How the World Hides Liability for Climate Deaths
Author Bios:
Rei Stone-Grover is a trauma-informed, healing-centered professional, certified sexual assault professional, mental health professional, and author. A former crisis text line, sexual assault, and wellness clinician, she leads healing-centered engagement workshops and provides consultation for working in the trauma community. A key organizer for the Charlotte Women’s Movement, Stone-Grover was a contact person for the media, drawing sponsors and thousands of marchers. In recognizing writing as a tool toward wellness, Stone-Grover created a workbook and workshop, “The Cope Life,” designed to focus on healing-centered engagement and building self-regulation skills. She is a contributor to the Observatory.
Beatrix Homler is an animal and human rights activist based in New York. She is the head of communications at the Fair Start Movement, a consultant at Rejoice Africa Foundation, and a board member at the Education for African Animal Welfare Foundation. She is a contributor to the Observatory.
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. He is a contributor to the Observatory.
Public Interest, and Misdirection Away From Incoming Generations
Billions face a deadly future because of the climate crisis. While rich nations’ inability or unwillingness to curb emissions is a major driver of apocalyptic scenarios that may unfold, some of the blame falls on deceptive tactics like greenwashing, growthwashing, and humanewashing.
While these strategies are often employed by the for-profit sector, nonprofit organizations are not immune. It was the philanthropy of wealthy families not accountable to election or market forces, rather than small business or government, that for decades envisioned and articulated insufficient standards - devoid of child equity - for social justice, environmentalism, animal liberation, etc.
Wealthy families and governments, in designing reproductive rights regimes, treated the act of having children as more personal to the parents than interpersonal for the children and the communities they comprise.
The climate and related crises we face today have been largely driven by this, by the absence of any child equity and empowerment standards in reproductive rights regimes dating back to 1948, regimes that seeded racist inequity, at and unsustainable growth.
The crises we face today are all exacerbated by those standards, which had more to do with growing generational wealth than assuring good outcomes.
These families and their concentrations of wealth and power never created value. Instead they first used poor family planning to create their own audiences and artificial demand by ensuring dismal standards for child development and education, treating people as economic inputs rather than citizens while benefiting from the appearance of inclusive and functional democracies where the average vote was actually being diluted to uselessness.
These families used child inequity to subvert the civil rights movement, and evade race and other reparations. This was and is a form of reparations fraud, and the hiding of a share equity deficit that is killing children of color.
This fraud - like the omissive use of language that assumes black lives are worth less by ignoring birth inequity - clouds the language and concepts needed for universal reparative justice, and the fact that by ignoring ecosocial birth equity, most philanthropy ensured the climate crisis and did more harm than good.
By isolating women in the family planning process and ignoring child equity, wealthy families have for decades ensured inherited poverty, or commercially exploitative rather than legitimate and inclusive relations. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, "What does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter if he doesn't earn enough money to buy a hamburger and a cup of coffee?" That condition derived fundamentally from the use of illegal family entitlements that undermined all civil rights and created a generational apartheid.
Freedom is an objective and measurable concept, linked to historical ecological and social markers that are tied to birth and development but often ignored.
What was owed in birth equity, and one’s influential share in democracy, was instead taken and sold back in growth-based economies.
Today children are being born in a way that reverses the impacts claimed by many nonprofits. Just do the math, contrasting claimed beneficial impacts by the organization, relative to how those impacts are undone as children enter the world.
Look at historical annual reports of organizations claiming progress in this area in the 1960s and 70s. Those were all misleading. The organizations were embracing family policies that were quietly undoing progress in all those areas, ensuring the catastrophic situation we find ourselves in today. The background systems they usually did not question and implied the legitimacy of were benefitting the claimant while unleashing significant and increasing harm to infant humans and equines (and other nonhumans) alike.
Many organizations today are trying to do the same thing for future generations
These lies are told to avoid having to cover the high costs of ensuring future children’s rights as the legitimate basis for reproductive rights and to make money on the growth that a lack of protection would ensure. This creates a fake, top-down version of social justice, one hiding the actual creation of power relations in birth, development, and and emancipation. It allows wealthy white families to amass wealth, at deadly cost to generations of black families.
