In 2018 I was invited to renew activities with the Green Party of Alaska because the light had gone out, the stewards retired, and the entire legacy of the organization was condensed into a FEDEX box. Despite the commonly held belief, the officers didn’t deny the national candidate in favor of our own choice, we defended Alaska’s right to choose and those who participated chose Jesse Ventura. Regardless, as a result, our state chapter became unaffiliated from the national federation. In the years hence we have had the opportunity to look deeply at what it means to be a party; what it means to be “green”.
Since we are now facing a crisis of constitutional proportions, we are being encouraged to examine what it means to be American; to be human. With the recent passing of Dr. Jane Goodall, we are given the chance to see our distant cousins, the chimps, as a mirror for what we are and what we can become. Equally brutal and delicate, chimps, like humans, have a great capacity, and the ability to choose what to do with it. Civilization is built on compassion, patience, and diversity, but greed, fear, and anger can shred the most durable of social fabrics, if the cloth (government) is not regularly mended by the people.
As 2025 begins to draw to a close we are both looking back at the lessons that have shaped us and forward at the difficult road ahead. One of the biggest reminders for me is that while the state paperwork list, Josh Hadley and myself as officers we do not “run” the party. We are stewards of the brand, the principles, and have been dutifully weaving into our matrix, the principles of permaculture as the trellis on which the party can grow tall and bare good fruit of getting candidates elected so our practices become the policy of the land.
One of the duties I am learning is protecting the party not only from attacks from the outside, but from the infiltration of imposters who are not interested in building the party but in making sure the party never gets organized and becomes a threat to the major institutions, who both talk diversity and practice uniformity. This is way different than someone who doesn’t like our policies, practices, or personalities. We are talking about someone who came in swinging, tried to execute a coup against the registered agents and now is parading out of Anchorage as the “real” grassroots green party. First, it was the Aurora Party and now these baseless attacks that we are not green enough. Trees grow stronger through the storms we face and so shall we.
2026
Meanwhile, we have been training, building strategic alliances, and preparing for 2026 and a run on regeneration. This means that we are working to train and support candidates that understand the 5 forms of capital, life-cycle calculations and budgeting. How a healthy planet is our most precious asset, how Alaska has a leadership duty at the national and global level, how peace can be extremely profitable, and how to win seats locally and nationally. Having done (its never really done) the shadow work, I believe we are emerging stronger and as we branch out will become a party people want to join and represent to a needlessly cold and secular world.
After an intense arctic summer, we have started up again with monthly meetings, are looking to schedule more townhalls, debates, and community building events. Most importantly, we recognize that even though we are a political party, we are also a human agency. To our members and the members of the public in need we are pledged to positive direct action whenever we can to the extent of our ability. Phone-banking, door knocking, fundraising, and organizing campaigns are valuable skills that extend beyond running for office and outside the scope of the political season. Parties maybe fun but it’s the civic engagement that has always proceeded a renaissance.
A few key points to our winning strategy:
1) The regenerative economy provides social solutions and by default begins the healing of the environment. We aren’t trying to be everything to everyone or everywhere all at once. By focusing on actionable items within the core framework, we can empower not just our members but their neighbors to see Nature as a living part of our healthy lives which we call symbiosis.
2) As stewards of the Earth, all Greens are called to honor, respect, and help heal the first nations people from who we learn the ancient wisdom that is the Rosetta Stone of Permaculture. In our bylaws, the foundation of our pillars and the root of our key values we remember.
3) We do not strive to be the biggest or the best. We may take the board to reset the rules, but we recognize our strength, our health as a political party is because we are a keystone species in the diversity of the political ecosystem. We have legal requirements to be recognized and gain ballot access, but we believe only those afraid of losing believe winners take all.
4) We challenge the system to make it better or make a better one. We question practices, principles, and priorities because its between the hammer and anvil that our platform is forged. We do not belittle, demean, slander, or repeat negativity about other members, candidates, other parties, or any person in general. We may praise in public, but we correct in the proper forums and respect the human journey we are all on.
5) Candidates and elected officials are not glorious leaders to exalt. We work together to lead ourselves, inspire each other, and this is our enduring legacy. To those ends we exalt Star Trek, and the Resource Based Economy as the most impactful sources of inspiration to show generational peace and prosperity to a world that has largely only ever known war and scarcity.
Conclusion
If you have made it this far, thank you. For far too long people have looked at politics as full of snake oil salesmen that will tell you anything to get elected and then constituent who? A system the people do not believe in is a failed system. As a Constitutional republic we have to remember freedom is not a right, it’s a privilege protected by the lives of those who live its principles. Not just when they serve our individual interests but when our collective interests become the need to protect our individual rights to choose, and the democracy we have nurtured for the last 250 years is threatened.
We will not achieve everything we set out to do but we do them anyway. Not because they are easy but because they are hard, and this is how we as a nation, a party, and a people remain strong in the face of adversity. The easy thing would be to give in or walk away but then what would we have to pass on to the next generation of stewards? Those who give us the strength to rise and show the world the prosperity, the stability, and the peace of permaculture principles woven into the USA mainstream as the regenerative economy.
