Equitywashing and the Hidden Costs of Sustainability
Systems that claim to protect the environment often benefit the powerful while leaving the most vulnerable behind, revealing how inequitable standards, birth positionality, and philanthropy shape climate, social, and human rights outcomes.
Introduction
Sustainability has become a buzzword, but behind the rhetoric lie deep inequities. Systems that claim to protect the environment and future generations often benefit the powerful while leaving the most vulnerable behind. From corporate greenwashing to philanthropic initiatives that ignore structural injustices, these frameworks rarely account for the true costs of economic growth—particularly for children and communities facing systemic disadvantage.
These inequitable standards, known as equitywashing, shape environmental policy and philanthropy, harming the climate, democracy, and human rights. At the same time, the conditions into which children are born—referred to as birth positionality—determine their capacity to participate in society, influence policy, and survive environmental threats. Establishing a legitimacy line, defined as the minimum threshold of empowerment and resources a child must have to exercise meaningful freedom, is central to understanding how inequities persist. Genuine reforms that account for these factors are urgently needed to create a truly sustainable and just future for all generations.
How Philanthropy and Nonprofits Perpetuate Inequity
This problem extends beyond for-profit enterprises. Wealthy investors and donors often exploit flawed frameworks in both business and philanthropic models, fueling systemic harms such as factory farming and environmental degradation.
Some business models rely on standards that discount the lives of future children and nonhuman animals. Activists, including myself, have served at large U.S. nonprofits and witnessed dominant funders deliberately ignore how inequitable growth undermined, on a macro scale, the organizations’ claimed impacts, benefiting funders while exacting deadly costs on the most vulnerable.
Superficial interventions by philanthropists and public interest groups—often funded by the same wealthy investors exploiting the market’s failure to capture true costs—repeat these mistakes. Any value or impact claim today is likely out of context, ignoring that children born into vastly inequitable conditions fundamentally affect the veracity of such claims. If philanthropy has failed to prevent the climate crisis, the decline of democracy, and widespread inequity, it is because wealthy families assumed the right, via unsustainable growth, to benefit their children at deadly cost to others.
The Foundations of Birth-Based Power and Inequity
For decades, nonprofits backed by predominantly white philanthropic families relied on value assessments and impact reporting standards that ignored how growth gradually undermined claimed benefits relative to ecological thresholds. The result enriched some children, often funders’ offspring, while children of color absorbed the true costs.
This issue goes beyond greenwashing to a deeper problem: equitywashing. Equitywashing conceals illegitimate, inequitable, and birth-based power relations, defining “green” standards in ways that benefit some at deadly cost to others and drive the climate crisis. Stemming from the subversion of racial justice movements in the 20th century through policies that privatized family planning, this ideology shapes power rather than promoting equity or empowerment.
Wealthy families and governments executed a sleight of hand, assuming authority and entitlements instead of legitimizing them. They treated freedom from coercion as freedom from the state rather than the ability to consent to influence, implementing reproductive rights standards that enriched some children at deadly cost to others. This framework encouraged those with privileged birth positions to live in more other-determining than self-determining ways, eroding genuine freedom for all.
Equitywashing and the Limits of Green Metrics
Cosmetic or commercial diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice reforms—often promoted by philanthropists—rely on a false dichotomy between autonomy and equity. This approach ignores deeper systemic issues: By sidelining initiatives that prioritize empowerment, such as the autonomy-building value of Black birth equity, these reforms risk reinforcing the inequities they claim to address.
Even widely accepted legal or social standards can obscure the real consequences of inequitable births. Policies treating pregnancy termination as autonomy may overlook broader risks: A woman might still face life-threatening heat waves caused by climate change if she cannot afford air conditioning, lacks political influence, or cannot rely on community support. Under flawed “efficiency” standards, she may be treated as an economic input rather than a fully empowered human being. Freedom in this context is misvalued, as governments have historically based legitimacy on an unjust “birth lottery.” Focusing on downstream, siloed interventions without addressing foundational inequities perpetuates systemic disenfranchisement.
Global Pressure and Calls for Reparative Justice
Global pressure for reparative justice is intensifying, particularly from African-led coalitions facing severe consequences of inequitable development. These groups advocate family-based climate reparations to guarantee the right to be born into empowering conditions and call for an end to unfair competition from U.S. nonprofits that ignore equitywashing standards.
Many large U.S. environmental organizations have raised millions to protect specific regions while knowingly allowing birth inequities to benefit funders. They have obscured funder enrichment while celebrating animal-protection victories, even as growth-based policies undermined those achievements. Without addressing fraudulent equity and impact standards, these organizations risk repeating harmful patterns.
One solution is to establish a preemptive right to equity reparations directed toward collective family-planning systems, ensuring that new generations are empowered and self-determining. Governments must base authority on measurable political equity—the degree to which constituents are genuinely empowered—or equal offsets relative to zero. Funding delayed parenting ensures no child is born below a minimum threshold of self-determination, creating a legitimate line of opportunity.
What does this look like in terms of concrete actions one can take? Citizens can challenge false and misleading claims by filing complaints with state attorneys general. Furthermore, citizens should seek a preemptive injunction from the states to block the use of the equity fraud standard driving equitywashed claims.
Reframing Freedom and Responsibility
Reforming systemic inequities requires rigorous fact- and value-checking, alongside securing admissions of truth and commitments to change. This process fosters obligations that allow people to become genuinely self-determining—something legal texts or academic frameworks alone cannot achieve.
Laws are followed effectively only when people can act within a system that supports autonomy. Ignoring how birth conditions enhance or limit self-determination undermines true empowerment. Ultimately, reforms must create unified obligations that strengthen collective freedom and responsibility rather than relying on fragmented or purely intersectional approaches.
Truth and reconciliation frameworks provide a way to hold accountable those who benefited from inequitable or fraudulent standards. By establishing shared values and obligations, society can anticipate and prevent further harm caused by systemic inequities.
Redefining sustainability requires placing freedom and responsibility in context, recognizing that genuine sustainability depends not only on environmental or economic metrics but also on the equitable empowerment of all people, particularly the most vulnerable. This approach shifts the focus from superficial measures and short-term gains to long-term, just, and universally beneficial outcomes.