Wealthy families in those nations most responsible for the climate crisis are now funding a fantasy world to evade liability arising from the use of the standards above - fraudulent standards for political equity and thus legitimacy in governance.
This includes evading liability for climate reparations, in what amounts to a charade of environmental sustainability and social justice claims that are being vastly undone every day as children enter the world without the resources they need.
Wealthy families routinely fund decoy nonprofits that silo social justice into various downstream issues, to hide upstream entitlement and reparations fraud, using a false premise to benefit from a system that undoes the good they seem to do. This does more to benefit the rich, white children of the funders backing their programs, and at deadly cost to countless children of color, than it does to accomplish the missions.
Undoing Animal Rights and Environmental Protection
Many nonprofit organizations, like environmental and animal rights advocacy groups, have made ill-advised choices that actually worsened the environment and the welfare of nonhuman animals. They have commonly chosen campaigns that assume and use growth-based economic systems, the effects of which run afoul of the values of those organizations as the growth undoes the value of the campaigns.
These systems of economic growth, with no functional protections for children as they enter the world, operate in constant violation of the Children’s Rights Convention. Those leading these systems are essentially freeriding on their positionality at a deadly cost to others, undoing every day through birth inequity among children the benefits they claim to create.
When it comes to claims being made about how any particular legal system protects animals, the statements become outrageous, creating a fantasy world of change undone, every day, by growth. The statements, and the illusion they create, make wealthy funders feel good while benefiting from systems of inequity killing millions.
Wealthy families in polluter nations use low child welfare standards and massive inequity to undo upstream what they are pretending to do downstream - selling vegan products in growth markets that do more harm to animals than our sales do good, suing over immediate threats to endangered species that will go extinct long-run, centering children's needs well after they arrive in the world and most of the damage is done, focusing on political candidates when their ability to represent is being slowly eroded.
When one factors in family entitlements, environmental and animal protection funders, nonprofits, and their media have done more to empower the industries they claimed to oppose than the victims they claimed to represent, and in many ways show the greatest example of the Winners Take All form of corruption and by creating a mutilation of the ideal of animal liberation, skew the baseline for climate reparations.
These charades of focusing on symptoms more than cause have often done more harm than good, clouding the language of liberation as the claimed benefits were being undone daily. For decades Fair Start members were employed and worked with such entities, and we benefitted at deadly cost to others by omitting information about the fundamental harm we were causing, and in a way that enriched mostly white children and killed mostly children of color.
Every person must ask: Why is the world tolerating it?
“Above all, we’re talking about how all these—and many other events and policies and cultural practices—have worked together to keep wealth and well-being disproportionately concentrated in white communities,” writes Edgar Villanueva in his 2021 book Decolonizing Wealth, which focuses on how philanthropy nonprofits need to engage in reparative justice.
How could people not be part of, and the beginning of, any work that anyone does? The power relations that develop when we are created, between each other and with the nonhuman environment, are the basis of our positionality (i.e., our socioeconomic position relative to others) and impact all we do. That is why growth undoes most of the climatological benefits of diet change.
White supremacy might seem like a marginalized thing to many whites until they consider the birth basis of massive financial and political inequity.
Because of colonization, slavery, and other structural forms of racism, Black children in the United States are born with roughly one-tenth the wealth of white children. This is the genesis of inequity of opportunity. Like the absence of minimum levels of welfare for children, this inequity is a basis for treating the legal system that allows it as illegitimate.
This disparity ensures that Black, Indigenous, and Latino households will work for wealthy whites while absorbing the most significant risks and harms in the climate crisis—both socially and ecologically. Black children are almost three times as likely to face hunger than white children. If we consider immigration status as a comparable basis for inequity, these numbers get worse.
