Running for President - Am I Crazy?

This post is not about COVID, so bear with me. September began with a surge in COVID cases and return to mask mandates at some hospitals and colleges. Former President and likely future convicted felon Donald Trump posted a video about mask mandates, declaring, “we will not comply.”

Trump made it fashionable, for some, to be uncompassionate during a pandemic – to resist masking and shut-downs even though it was likely they would prevent many deaths. A compassionate person would be willing to accept some inconvenience in order to give students, teachers, the elderly and even the general public a better chance of avoiding serious illness or death.

I don’t believe we’d have the degree of resistance to following CDC and NIH recommendations if not for the fact that Trump politicized the COVID pandemic. He didn’t want the public to understand the seriousness of this health threat, for fear it would dramatically chill the economy. He – correctly, I believe - felt he could win reelection only if the “robust” economy was still on fire in November. In a bungling administration, it was the only thing he had going for him.

This is a perfect example of just how strong our economic growth fetish has become. No politician can be elected without promising growth. And the President of the United States was willing to let lives be lost rather then risk economic contraction. Our obsession with growth is also the primary reason we won’t do what it takes to keep global warming within tolerable limits.

That brings me to my announcement today that I am running for U.S. President, and I’m doing so on a promise that I will put the nation on a path of economic and population contraction. Yes, that’s blasphemy. But it is the only chance our children have for a bright future. I’m running so I can tell you what no other candidate will, that we’re in the midst of the most crucial global (and national) crisis ever. And no, it’s not climate change. The climate crisis is just one consequence of the real emergency: we have outgrown the planet, and Earth is now crumbling under the stress, in many ways.

The late sociologist William R. Catton, Jr. called this “overshoot.” He wrote the seminal book on the subject in 1980, Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change. I met Catton and interviewed him in his hotel in Washington D.C. in 2009. It’s hard to wrap my head around the fact that scientists like Catton understood our ecological overshoot predicament more than forty years ago, yet we remain oblivious.

That’s how strong this faith in growth everlasting is. The computers of the world run on Mac OS, Windows and Linux. Our society’s operating system is growth. But it’s time for an upgrade. Ecological economist Herman Daly (at one point a senior economist at the World Bank), put it very succinctly in my film, GrowthBusters, “In an empty world, it was a safe bet that growth was making us richer. But we no longer live in an empty world – we live in a full world.”

So here we are, in a world with 8 billion “consumers” powering a $105 trillion economy, trying to understand why nothing is going according to plan. Our report card is mostly F’s - in mental health, suicides and gun violence, housing affordability, cost of groceries, territorial and resource conflict, biodiversity, soil health, water supply, and climate stability, not to mention traffic congestion and civility.

We know we have these problems. They populate our news feeds every day. But we’re NOT making progress in solving them. Why? Good people with real expertise in their field are working diligently to find solutions – in their field. But what we need is a holistic solution, and it seems very few are working, speaking up, or being heard on the big picture. If you’re expecting a flood, you can stand downstream with a bucket – and drown, or you can go upstream and deal with the source of the water. The upstream source of our crumbling planet and failing systems...is ecological overshoot. Business as usual is not going to get us out of this mess.

We must contract the scale of the human enterprise. We can do that by jettisoning pursuit of growth, and pursuing instead GDP contraction, by going on an energy diet, and by embracing and supporting the trend of women and couples making more informed, well-considered, small family-size decisions. These are the things I will work to accomplish as President of the United States. I’ll declare a national overshoot emergency, and we’ll immediately launch a National Project to get out of Ecological Overshoot.

What makes me think I can win the votes to get this done? I only began to consider this run when it became clear most voters don’t like the two likely major-party candidates. There has been conjecture this might be an opportunity for an outlier to win the race. So, it’s a better opportunity than usual. But still, I’ve never held office. I don’t have any hit records, I’m not an action movie hero.  And I’m not a millionaire entrepreneur. So, I’d have to be crazy to run for President.

The long odds of election are exactly what makes me the perfect candidate. Because my election is SO unlikely, I am not the least bit tempted to let polling or big donors sway me to moderate my message or platform. I am free to tell you the truth, no matter how inconvenient. And that truth includes the heroic measures we’ll need to take if we want to get out of overshoot and give our kids the bright future they deserve. It won’t be easy. It will be scary. And sacrifices will be necessary. But we’ll also rediscover joy as we step off the treadmill and get out of the rat race.

Over the coming months my all-volunteer team and I will shout it out to the world. We’ll talk to every journalist curious enough to listen. We’ll confer with very smart advisors and refine the National Project plan during the course of the campaign. We’ll hold roundtables to sort out greater detail on how we’ll accomplish our critical mission. We’ll post videos to YouTube and launch a new podcast to share what we learn, and to educate elected policymakers, members of the press, and the public.

Please join me on this journey. If the children of the world are lucky, the 2024 election will make history and we’ll all get busy writing a new operating system – one that doesn’t kill the planet.

Posted on 06 Sep 2023, 16:27 - Category: News