"EarthFoot" has no home office, and no affiliation with any formally recognized organization. There are no glossy brochures describing EarthFoot and no secretary waiting to take your call.
EarthFoot is a presence in cyberspace. In other words, it is unabashedly nothing more and nothing less than what you see when you visit the site at http://www.earthfoot.org.
People behind EarthFoot are scattered all over the globe and they network with one another via the Internet. The "main node," which sometimes shifts from country to country, resides with me, Jim Conrad, middle-aged naturalist and writer. I am typing these words in a trailer in the forest of southwestern Mississippi, USA.
With regard to EarthFoot, I have ideas, coordinate things and place material at the EarthFoot site. My business partner in Denmark, George Meijer, is a friend of many years. He handles all EarthFoot matters relating to money. For him, EarthFoot is a kind of a hobby where he can "do some good," and distract himself from his very demanding regular job. The other people comprising EarthFoot are the widely scattered "hosts" who propose "eco-events" which are promoted at the EarthFoot site.
At our opening web page we spell out our mission in big letters and simple words. We say that we offer:
Non-profit support for independent, small-scale, low-impact, info-rich eco-events hosted by earth-savvy folks near their own homes.
We say that an "eco-event" can be anything from a Ph.D. leading a birding trip, to a native lady inviting visitors into her home to learn traditional cooking. For us, ecotourism is small, personal, easy-going and slightly cerebral stuff. It must deal with nature and/or traditional cultures.
You can study the mechanics of how EarthFoot promotes its hosts' eco-event proposals by visiting the site and browsing through some proposals at the "destinations" link. Here I wish to expand on WHY and HOW EarthFoot came into being.
Several decades ago, as a student in the '60s working toward my M.Sc. in botany, I was not alone when I decided that something had to be done about mankind's ongoing destruction of the Earth's biosphere, which enables all forms of life, including human, to survive. Later my alarm grew when I traveled in several tropical countries collecting plants for scientific investigation, for the Missouri Botanical Garden and other institutions. The vast destruction of critical ecosystems everywhere was appalling.
I abandoned my career in botany and became a writer. My simplistic notion was that if I could eloquently describe the causes and effects of environmental degradation, and point out rational solutions, then a fair number of people might change their behavior, and life on earth would be less endangered.
However, in a world where people smoke even when they know they are killing themselves and others, and where AIDS keeps advancing even when people know how to prevent it, I should have known better. It took me a couple of decades of roaming the world as a freelance writer before I could fully assimilate that simple fact. So, if education isn't enough, what's the missing ingredient?
Eventually I accepted that what the great gurus, mystics and religious figures had always been saying was true. The missing ingredient had to be... "love." The only positive force strong enough to keep people from destroying the biosphere that sustains us all is love of that biosphere and its components. And "components" includes "people." There has to be love for people, too, who live beyond spitting distance of our own doorsteps.
For me personally it was a marvelous thing that this insight, though coming late in my life, coincided with the burgeoning of two completely unrelated, unforeseen phenomena. One was that the concept of "ecotourism" acquired a name and came into its own, and the other was that the Internet became available to large numbers of people all over the world.
Today I think of the EarthFoot concept as crystallizing spontaneously as the insight about love serendipitously synergizes with the ongoing blossomings of "ecotourism" and the Internet.
For me, working on EarthFoot has been and continues to be a form of meditation, perhaps even a kind of prayer. It is a manifestation of my spirituality. For others, EarthFoot can offer more tangible benefits. Let me tell you about a particular incident that influenced how ultimately the EarthFoot concept came to be structured.
Some years ago I was in Madagascar collecting plants for taxonomic study. I befriended our Malagasy guide, who was a student at that time. Later he attended a university in France and acquired his Ph.D. Today few people on earth know as much about traditional medicinal uses of Malagasy plants as my friend.
Yet, the last I heard from him, he was driving a taxi, just to have enough money to eat, and he was too poor to marry the woman he loved.
I am absolutely sure that there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of individuals in the world who would pay my friend a modest fee for the pleasure of having him introduce them to the pungent world of Malagasy medicinal plants. And I am just as certain that this modest fee would benefit my friend immensely.
EarthFoot, then, comes about as the result of a dream. The dream is that someday it will facilitate the connecting of thousands of people on Earth who know a great deal about some corner of nature, or of their traditional society, with travelers who seek to know more about those very things. It will do so at no cost to the host, with only a very modest cost to the visitor, and with the absolute minimum of offices, administration and glossy brochures between the host and visitor. Nothing but the purity of cyberspace.
There are those who say that any undertaking without an office, without a traditional administrative structure, and without usual cash flows, is a shady thing.
We suggest that these are new times, and the old assumptions about how things can get done no longer are compelling. With the Internet now there can evolve new forms of presence that will thrive and serve in a milieu of nothing more than creative energy expressed digitally, in HTML language, pixels on screens, and networking, widely spaced souls expressing "love" in their own ways.
I like to think of the EarthFoot concept as something like a snowflake that has materialized in thin air exactly when the conditions became just right. The EarthFoot snowflake hangs suspended in nothingness as it grows, molecule by molecule, its molecules being the hosts with their eco-event proposals.
This is the image inside me as I sit at my keyboard right now in extreme southwestern Mississippi, USA, being a "node" for the EarthFoot network as it crystallizes and grows day after day. If you wish to add to this ever-more gorgeous Available Eco-Event Infrastructure Suspended in Cyberspace you are most welcome to join us.
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