How can we ask those like Exxon to admit full impacts, back true liberty via degrowth, and change course towards restoration and measurable legitimacy/equity, if the most radical of social justice movements – the ethos of which demands the change – does not?
Why value/factcheck?
As the United Nations has recognized, the climate and related crises killing millions of persons least responsible for the crises are fundamentally driven by ubiquitous and inaccurate impact claims that create a fantasy world – largely funded by wealthy and white concentrations of wealth and power – masking the reality of the Anthropocene and its deadly deprivation of political equity.
Contrasting such claims with relevant facts can avoid the hiding of liability for mounting deaths as the climate crisis escalates, and can incentivize life-saving changes in messaging and behavior. It can avoid misinformation that drives the fantasy world of accurate costs and benefits that ensured the crisis and now minimizes climate reparations.
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, and as such 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.
In one case a member of a prominent and wealthy family funding animal law projects insisted on omitting the role inequity and growth on their charitable impacts claims, knowing these omissions were hiding drivers doing more harm to animals than the funder’s work has done good. They feared how full-spectrum evaluations of claims, costs and benefits, around the climate and related crises, would impact the family’s wealth.
While we use the term “growth” below because of its familiarity, this is really more about power than population, quiet decisions to fundamentally (on eight interconnected levels) exacerbate the crisis by treating children as economic means rather than democratic ends, and whether claims hide impacts on share equity – which is like equity in a company, where you have a measurably equal and influential role in outcomes, relative to a neutral background or position like the nonhuman world.
Animal protection, the allure of growth, and moral hazard.
Fair Start supporters have interacted with funders and plant-based food investors who wanted to make money on inequity and growth, even when it harmed animals and future generations on balance, and interacted with former animal rights activists who were now invested in or otherwise benefitting from inequitable growth-based markets. Fair Start supporters have been advised that many organizations claiming to benefit farmed animals were undoing their claimed benefits by omitting the impacts of inequity and growth.
The prominence of many organizations claiming to engage in environmental and animal protection, which can drown out the voices of the vulnerable, is often funded by inequitable growth-based wealth made at deadly cost to humans and animals. And yet animal protection organizations are crucial stakeholders in determining social justice because they purport to further the interests of the most vulnerable entities, thus setting the highest standard for reform. Animal rights is the most demanding of all sectors because adherents claim to value each individual – which demands changes in who we should become that go beyond some environmental ethics that are species level, etc.
Animal lives first and foremost depend on the creation of the humans with whom they interact, and protecting animals would require many changes in this regard. Inaccurate claims in the animal rights sector, just blithely riding on the status quo, are especially problematic, degrading the highest standards for outcomes in animal, human and nonhuman liberation, and doing more harm – on balance – to animals (and humans) than organizations making the claims do good.
This makes them key targets in efforts to legally preempt and – through crowdsourced action – shift illegal entitlements in order to evade millions of climate-related deaths. Claims of animal liberation, on the edge of countless deaths caused by the Anthropocene, that exacerbate that situation may be the most glaring example of Winners Take All – a but also a chance to make examples of those involved, to show what it means to do better, and to decolonize wealth and the nonhuman world at once.
Claims about how humans interact with animals show the greatest disparity between what humans say and do, versus the objective standards necessary to actually legitimate political systems and ensure positive outcomes for animals.
Separating animal liberation (towards consumerism, for example) from fundamental social justice also changes the goals of social justice movements and reduces their efficacy, e.g. consider leading environmental organizations that rejected ecocentric animal liberation as a standard, thereby allowing disastrously high anthrocentric emissions standards that will now kill countless humans, or scabs undercutting unions at animal protection organizations that seek to ensure equity and mission compliance in the face of funder-corrupted leaders.
Animal rights is a human idea, and must come from a legitimate human rights orientation consistent with animal rights outcomes. Micro animal rights, like open rescue, cannot come from a macro orientation of anthrocentric domination that is antithetical to it, claiming as property all of the the nonhuman world and overrunning it. Macro animal rights would mean treating children well enough so that they would treat nonhumans well, and to invest enough in their birth and development to bend the arc of growth towards equity, restoring biodiversity and the nonhuman world, the homes and lives of animals.
Is it wrong, or divisive, to ask questions of and show the inaccuracies of an animal organization? Imagine wanting to work in animal protection as one of the highest ideals of social justice, but having to omit information about your work in a way that, on balance, harmed the larger effort – including for animals. Contrast those upset by being questioned about impact with the millions suffering from the crisis, and you will get a sense of the fantasy worlds of manufactured demand and disgusting confidence in one’s own misentitlements that brought us to catastrophe. Yes, all should have a voice and turn at the podium, but those who are assuring that actually have priority.
Macro animal rights, via family reforms that align human and nonhuman interests, precede and override individual interventions that would otherwise be undone. Anyone truly caring about nonhumans has to admit this.
The claims:
Mercy for Animals is a U.S. based animal protection organization.
The Mercy for Animals website and various reports now make, and for well over a decade, have made 1) claims about specific beneficial impacts for farmed animals achieved through targeted interventions, 2) claims using the term “sustainable” or comparable standards, and 3) claims about the organization’s commitment to transparency and accuracy.
MFA also uses collective pronouns that express and imply inclusion, and hence a legitimate overall allocation of costs and benefits, certainly one that isn’t enriching some at deadly cost to innocents parties.
Mercy For Animals believes that a world without industrial animal agriculture is possible—if we work together to create it. Imagine a world in which we nourish ourselves with food that is kind to animals and sustainable for the planet and all who share it. We envision a world in which eating is an act of compassion, in which no one is exploited or forced to exploit another.
