People ask me why I’m running under the Ecology Party of Florida instead of as a Democrat or a Republican.
The honest answer is: I’ve been an Ecology Party member since 2017. This is not a marriage of convenience. This is not a candidate shopping for a ballot line. I was registered with this party before I decided to run for anything — before I had a campaign logo, a slogan, or a filing with the Hillsborough County Supervisor of Elections. The convictions came first. The candidacy followed from them.
That sequence matters. It is the difference between a politician who adopts a party’s language and a person who actually shares its values.
What the Ecology Party of Florida Is
The Ecology Party of Florida is a recognized minor political party in the State of Florida, designated by the abbreviation ECO in official state election records. It was established in 2008 and has maintained its status as a registered Florida political party ever since — a distinction that requires an active state executive committee, filed rules and bylaws, and ongoing compliance with Florida election law.
The party describes itself as dedicated to protecting the environment and its residents — plants, other animals, and humans — in the State of Florida and beyond. That framing is deliberate and worth sitting with. The Ecology Party does not view environmental protection as a special interest, a niche issue, or a political calculation. It views it as the foundational obligation of any government that intends to serve the people who live within the natural systems that government is supposed to protect.
The party earned early recognition for its advocacy work beyond elections — opposing phosphate mining expansion, challenging the use of fluoride in public water supplies, and working with national organizations on nuclear energy concerns. It has always been willing to take positions on issues where the two major parties have chosen silence over accountability.
The party’s constitution establishes a set of core principles that are not talking points. They are operating commitments, binding on candidates who seek the party’s support under Articles 6 and 7 of its constitution — which require that candidates espouse, promulgate, and disseminate those principles before the State Executive Committee grants final approval.
Those principles, as drawn from the party constitution, include:
Respect — the party commits to respecting and counting the votes of its members, and members are expected, in return, to respect and carry out the core principles of the party. Accountability runs in both directions.
Lead by example — the party commits to supporting the best and most sustainable practices — environmental, compassionate, socially responsible — in conducting all its official business and events. It does not ask others to do what it is not willing to do itself.
Peaceful revolution — the party calls for a dynamic and unyielding political and social commitment to restoring ecological, social, and political communities. Not incrementalism. Not accommodation. Restoration.
Participatory democracy — those who do the work, who are aware of and keep abreast of the issues, should be the ones making the decisions. Not donors. Not insiders. Not the approval machine.
Opposition to corporate power — the party holds that corporations, which are legal fictions created by state law, should not be accorded the rights and protections intended for human beings. The influence of concentrated private wealth over public governance is not a feature of democracy. It is a corruption of it.
To learn more about the Ecology Party of Florida or to join the cause, click here!
Why I Joined in 2017 — And Why I’m Running Now
I registered with the Ecology Party of Florida in 2017. Not because I was planning to run for office. Not because I was making a political calculation. Because I had spent the better part of a decade watching the two major parties manage Florida’s environmental decline rather than reverse it — and I had run out of patience for managed decline. Other parties like the Libertarian Party had left me behind as well.
The Ecology Party’s core commitments — environmental stewardship as a governing philosophy, opposition to the corporate capture of public governance, participatory democracy over donor-class democracy — were not new ideas to me. They were the ideas I had already been living by. The party gave them a name and a political home.
What has changed since 2017 is that I have watched nine more years of the pave-and-profit crowd operate with impunity in Hillsborough County. Nine more years of commission meetings where the concrete merchants got what they came for. Nine more years of residents in Ruskin, Apollo Beach, and East Bay showing up to say that something was wrong and being thanked for their input and ignored.
Running is the next logical step of the same conviction.
Where the Alignment Is Real
The Ecology Party’s opposition to phosphate mining expansion is not abstract to me. I grew up reporting on what phosphate mining does to Florida’s land and water. I have watched the legacy of the Bone Valley’s stripped terrain play out in the wetlands of southeast Hillsborough County, in the aquifer recharge zones that no longer function as they should, in the Piney Point disaster that dumped a year’s worth of nitrogen into Tampa Bay in ten days because Florida let a mining waste site operate without a valid permit for more than twenty years.
The party’s opposition to corporate power is not abstract to me either. I have spent my career watching the developer-commissioner alliance operate in District 1 — watching the concrete merchants show up at commission meetings with their attorneys and their project binders, and watching commissioners who campaigned on accountability vote yes anyway. The Ecology Party’s position that corporations should not be accorded the political rights of human beings is a position I share not as a theory but as a conclusion reached from watching what happens when they are.
The party’s commitment to participatory democracy is the reason I am doing this campaign the way I am doing it — door to door, community meeting by community meeting, blog post by blog post, without a developer check in my campaign account. The people who fish these waters, farm this land, drive these roads, and drink this water should be making the decisions that govern them. Not the people who profit from building on it.
The party’s call for ecological restoration — not just protection, but active restoration — is the framework inside which every position I hold makes sense. Protecting the last wild coast. Ending the aquifer robbery. Restoring the freshwater systems in southeast Hillsborough that phosphate mining severed sixty years ago. Rebuilding the seagrass beds in Hillsborough Bay that the commission’s indifference helped destroy. These are not policy preferences. They are what stewardship looks like when it is taken seriously.
A Word on Third Party Politics in Florida
Running under the Ecology Party of Florida means running outside the structures that most Florida voters are accustomed to. It means navigating a ballot access process, a candidate vetting requirement, and an electorate that has been trained by decades of two-party messaging to regard third-party candidacies as either protest votes or spoilers.
I reject that framing — not defensively, but historically. Some of the most consequential political movements in American history began as third-party campaigns that the major parties dismissed. Hunter S. Thompson ran for sheriff of Aspen County in 1970 under the Freak Power ticket — an outsider journalist, an anti-development platform, a community that had decided that neither major party was going to protect what mattered to them. He lost the election and ignited a movement.
District 1 is not Aspen. But the dynamic is recognizable: a district whose residents have been systematically underrepresented by the political structures that claim to serve them, and a candidate who has been part of this community — fishing its water, coaching its kids, working with its tradespeople and farmers — long before he decided to run for anything.
The Ecology Party of Florida gave me a political home in 2017 because its values matched the ones I already held. Nine years later, it is giving me a ballot line — and a mandate to do what the party constitution calls for.