Please check out my article on the Atlantic Monthly's website about my activist run for Congress and how citizen politics can help do something about climate and other problems:

My unlikely course in activist politicking started with a May call from a member of the executive committee of the Green Party of New York State.

The call came, I understood, because of the notoriety of my very-publicly performed 2007 experiment
in extreme environmental living in the middle of Manhattan. The project
had been intended to question and look for alternatives to the typical
American's consumption-based way of life. It was also a vehicle to help
bring broader public attention to the range of our environmental crises
-- from ocean depletion to species extinction to climate.

To that end, I wrote a book and starred in a documentary film about the experience, both titled No Impact Man.
The book, translated into a dozen languages, has been required reading
for more then 100,000 American college students. The film has received
over a quarter of a million ratings on Netflix, in addition to
screenings in theaters and on television around the world. My
non-profit, NoImpactProject.org, whose main program is an immersive, educational week of environmental living, had attracted over 50,000 participants.

While all that notoriety may have attracted the Green Party to me, it did not attract me to the idea of running for office.

I said no.

As far as I could see, the entire political process was corrupt. I'd
become fond of calling the presidential election "a big sports-like
event paid for by the multinational corporations in order to distract us
from the possibility of real change." At that time, I had the same
mistaken instinct as so many despairing Americans -- to abandon the
political system and look for hope elsewhere...

Click here to read the rest.