Facts:
These claims do not account for the impact of growth and inequity, and inequitable growth-based policies, on farmed animals, 1) growth and inequity which together are doing more harm to humans and animals than dietary change is doing good, including 2) increasing demand for farmed animal products, and 3) driving deadly emissions that cause suffering to farmed and other animals. There is no evidence the organization opposes or is seeking to change fundamental policies that prioritize growth over equity, exploiting children’s birth positionality – including race positionality – in ways that are killing millions, and could kill hundreds of millions of persons and untold numbers of animals.
MFA’s use of collective pronouns that express and imply a basic and legitimate allocation of costs and benefits also constitutes growthwashing. There is no indication that MFA supports or has ever supported macro animal rights policy reforms that alter the flawed baseline, which is devoid of nonhuman and children’s rights, that created the climate crisis. Compare the assumption of a legitimate baseline to the use of that baseline by Exxon, and the relative impacts of growth versus dietary change. MFA personnel, especially the highest paid employees, benefit from this larger system at cost to others.
A former employee in senior leadership had been advised of these issues over a year ago, and took no action.
In fact the organization downplays the role of inequity in its messaging and using language and a tactics common at Vox, which has been documented misreporting impacts in a way that hides climate liability, driving anti-equity and pronatalist narratives, and creating lots of room for anti-abortion measures by hiding their role in climate outcomes. Similarly, on any given day MFA made claims about creating benefit, those claims were being vastly undone as children entered the world without entitlements to share equity (equity, like equity in a company, where you have a measurably equal and influential role in outcomes) and beneath minimum thresholds of wellbeing, thereby degrading their own environment and exacerbating the climate and other crises we see today.
There is a difference between those who choose a system of inequitable and exploitative birth and developmental positionality, which is the largest driver of nonhuman suffering, and those who do not. Those who choose the former, often oblivious rich kids who want to performatively help animals while ignoring that on balance they harm them, is the nonsense that created the climate crisis.
Why It Matters
How can we ask those like Exxon to admit full impacts, back true liberty via degrowth, and change course towards restoration and measurable legitimacy/equity, if the most radical of social justice movements – the ethos of which demands the change – does not?
The climate crisis will cause unimaginable suffering, and fundamentally derives from illegal entitlements designed around exploiting future generations of humans and nonhumans. It is physically impossible to remove what we do from the context of who we are becoming as a species, and taking claims out of that context ignores loss of equity on at least eight levels, impacts we are all responsible for given our birth, developmental and emancipatory positionality – existential impacts which for most of us have exponentially greater impact on others than what we choose to do in life.
Creating the sense that we can be merciful to animals as we quietly choose the most fundamental policies that on balance cause them harm is wrong, hides liability for our having benefitted via fundamental positionality at deadly cost to others (which can never be a “different issue” from what we do – especially when the former undoes the latter) and, by redefining what it means to be merciful, enables influential interests to urge deadly policies that enrich mostly the narcissist, wealthy white children of investors at deadly cost to millions of black children.
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 kids, are largely excluded from the political system, 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 make billionaires whose wealth is being made at deadly cost to millions of black children, wealth that could be moved to still save lives? There is a bright line test for this sort of racist, based on whether one supports universal birth equity or not, now pending before the United Nations.
Right now most nations treat their constituents as economic inputs, consumers and workers designed for growth, rather than citizens with an equal and effective voice in their political systems. But it’s unclear why those created as economic means would ever have to follow the law – including laws protecting life-saving wealth that should be re-entitled to those subjected to its true costs, as the death debt for the crisis skyrockets.
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, e.g. officials, the wealthy, CEOs, celebs, 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 wellbeing for future children and animals, and you won’t find one because they are both already earmarked for use in growth.
Both the political left and right back this – it being always easy to exploit the most vulnerable. But we can’t legitimately create economic demand by violating children’s rights. We can’t fill shopping malls that drive animal suffering and extinction by cutting citizens off from being born and raised into town halls. Those who do, and pretend to further animal rights, do more harm than good.
Freedom is being – birth, developmental and emancipatory positionality, before it is doing. What could possibly be more primary than our existential positioning in the world, relative to others? And whatever criteria were used to determine the truths and values that gave rise to current influencers (e.g. demand that we manufactured with dismal investments in children and constant advertising), the thought leaders, the officials, wealthy, CEOs, celebs, etc., these criteria and the legal system that enabled them were fundamentally flawed, and we know this because millions of innocents are dying in the climate crisis largely from the way they were positioned at birth. Humans can only constitute the future through the language of obligation and the creation of power relations, and the Take Action asks below – inverting power – are meant to assure truly merciful behavior towards animals.
Take Action
Urge Leah Garces, President at Mercy For Animals (MFA), to ensure the organizations specifically accounts for the impact of growth, and growth-over-equity policies, on animals in Mercy for Animals’ website and various reports, wherever making claims about specific beneficial impacts for farmed animals achieved through targeted interventions, and in claims using the term “sustainable” or comparable standards.
MFA need not alter it’s work. It should do that work from an equitable orientation of truth, context, and fundamental political obligation, that is not inconsistent with being merciful to animals.
Also urge Leah to say whether she thinks all children deserve a fair start in life, and how ensuring that relates to UN mandated fair climate reparations based on measurable standards of equity which, because they are primary, preempt all conflicting interests.
Leaders and organizations either support accurate claims that include the key contexts and standards, as well as fundamental fairness where we we all move towards not benefitting at cost to the welfare and self-determination of others, or they do not.