Again, this could be resolved with universal birth equity-based planning—and significant baby bond distributions—but policymakers and wealthy white families that ensure their election prefer to exploit the difference. These children are created to work and absorb the social and ecological costs of the wealth they create.
We see inaction on the climate crisis because it's an existential crisis, embedded in billions of relations born from the exploitation of birth positionality. It cannot be solved from above, but rather by changing the creation of relations - through birth - itself. The failure is in who we are, more than what we do. And who we should be—children's rights—comes first, and overrides all.
Who we should be is based on a climate change-necessitated update to the Children's Convention, which then modifies existing reproductive rights regimes to focus on child share equity over reproductive autonomy or the inclusive and measurable empowerment of each child as they enter the world.
This makes a key reform discussed below - women's defense and care groups, being piloted in Uganda, that can demand and use climate reparations as family planning funds - much more of a legitimating "we the people" than any founding fathers ever were.
This is not futurism: Care groups/circles immediately limit the legality of the right to hold wealth and other forms of power driving the crisis, the same entitlements failed downstream-focused environmentalists, and other activists never questioned when they asked the targets of their campaigns to change corporate behavior.
A Deadly Idea: Endless Growth as a Given That Even Animal Liberation Has to Assume
In the New York Times bestselling book “Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World,” Anand Giridharadas presents a groundbreaking investigation of how the global elite’s efforts to “change the world” preserve the status quo and obscure their negative impacts.
Animal protection organizations are no exception. Is it better for the environment, public health, and billions of animals raised yearly for meat and dairy products if humans adopt a plant-based diet? Is it better for an egg-laying hen to have a few more square inches of space in her cage? Is an electric car more energy efficient than a gasoline-powered car? Is it better to recycle plastic than not recycling plastic?
The answer to these questions is yes. However admirable and well-received these solutions may be to activists and advocacy groups, they do little if nothing to address the fundamental problems at the core of human society: Anthropocentrism, racism, and birth inequity.
Until these issues rise to the top of the conversation, we are moving deck chairs on the Titanic. So, in terms of actual impact, many large animal rights organizations tout what are, in effect, “micro-victories” (e.g., getting a brand to stop using fur or seeing a surge in plant-based eating) against the “macro-anthropocentrism” that clouds our decision-making as consumers, voters, policymakers, and nonprofit donors.
So, what does the right to a healthy environment mean? It is now deemed a universal human right for people, regardless of their location, to be able to breathe unpolluted air, have access to clean water, etc. To uphold this right, recommendations include holding companies accountable, urging governments to implement climate-protecting laws, promoting recycling, etc. Every small step, every action we take, matters.
A fair start in life should be considered the most fundamental human right. Outcomes should not be predetermined at birth due to circumstances, such as being born in a small village in Kenya to a mother forced into a marriage merely for survival or in a wealthy New York district to financially secure parents.
The danger is not political opponents addressing each other. It’s the decoys—something that looks like a movement but has fundamental omissions that change its values and make it hard to align with other movements.
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Organizations have sold a lie: that the ultimate goal of increasing economic growth, endlessly escalating national GDPs, is good.
The reality is that our earth is finite, with a definitive number of resources. Indigenous and Afro-centered communities have always respected and communicated this. Endless consumption is another white-lead lie. We can only continue overconsuming resources once they can be replenished. Infinite growth is a fallacy. And it is a dangerous belief that drives all economies. It cannot be remedied through a continuation of neoliberal and technocratic solutions spearheaded by mostly white men invested in maintaining their wealth and power.
It is often touted that energy efficiency has increased since 1990, and carbon dioxide emissions have been reduced. But this ignores that the effects of growth—powered by all that energy—have resulted in no progress on the climate front.
In many ways, we haven’t progressed. We have regressed. And the deadly impacts are already being felt, with heat and other climate impacts damaging fetal development in humans and nonhumans alike.
The United States government, as well as governments around the world, are urging women to have more children with little or no safeguards—and, indeed, insufficient resources. Many animal rights voices back these policies despite the harm it does to animals. At the same time, wealthy whites have drummed up their own movement to create more wealthy and high-consuming white babies as a response to falling fertility rates.
