equity and sidesteps the critical understanding that reproductive rights, informed by children’s rights, take precedence over other human rights. Alternatively, they may focus on immigration issues to divert attention from the fundamental need for universal birth and developmental equity.
Many of us have hard-core animal activist friends who, when urged to make the more macro move to fairness and question their own birth and developmental positionality and what they owe on a larger scale, start to blather on about quixotic goals, inevitable apocalypses, and how much they want just to enjoy nature before it goes away. They care more about performatively acting than being just. The mainstream masses on the left and right should instead be looking upwards towards those who benefitted from a system of rich kids and poor kids and whose wealth can save countless lives.
Tactic 4: The Researcher / Distracademic
In this context, a researcher will play dumb and say we need more research. I’ve had many conversations with everyday people who understand the growth of each member’s share of an enterprise and realize that insufficiently developed and antisocial members can disenfranchise others by being unfair or unreasonable, disrupting the process.
Many children get this—when shown how new entrants impact their classes. Few would be inclined to exploit those new kids as laborers and consumers for a side business the child might have in the classroom, but they understand what entry means.
Yet, law professors will often seem shocked by the idea that the default entitlements—the funding based on exploiting future children—on which their prestige and lifestyles are based might be illegitimate. These are people whose careers were staked on a system being made illegitimate by growth that, according to one Nobel laureate, used future generations as economic inputs rather than including them as self-determining citizens and failed to invest in sufficient family planning to achieve childhood development, a system now killing millions in the climate crisis.
One highly esteemed law professor consistently said that metrics to ensure fair starts in life, life health care, and education were our values—while his highly privileged children gobbled up such things as if they valued them too. While initially supportive of birth equity, this person backed off on any criticism of funders when he realized that while right, the work was not widely popular.
One law professor who has consistently dismissed looking at how family reforms can benefit nonhuman animals (while raising two very privileged children) urged young mentees to get any work discussing animal protection into leading law school journals because for them—in their fantasy world—doing so somehow helps nonhuman animals. They are ”building the institution of animal law.” They do this while reversing the protection of nonhuman animals on many levels in their daily commitment to a legal system that is antithetical to nonhuman liberation. In contrast, others risk their freedom in ways that help but fail to mention nonhuman animals.
Their children will not appreciate their kicking the issue to the next generation, as they published for the sake of publishing and pontificating rather than being just.
Legal professionals, especially in the legal academy, bear unique liability for creating the illusion of a legitimate and inclusive system, which was never that, but an illusion from which they profited. One famous book on legality (the title of which wrongly implied an animal rights theme to many) purports to show the unity of value but myopically misses the primacy and privilege of the author’s birth positionality and the greater unity of value represented by dealing with that issue.
Even in the face of these truths and the rising piles of dead, many academics will say we just need more information, as they and their families carry on with their privilege and think-tank, university, and nonprofit salaries, often scoping the studies over years, assuming those urging birth equity might simply go away.
Tactic 5. The Iconarchist
An “iconarchist” takes advantage of the fact that humans focus on shortcut symbols rather than the thing being symbolized. We want to focus on a battle between two presidents. Yet, we don’t question how two individuals could possibly represent hundreds of millions of Americans with little common core, on the Constitution as some ancient document (that only a few are qualified to interpret, but all are bound by) rather than the complex of relations—the actual, dynamic social contract—it is meant to symbolize, or the title of being a professor (many of whom check truth and obligation in a line between work and home life) rather than the integrity of the materials they have published and profess.
Here is a way anyone can think through these matters. Consider that the President of the United States says they represent the collective “we.” Now, consider how much each American trusts the other Americans. After that consideration, you will find that the “we” that our elected representatives refer to is based on top-down coercion, not bottom-up power, i.e., investing enough in each child to create a common core and consensual relations among the citizenry.
The former is not a real “we.” We tolerate this illusion because our country is expected to keep us safe from other countries, and survival overrides the need for genuinely democratic systems. The climate crisis has shattered that justification since national policies that do not invest enough in children are killing their own citizens.
A related tactic is to bring those who wish birth equity into the structure. For example, organize a small retreat of law professors and make those who would otherwise be making public demands feel heard and part of the structure. Urge them to use back channels, hierarchies, and contacts to get leaders to act.
Why is this bad? It undermines the dignity of human rights, where all good changes should be made publicly and as equals. It invites delay and cooptation, excluding rather than including those with a real stake in the outcome. If we want to replace concrete jungles of showing malls with town halls in nature, we have to act in accord with the latter.
Go deeper when anyone claims to do good and see whether ignoring how children enter the world undermines the values—truth, representative democracy, animal liberation—they claim to symbolize.
