Wealthy families make money on growth driven investments, and avoiding any obligation to fund children outside of the family getting a fair start in life. One way to do that is to make those who wish to assist those in need think that they are making progress when they are not.
Decoy nonprofits do this by making claims that hide key factors, like inequity and growth.
Greenwashing is generally when someone conveys a false impression or misleading information about how a company’s products or services are environmentally sound. Often it involves using terms like green, sustainable, humane, safe, or regenerative, etc. when those making the claim are on balance harming the environment.
One of the worst forms of greenwashing is called growthwashing, or hiding the impact of population growth when making a claim. When a company or nonprofit makes any claim related to the environment, check to see if they are accounting for the way outdated family policy, and the growth it creates, is undoing that progress. The claims usually omit the fact that population growth is undoing the what is being claimed, increasing demand and consumption in a way that is causing ecocide.
That means those making the claims chose family policies that put more animals in factory farms, research labs, and puppy mills, ensured more children would be born and raised in conditions of abuse, suffering and deprivation, and policies that also ensured each person had less of a voice in their political systems – the systems many groups point to as the best source of change.
The growth many claims hid (and sometimes promoted) undid roughly three-quarters of the reductions in carbon emissions achieved since 1990 by increased efficiency and alternative energy production.
https://populationmatters.org/news/2021/01/study-population-growth-cancelling-out-climate-change-progress/
Those lies will help lead to the death of millions in the future.
Growthwashing is one of the worst ways to exacerbate the climate crisis, and it prevents reforms that could save millions of lives. Growthwashing does something else that is uniquely harmful. It hides the impact human rights can have on our lives when we truly understand them, and the way fairness – first and foremost in our creation – overrides conflicting rights and interests, like property rights to wealth, much of which was made by externalizing costs on future generations. Growthwashing hides that we cannot separate our values from who we should be.
Growthwashing hides what we owe to future generations, and instead it enables our quiet exploitation of them. Growthwashing, unlike simple greenwashing, involves robbing us of our freedoms in a variety of ways, in addition to harming us through our environment. It hides our valid claim to resources for young women to plan their families in a way that can save millions of lives.
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.
TAKE ACTION: TEST ANY CHARITY YOU BACK. IF THEY REFUSE TO TREAT BIRTH EQUITY AS THE FIRST HUMAN RIGHT, THEY COULD BE A DECOY.