The oxymoron of promoting animal rights while creating a system that destroys animals is blatant. The demand for factory farming grows with each and every child entering the world. Factory farming is responsible for 45 percent of global agricultural emissions, not to mention the unimaginable suffering of innocent animals. Does any of this sound like fighting for animal rights?
Another example of encouraging population growth without ensuring a fair start in life is Hungary. As one of the poorest countries in the EU, Hungary offers tax incentives to mothers of four or more children. The question remains: Who benefits from this inequity? Not the children.
Reduced fertility rates threaten the economic growth that created the crisis. These conditions, along with failure to provide sufficiently within predetermined parameters, drive the vast majority of wealth into the hands of the antithetically wealthy while the U.S. and other governments continue to push for childbirth and endless growth.
Decolonizing Animal Law: From Micro Animal Rights Charades Towards Macro Animal Rights as Inclusive of Humans and Social Justice
In the United States, the field of animal rights, law, and policy provides a key window into the problem because that field is the most ambitious of the social justice movements, holding out in its most basic words and framing the highest ideal of an obligatory system oriented from protecting the most vulnerable.
Animal rights and welfare is not just about protecting species and biodiversity. It requires accounting for each nonhuman as an individual, and well beyond their ability to suffer, but inclusive of their full lives. The movement demands the most of humans, including that the creation of those children who will determine the lives of animals be consistent with the liberation of those animals.
Thus, corruption here is thus easy to see, with things like food capital creating decoy foundations and nonprofits created to misdirect social justice efforts, and with hundreds making high salaries convincing audiences they are successfully saving animals in a world characterized by human growth causing a daily increasing in animal use, suffering and death based on low wealth-serving standards that are also killing millions.
When equity and growth is factored in, many organizations and those funding them will have spent more time, money and effort on work that is being undone daily as children enter the world. In many cases the entities will be shown to have wasted resources on union busting, lavish travel and conferences that show little benefit, and sensational but low-impact campaigns more designed to raise funds than ensure the states missions of the entities.
Leadership at several large foundations and other funding entities in the United States have ensured their children and other family members are benefitting from funding decisions, often based on investments, in industries counter to the stated missions, that rely on growing markets. These entities have literally refuse birth and development entitlements for vulnerable children that would further their stated missions in effective ways, while funneling money to relatively wealthy family members.
Many involved in Fair Start had been urged by management at several major nonprofits to never to talk about this undoing or the reprioritization of human rights around fair start, because it would anger wealthy funders (mostly men whose misogyny is evident in conversations with other men) who made money on growth—even when it made the fundraising claims inaccurate. They are well aware of the problem but would not benefit from fixing it.
Senior managers in many of the organizations have used funds to help their own wealthy children, or former clients at their law firms, while choosing policies that would harm animals, as well as vulnerable children. So the problem remains—and grows, driven by wealth that could have instead been used to change the fundamental standard to benefit—rather than exploit—all animals, human and nonhuman.
In one case, a coalition of foundations organized dozens of nonprofits to challenge factory farming. The coalition was structured around assumptions and entitlements that were clearly designed to protect the funders, their entitlements, and their children at cost to the mission of the coalition.
The impact of those decisions, which mimic decisions made around the world for the last several decades, will show largely white wealth killing countless black children while masquerading as saviors of the most vulnerable. Given room by the charities to do so, we would rather invest in vegan burgers. Celebrities, influencers use their power to promote vegan brands while on the same platform making a living from having 4, 5 or even 6 children living at disastrously consumptive levels.
This has created a fantasy world of value and progress, a world built by nonprofits, media, foundations, companies, etc. all driven by growth-based funding that hid the need for true reform, forestalled effective family law changes, and led to the deadly climate crisis.
As a distraction from the real problem we dazzle on charity galas, give emotional interviews about a dog shelter or write books about how to be a good animal lover and how to save the world. Thus, the real problem, denying the idea of fairness from birth remains present.