Tactic 6: The Metaphysicalist
They will offer a false beacon like religion or a nonsensical idea like procreative autonomy to take advantage of many people’s desire to evade the enormity of existential questions. This manufactures a false god that accounts for our positionality or some “we” that exists in the ether—a self-contradictory deity, something out there that would have ensured growth destroying the other species they themselves created, and that meant we would not have been alone, and whose habitats and homes would have required smaller democracies with more invested in each person, a voice not drowned out by the crowd, a voice more god-like citizen than menial consumer or worker.
It’s easier to get humans to believe they were created by god or some good that magically nests in the subjective decisions of would-be parents—even one that would make no sense, than that they derive from failed family planning policies that never contained the thresholds necessary to protect the atmosphere.
Tactic 7: The Denier
This tactic involves moving the Overton window (the range of policies voters will accept) by saying we need more babies to survive to evade our liability for reparations. Donald Trump mastered this move, but left-seeming outlets like Vox, which have been urging growth in the face of heat waves and are facing severe liability, also use it.
We’ve had conversations with editors there who knew they were promoting growth and plant-based diet change, which simultaneously entailed one canceling out the latter. They also knew that “birth-equity override” could hobble massive meat companies by freezing their assets and entitlements under loss and damage reparations regimes.
But given a choice, the company bent to backers who favored growth and themselves faced liability once equity became the issue. So what do you do when caught shilling for vegan food companies in the face of millions dying, all based on a lie that what you promote is sustainable? Double down and hope for the best.
Those who failed to set a sufficient protective threshold for family planning drove—at the most basic level of child welfare and who we should be—the polycrisis we face today. We call these leaders “non-primary” to group them and more efficiently target and hold them accountable. They were not correct, as the consequences of growth have unfolded. But more importantly—at a meta-level—they also helped define right-wing economics, e.g., using gross domestic product with massive, externalized costs as a marker for the public good.
Tactic 8: The Greenwasher
A greenwasher is an individual, company, or organization that engages in the practice of greenwashing. Greenwashing is misleading consumers regarding a company's environmental practices or the environmental benefits of a product or service. This deceptive tactic involves making unsubstantiated or exaggerated claims about a product, service, or business operation’s environmental friendliness to appear more environmentally responsible than they are.
Enterprises invest substantial resources in promotional initiatives, highlighting insignificant environmental gains while omitting noteworthy adverse effects. A corporation may, for instance, tout the fact that its packaging is made of recycled materials while downplaying the pollution that results from its production methods. Without providing tangible environmental advantages, this strategy takes advantage of consumers’ desire for sustainable items.
Tactic 9: The Tokenist
A tokenist makes superficial or symbolic efforts by individuals, organizations, or entities to appear environmentally friendly or committed to sustainability without implementing substantial or meaningful changes. These tokenistic actions often aim to enhance public image and deflect criticism rather than address the root causes of the ongoing climate crisis.
Tokenism in sustainability efforts manifests through small, symbolic actions that are disproportionately publicized. Examples of token gestures include planting trees (schemes that often fail), launching a small-scale recycling program, or donating to an environmental cause. These actions often divert attention from more significant systemic issues within the organization. By showcasing these minor efforts, leaders attempt to create an illusion of commitment to sustainability and appease critics.
Tactic 10: The Legal Loopholer
The “legal loopholer” uses regulatory gaps and legal technicalities to avoid meaningful environmental action. Instead of genuinely committing to sustainable practices, they exploit loopholes in existing laws and regulations to create the appearance of compliance without making substantial changes.
This tactic allows them to evade accountability and continue harmful practices under the guise of legality. For instance, a company might buy carbon credits to offset its emissions on paper while polluting heavily, exploiting the flexibility in emissions trading schemes without making real reductions. They may also produce superficial environmental impact assessments that technically comply with regulatory requirements but fail to address the full scope of their environmental impact.
True Sustainability Means Having Children in a Very Different Way
These deceptive tactics undermine the promise of sustainability, allowing leaders to project a false image of environmental stewardship while continuing harmful practices. To achieve genuine sustainability, we must demand transparency, hold organizations accountable, and ensure that the benefits of sustainable development are distributed equitably. Addressing these systemic issues is the only way towards a sustainable and just future.
Many rising stars in social justice have agreed:
“Humans have a moral duty to live in peace with nonhuman animals and to protect the environment. Fulfilling this duty will require us to critically analyze the way we have ordered our human societies and to dramatically reverse course,” said Mirais Holden, an animal rights attorney and activist, in The Simple Heart Initiative. “We must redefine the rights of nonhuman animals and human children, curb human population growth, and re-envision our interrelated systems of consumption. We are called to build a more compassionate world where children’s needs are met, and nonhuman animals are treated not as resources for our consumption but as our fellow earthlings who, like us, have a right to be free from avoidable suffering and injustice.”
