Ask any nonprofit:
What are you doing to assure the conditions in which children born and raised, including their environment and role models, are being improved so as not to undo the benefits of the work you discuss?
Does the entity you are asking have any minimum protections for children and animals, when you look at their actual approach to family planning policy? Will they admit that their failure to ensure such minimums through a correct system of entitlements, historically, is now killing millions of those least responsible for the climate catastrophe?
In asking these question you are looking for the #Impactscam: A growing body of peer-reviewed research had shown the basis of deadly climate greenwashing – which is killing millions – originates with child welfare policies that illegitimate political systems because they ensure no minimum threshold of self-determination or freedom. These policies literally set inequitable standards killing millions of those least responsible for the crisis. And those backing them are choosing to benefit at deadly cost to others, when there are clear alternatives – like moving wealth through externalizing deadly costs into the hands of young women able to save many lives.
These policies illegitimate governance because our generations can’t get benefit of future generations’ political obligation, not to violently target us for reparations required by the deadly climate catastrophe for example, because we never met our obligations to them. At the very least young women demanding birth equity reparations would have greater right to use coercion to protect their children than the state would have to defend existing property rights that harm their children. That said, nonviolence is more effective in achieving justice
Instead of changing the policies many organizations are hiding them – aware that they face liability for greenwashing, where the growth they embraced historically did more harm to their causes than their efforts did good. Many of them are going out of their way to evade liability, and thereby – at least inadvertently – reduce the reparations victims would be awarded.
The most just and effective solution? There are legal actions pending before the United Nations and other agencies urging more inclusive legitimacy. Self-determination derives by definition from conditions of development that ensure the capacity for us to choose who has influence (including climatologically) or power over us – to be free. According to a growing body of research, there would be no legitimate political entity to assign wealth or incentives that precedes this obligation. Who we should be, the “ought” of Children’s Rights and the hard metrics of being a legal person as opposed to an economic person, logically always comes first – before what we should do, and the allocation of other entitlements.
But there are ways to move towards fulfilling this obligation, upstream, and we work downstream on more traditional projects.
Take Action: Work with the Fair Start movement to factcheck claims by nonprofits. Read more here.