Media Routinely Omit the Key Driver of the Crises We Face Today: The absence of even minimal protections for children in reproductive rights regimes.
Editors at major media outlets are intentionally omitting information from reporting to ensure desired outcomes, like the sale of vegan products in growth-based markets that do more harm to animals than dietary change does good. An editor at a major U.S. media outlet told Fair Start activists that the outlet would never cover the full impacts of growth on animals, while simultaneously covering sensational but low-impact animal rights campaigns.
The campaigns are funded by a wealthy family that made money on growth-based food investments which, on balance, did more harm to animals than the family’s philanthropy has done good.
The outlet routinely published media urging women to have children, with no safeguards, during the climate crisis, and misleading articles criticizing the idea of equality of opportunity and minimizing the role of family wealth in controlling United States politics
This was exemplary. Environmental and animal protection funders, nonprofits, and their media have - by ignoring family entitlements - done more to empower the industries they claimed to oppose than the victims they claimed to represent.
Some factually funders have told Fair Start activists that increased sales of vegan products they were invested in was evidence of saving animals, not realizing in that case that growth—growth that killed more animals in many ways that dietary was changing—was driving the sales more than any conversions to veganism.
Academics and Hollow Animal Rights in the Anthropocene
Many involved in the Fair Start movement had to, in prior employments at nonprofits, governments, media corporations, and universities, omit crucial facts about inequitable growth impacts that were actually undoing the public benefits the organizations claimed to create.
This helped illegally enrich mostly white children at deadly cost to millions of children of color—hiding massive liability and skewing the baseline for crucial climate reparations.
For example, the animal law program at Harvard University simply defines the scope of their work to avoid the issue of growth, creating the misperception of on-balance benefits to animals.
This framing aids funders in creating a fantasy world that forestalls life-saving reforms, and maintains instead a world where one could engage in food investments, and make millions convincing others you were being - on balance - merciful to animals.
Recently, a professor at Princeton University endorsed a Fair Start letter calling for the Dean of Yale Law School to invert her analysis of equity to actually address racist power imbalances create at birth, and in a way that would have actually benefited animals. The author of the letter was then urged by the head of Yale’s animal law program (which is emblematic of the failures discussed here) to take down the blog, with the supervisor at the author’s place of employment copied.
Like many in the Fair Start movement in their prior employment, many involved in Yale’s animal law program had for years omitted crucial facts about inequitable growth that was actually undoing the public benefits the program claimed to create. This helped illegally—in violation of binding children’s rights—enrich mostly white kids at deadly cost to millions of children of color, hide massive climate liability, and skew the baseline for crucial climate reparations.
One of the funder’s behind the animal law program at Yale, who made much is his wealth by externalizing costs on animals and vulnerable humans in ways that did more harm than his philanthropy did good, had been advised that family-based inequity was undoing his claimed beneficial impact. He chose to ignore the warning and embrace his charade of a legacy, even after the climate crisis has begun to make the point obvious.
The criticism of Dean Heather Gerken remains: She is promoting as legitimate a system of fundamental entitlements that not only does more harm to animals than any of Yale’s initiatives have done good, but which benefit her white children (and the children of the faculty member who intervened) at deadly cost to countless black children.
This ignoring of child equity is done on the premise of a form of reproductive autonomy devoid of children's rights, something even a first year law student can see makes no sense.
Leaders in a crisis are ought to take responsibility, not hide climate reparations liability to benefit their cadre by hushing criticism.
A program that does not recognize the simple fact that more people mean more demand for factory farming can hardly be called pro animal. Pro money, pro business, pro power… not pro animal!
Every attempt to discredit the Fair Start Movement and its mission sets us back and causes more innocent children and animals to die. How can we begin discussing reparations if some powerful entities deny the existence of the problem?
Look at historical annual reports of organizations claiming progress in this area in the 1960s and 70s. Those were all misleading. The organizations were embracing family policies that were quietly undoing progress in all those areas, ensuring the catastrophic situation we find ourselves in today. Many organizations today are trying to do the same thing for future generations. The background systems they usually did not question and implied the legitimacy of were benefitting the claimant while unleashing significant and increasing harm to infant humans and equines (and other nonhumans) alike.