Elizabeth is the Founder and Executive Director of For All Animals (FAA) and for decades, has overseen communications for nonprofits. She said: “To truly measure the impact of our efforts to protect animals and the environment, we cannot review metrics in a vacuum. It is far too easy to manipulate impact by hyper-focusing on one positive outcome or extrapolating beyond acceptable mathematical standards. This not only presents a false narrative of success but typically ignores the negative reactive implications. Fair Start’s approach requires us to examine individual crises as part of a whole, highlighting the global impact the recognition of a basic legal right to equity could bring.
“I support the need for work that starts to undo the catastrophic impacts of growth on nonhumans across the globe. I have always criticized a view that treats unchecked economic and population growth as harmonious with efforts to protect animals over the long term. Frankly, I am grateful for these overdue efforts to try and address the linkages between human and animal thriving.” - Justin Marceau
Many of those willing to benefit at deadly cost to others want to treat the fact of children entering the world as something unrelated to their lives, an item on a menu of charitable choices. It is not. It is the base of all things, a commitment to who we aspire to be. Do we care about each other or exploit each other? We should ostracize any entity refusing to hire someone simply because they are Black or Brown. We should ostracize anyone refusing to hire is not part of a real “we.” Instead, they threaten the rest of us because they cause division.
The question of how others treat children entering the world lets us look for those who are willing to benefit at a deadly cost to others—millions of others, refusing to fund sufficient protections for kids coming in. This type of antisocial behavior is worse than the racist employee because it determines who we are and not just what we do.
They are insufficiently other-regarding to include others or constitute in a way that ensures self-determination for all. How is accepting current entitlements—in a situation where a climate crisis driven mainly by White, wealthy citizens is harming and killing BIPOC communities—not considered White supremacy? We must ostracize those who refuse to hire BIPOC workers and defend billionaires whose wealth is being made at deadly cost to millions of current and future BIPOC lives.
While economics has dominated the social sciences because humans predictably try to maximize their welfare, it is also clear that many people also choose criteria for truth and value that reaffirm their birth and developmental positionality. Many think the existence of electric cars is a good thing because they are omitting from their minds the multidimensional inequity—the loss of an equal and influential voice in democracy, the loss of being included and empowered—that destroyed our atmosphere and necessitated them.
That’s a dangerous form of self-deception, but seeing it gives a move beyond economics, beyond capitalism versus socialism, and toward unifying constitutionality or being a legality before we are an economy. We can’t change the lives we all experience for the better if disproportionately influential people can define what good is, and the deadly climate crisis shows us what it is not. Use that fact to hold those who evade our obligations to birth equity accountable—so that all can work together to know what’s right, contrasted with mistakes increasing the temperature of the word in killing ways even as we speak.
How could you know how much welfare you deserve if you are not involved in making the rules determining welfare? We can’t create economic demand by violating neonatal rights. We can’t fill shopping malls by cutting citizens off from being born and raised in town halls. Using specific ecosocial thresholds (roughly eight) to reform birth and development rights ensures an equal and influential role in all deciding under which rules one has to live, thus limiting the influence others have over you to live in relative self-determination. Given the exponential difference between the wealth of black and white children, massive reforms are necessary to achieve equity.
Countries cannot legitimately undercut the sovereignty of their subjects by ignoring children’s birth and development entitlements, using those children instead as economic inputs to create ecologically deadly growth. Nations and many powerful interests within them have, in response to the “baby bust” of falling fertility rates, openly admitted to doing this.
In Walden, we learn that a basket weaver could not expect to succeed in the “free” markets being created by those colonizing his lands. But even Thoreau missed the fundamental value of nature in constituting the fundamental creation of power relations towards equity and freedom. To the extent the bead workers of Amboseli face the same threat from the likes of Elon Musk and his sort, we can make harsh examples of moving their illegitimate wealth as a fundamental act of liberation. The bead workers' offerings are inherently valuable as we ensure we treat others as ends, not means.
Wealth made through this process of disenfranchisement, cutting future persons off from influential citizenship in democratic town halls to shuttle them into crowded shopping malls as workers and consumers, is owed back to children entering the world, and those promoting that ignorance, and those most benefiting from it, have special obligations in this regard. Laws that protect the lives of beneficiaries of any political system only derive their legitimacy from the prior act of including and empowering—in a measurable way—future generations rather than exploiting them and thereby harming all of us.
Let’s fix the cause and not the symptom.