15: Behavior Change to Provide a Bright Future – Part 1

Developing Programs and Policy to Put Us On Course to a Bright Future

A conversation with Joseph Merz of the Overshoot Behavior Lab and the Future Behavior Lab

How can we help ourselves and everyone in the country make the dramatic changes needed to get our nation out of ecological overshoot and on a path to a bright future? Getting out of ecological overshoot – and doing it before the damage of overshoot is irreversible – will require a World War II level of effort. All of us – citizens, businesses, scientists and policymakers – will work together to completely reinvent our society, so that we give our kids not a dead planet, but a bright future.

We’ve begun to sketch this out on the Dave the Planet campaign website. Here’s a quick link to The Bright Future Project there: https://brightfutureproject.us. It’s far from complete, however. In this episode, presidential candidate Dave Gardner sought valuable perspective and advice to help us plan that project. Joseph Merz is one of the people he would invite to serve on the “President’s Council on The Bright Future.”

Merz was lead author of World Scientists’ Warning: The Behavioural Crisis Driving Ecological Overshoot https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00368504231201372

Merz is:

• Founder and Chairman of the Merz Institute https://merzinstitute.org/
• on the Executive Committee of the Stable Planet Alliance
• Senior Fellow of the Global EverGreening Alliance

 The Merz Institute’s Overshoot Behavior Lab and Future Behavior Lab are doing work at a high level that we think would inform The Bright Future Project.

Follow this podcast for a ringside seat to Dave Gardner’s adventures running for U.S. President. If elected, Dave will declare an ecological overshoot emergency and launch a national project to get the nation out of overshoot. Podcast guests don't necessarily endorse Dave for president. We’ve got a planet to save, and the U.S. should do its part. Learn more, subscribe to campaign updates, volunteer, or donate to the campaign at https://davetheplanet2024.com