Abstract academic debates about population ethics, often funded by concentrations of wealth and power reliant on inequity and growth, threaten to worsen the results of the climate crisis by forestalling law and policy reforms. Many of the debates derive from the same Eurocentric vestige of colonialism described above—the historic entitlement of wealthy families to exploit birth positionality relative to colonized nations—nesting in the human rights regime.
Most of the academics in these debates contradict in their writings the fundamental values they exhibited throughout their lives, e.g., seeking minimum thresholds of personal welfare, expecting equal access to opportunities, participating in and adhering to political/legal systems that purported to represent the governed, using and enjoying an environment relatively conducive to human and nonhuman health, etc.
Given their privileged intergenerational positionality and the fact that they spent their lives generally relying on and participating in legal/political systems of coercive obligation that benefitted them at a cost to others, they should at least begin from a default or provisional position of extending those values to future generations.
Any academic promoting social justice - having themselves benefited in their life at these horrible costs to others—should begin their work by saying—as a fundamental premise of justice over top-down power—that basic human-rights systems must prioritize child welfare and birth equity in instruments like the Children’s Rights Convention in the ethics, law, and policy of family planning and procreation so that future generations can also debate these issues from the comfort and security these academics do.
Explosive Growth Has Destroyed Functional Democracy
Because the family and child welfare system described above is not ecologically sustainable, future persons cannot enjoy the right to have children safely and sustainably. That growth also destroyed functional democracy. Democracy starts with “one person, one vote,” which implies that each vote is influential. Today, it is not.
To be free is to relate to others as self rather than other determining, and that - as well as representative government or legitimate demand and audiences, is physically impossible without accurate communication of that positioning and obligation, situating oneself as free.
Violence, both from the state and those around us, fundamentally derives from this because it seeds fundamental injustice, making government representatives very non-representative, and breaking any functional form of obligation to follow the law because children are never empowered in the system of making it. Logically, we would owe each other as much as our nation owes children as they enter, defining what we sort of a “we” the nation is.
There is no inherent authority in government, or inalienable rights, that is not receded with an collective pronoun that implies an obligation. There is no way to constitute justice, and an obligation to follow the law from the top down, enabling the powerful over the vulnerable. Free persons see obligation as deriving from and conditional on being empowered, something fundamentally contingent on the creation at birth of the relations we have with others.
This is not Kantian ethics. It focused on the primacy of positionality in creation, and obligations to the most vulnerable using zero baseline accounting linked to concrete ecosocial metrics, a zeroing out of debt in the tradition of a businesses practice, rather than the abstract, upside down, and static ethics of old.
The inclusion and empowerment line can be seen as a mirror to divisions in apartheid-based regimes, where the most influential who do not admit the omissions and harms described herein and take action to erase divisions by moving kids over into empowerment can be targeted for leaving them in inequity.
In this case getting all children above the line unifies rather than divides, and evades using the same fundamentally illegal system – based on violating children’s rights that caused the crisis
The wealth we see in the world today was made, firstly, by illegally avoiding paying the costs needed to protect children, animals, the environment – and measurable freedom for all of us.
Making sure – at grassroots, organizational, and legal levels – that no child is born without climate reparations accounting does protect them. Once one accounts for the common omission of the impact of children entering the world without what they need, we can see Fair Start as exponentially more just and effective than interventions without the qualifier.
Suppose we use family planning instead of the government to redistribute resources. In that case, we do so because we value the efficiency of early intervention and the equity of a fair start in life.
This makes legal systems unjust to the point of being illegitimate, but attorneys face a moral hazard because their careers rely on the illusion of functional systems. Their careers depend on deferring to power, meaning men with guns, rather than seeing it as the creation of a child into the home of a sadistic child abuser.
