Nonprofits Created A Fantasy World of Progress That Led To The Climate Crisis and Inequity
Article by Carter Dillard
Many nonprofits raised billions of dollars over the last several decades claiming to have protected various ecosystems, saved animals from factory farms, hauled children out of dangerous conditions, or improved human rights and democracy.
Non of those claims tell the whole story.
They usually omit the fact that growth was undoing that progress, exacerbating the climate crisis, undoing roughly 3/4ths of the reductions the world was attempting, and setting us all towards a future of ecocide, extinction, and the harm to children of the like this world has not seen.
That growth was converting the freedom of functional democracies comprised of citizens who were born and raised with what the Children’s Rights Convention promises them into a system of overcrowded shopping malls filled with people born and raised in conditions that fell well below the Convention standard and who were all the while destroying their own ecosystems.
That freedom was converted into wealth for a few, according to one Nobel Laureate.
Organizations ignored growth because in many cases their wealthy funders were making money on it, the same funders who are driving a popular media narrative that the world is simply underpopulated.
It’s called the #famscam.
The harm to future generations, especially in the Global South, is immense.
I’ve sat with uber-wealthy funders who were making money on growth through things like their plant-based investments, which were doing more harm to animals than the nonprofits they funded were doing good through low-impact campaigns, and these funders simply decided to continue what they were doing. I’ve seen tenured professors at Harvard and NYU law schools choose to promote funding for family models that undercut everything they proclaimed to value because those models gave their kids – their white kids – underserved head starts and massive privileges.
They are choosing wealth over children, animals and the environment.
TAKE ACTION:
We can reverse this process by moving the wealth that was made at cost to others into programs like the Seeds for the Future campaign, a process of reforesting the land, and creating savings accounts for kids in a way that pays them back for what we did, and sets a norm of smaller and more equitable families as the first human right and obligation.
We can target those, like Lee Raymond, who stole our freedom to return the costs he foisted on others to give back the costs his wealth laid on others, and by all means effective.