12/18/2025
Hello again. My name again is Richard Garner. I started this blog more than six years ago as one possible way to begin creating the intellectual, moral and political foundations for a new political party and to open up a path in American society for doing exactly that, creating a new political party that will help the American people and eventually all of humanity pass our final exam as a species of sentient life in this vast mysterious universe. This final exam for our species essentially consists facing up to and acting effectively on our world environmental crisis with its two fundamental underlying causes, human population growth and economic growth. We, the people of the United States have been failing this final exam over and over and over again over the past fifty years, and all of the other peoples of the world have been failing this exam right along with us.
I have not done a whole lot to promote this blog and make other people aware of it so far. I have had many obstacles to overcome. I have found it necessary to develop the content more. I plan to do much more to promote this blog and find other ways to promote the idea of a new political party to address our fundamental environmental problems in the immediate future.
In high school I was the valedictorian of my class and a state scholarship winner. I was already starting to become aware of the problem of human population growth years before I heard of the organization called Zero Population Growth in 1970. I am a seventy-seven year old man. I have been studying what science and the scientific method are since I was only eight years old. I mention these things because many people might think that if important scientists, or scientists who have the news media reporting what they have to say about various subjects, like climate change or biodiversity are not speaking up clearly and authoritatively about population growth and economic growth as problems threatening human survival and the survival of wildlife and the ecosystems of the earth, then how can there really be any crisis caused by them?
Scientists are human beings, subject to political pressure like everyone else. And many scientists have been speaking up about population growth and economic growth. There is a large body of work by different scientists and scholars that has been done over the last half century explaining these problems. In any case, all arguments from authority, arguments based on who says something are logically fallacious. Ordinary people do not need a scientist to tell them that these problems are real. The calculus is simple. The more humans there are, the more likely that there will be fewer members of the many species of wildlife and the less undeveloped land there will be for habitat for that wildlife. Some people may spend time and resources trying to restore lost habitat and on conservation and rewilding efforts, However, our human population is already so large, and our economies so large and growing, and there is still so much population growth coming in the future if we do not act to slow it down and bring it to a halt, that these efforts are almost certain to be completely overwhelmed.
In the 1990s I was the President, Program Chair and Treasurer of the San Diego chapter of Zero Population Growth. I faced a quandary. I was concerned about human population growth. However, I also had liberal political opinions. Many of the people in my ZPG chapter wanted to pursue solutions to the problem of population growth in the United States through the framework of political conservatism or so it seemed. I was uncomfortable with this approach. I regret that to some degree I may have contributed to the spread of the idea that concern about immigration to the United States originates only in racism. This was and is a false idea.
The problems of population growth, economic growth and a large volume of immigration to the United States have to be faced. Somehow we have to find ways to be dispassionate about the facts of our situation and compassionate about all concerned, and that includes everyone, citizens as well as immigrants. And it most especially includes wildlife and all of the ecosystems of the earth.
Please donate to support me if you can in my efforts to maintain and further develop this blog and push the discussion of a new political party in the United States specifically committed to the protection and preservation of the entire biosphere of life on Earth through to the actual accomplishment of that end as soon as possible.
The link to donate through a gofundme.com account I have set up is the following:
https://www.gofundme.com/promote-a-political-party-for-the-planet.
Copyright 2025 by Richard E. Garner, Jr All rights reserved