If more attorneys tell the truth, the next iteration of Black Lives Matter might bend the arc of who we are becoming toward a deep form of empowerment. Remember that as the climate crisis deepens, growth economics, utilitarianism, and other justice-degrading ideals don’t even have arguments for efficiency on their side. The crisis will erode even gross domestic product, a measure of welfare built through economies that use a micro-faction of the capabilities of the humans they employ.
Go watch many perform the sub-living-wage work “efficient” economies make them perform and consider what that person would have been capable of doing had they been freed from giving their lives for others’ profit. If the climate crisis has a bright side, it's that the costs of that lie of efficiency may be laid on the economists who promoted it through direct action climate justice.
This poverty and inequity cannot be challenged through democracy because family planning policies have ensured that the average citizen is disenfranchised, with little or no influence over the laws they are forced to live under.
Because growth is enabled by not ensuring minimum levels of welfare or equity, our elected officials simply do not represent their constituents. Growth has diluted the votes.
The idea of representation is an illusion when, in reality, one must have access to significant wealth or other forms of influence to influence political outcomes. It’s not even rational to vote in many elections, and the fact that the federal minimum wage sits at the poverty level is sufficient evidence to make the point that the law hardly reflects the people’s will.
The Solution: Reparations to Young Disenfranchised Women Will Save Millions of Future Lives
We can reverse the injustices described above—the blatant externalizing of the actual costs of wealth on future generations—by backing the right of young women to self-determination reparations.
“Society, as reflected in our government and the policy implemented by our democratically elected representatives, must do what’s best for children, regardless of economic impact, which must include social safety programs designed to give each child a fair start in life and climate reparations for the crisis we have caused and are leaving to them as our legacy,” argues Jessica Blome, a public interest attorney who frequently represents the Fair Start Movement, the nonprofit organization where I work that promotes the convergence of social, eco, and reproductive justice.
“That we are even debating the value of women’s autonomy as an economic driver—as opposed to an inalienable human right—is exactly why our culture needs to think differently about women and children,” Blome says.
Mwesigye Robert, a co-founder of Rejoice Africa Foundation, a nonprofit group that promotes climate restoration and family policy, argues that political leaders often promote climate responses that are ultimately unrealistic because they are top-down solutions. “They have come up with well-meaning centralized climate responses in their speeches and proposals, but none of these are implemented effectively,” Robert says.
His organization advocates the “Care Group” model, an approach primarily employed in international development contexts that promotes social and behavioral changes through peer-to-peer knowledge sharing, often led by mothers sharing insights. “Effective climate restoration must be decentralized to the affected communities at the grassroots level,” says Robert.
A Key Tactic to Reverse Inequity and Growth
One tactic shows promise in resolving these issues. Many in leadership at public interest organizations face a unique conflict of interest. They will be interacting with funders who want the organizations to undercut their missions by ignoring growth and inequity, and the exponentially greater impact children entering the world on any given day have on the organizations' claims and missions than the organizations' individual efforts have. Ignoring that factor, in claims and in organizational programming, constitutes deadly “impact fraud.”
The climate crisis is driven by large environmental organizations that for decades engaged in this fraud, and now millions are dying. Those at the bottom of the hierarchy, who do not face this conflict and are truly aligned with the mission, have a responsibility to police those at the top of the hierarchy.
This is an ongoing process that currently involves whistleblowers at several organizations based in the United States, including several facing ongoing retaliations for attempts to unionize and be formally empowered to avoid the fraud. Those continuing the fundamental deceit that created the climate crisis are a threat to all our futures.
Is it worth the effort to remove corrupt leadership in order to ensure organizational integrity and impact, and also to save countless lives by ensuring legal entitlements? Many think so, and many funders realize they should not be holding millions and billions of dollars as the true costs of one’s net worth—in the form of dead children—become evident.
In short, there are concrete examples of the privileged, powerful and wealthy avoiding liability in a way that kills innocents and justifies escalating action against them. These entities represent relatively soft targets, and the revelation of the full spectrum of their costs and benefits could trigger significant social change