10% Funded And Building!

When we made the commitment to create an outdoor school, the idea was a culmination of many years of taking ECO-Tourists out for day trips and a few overnights here and there where we would plant trees or native wild edibles, restore habitat and regenerate native plants where they had been lost. Sometimes for many decades the land had been abused and we learned many techniques for breathing life back into soil. When I was a young man, I had worked as an educator at College Settlement Camps of Philadelphia, teaching many of the same ideas and skills to young people, but as I continue to learn, many adults have never learned these important things either. As I have gotten older, the desire to start a sort of summer camp for all ages that would focus on not only rest and relaxation, but learning in a supportive and beautiful environment became my passion. I have never accepted a penny for my work in this regard. The pay offs for me come in ways that cannot be monetized. In fact, my life's savings are going into the pot as well as all the contributions that are coming in. Teaching about mutualism and the give back are far too important to hold hostage to money.
At the start of the global pandemic, I decided to change the way I thought about what I wanted to create and focused my effort on brining this outdoor school to fruition. Our group, ECO-Tours of Wisconsin, Inc. has begun to reach out to other groups, guest teachers who will share their skills and in an attempt to find the location for this new project, have poured over real estate listings for over a year. When we sold our property, more than three dozen wild edible plants filled the yard. The only real management required was to harvest some of nature's bounty each year and every few years, find others who we could give new shoots or cuttings, bulbs, corms or seeds. The profusion of life that sprung up under these plantings was amazing, the many hundreds of pounds of relatively free food we got to harvest was simply amazing and the soil these plants lived in matured as well, holding more nutrients, more water and more life than we could have imagined when we started. Now, we want to teach these same techniques to many hundreds, even thousands more people who come away to the wilds to experience first-hand what permaculture, carbon-smart farming and restoration biology can accomplish. Of course, it is not free or easy to bring together so many diverse groups and voices, so many skills and ideas into one experience, but we are on our way to doing so.
If you would like to manage your property in ways that give back to Mother Nature, that use no man-made chemicals, that revere rather than destroy natural systems, please contact us and/or contribute to our gofundme page. If you would like to learn how to store and sequester carbon in living soil, you can contact us as well. I will include a few photos of our gardens, but seeing them in person says more than the photos can capture. By teaching through actual experiences, rather than with just words, our students come away with skills and thought processes that help build community, honor the circular nature of life itself and to support diversity for the sake of all organisms involved.

Back To Work

It has been over a year since the entertainment industry closed down. I have worked nearly all my life in the business and last March, around the middle of the month, we just got sent home. From the beginning those of us who knew something about science and especially epidemiology prepared for the worst. I sold my homes because I knew that here would be at least a year of no work. Many of us were expecting a more likey two-and-a-half years of no income, especially considering the fact that we had an anti-science Administration in control of our government back then. The wealthy people who fund most television, concerts, industrial and trade shows and the theater industry started blowing smoke up our asses almost immediately. Some said that within months we would be back to work, a few said they would start up again in the fall. The implication was that by the time autumn rolled around, the worst would be over. Then, we had the low-end companies, the ones known for paying the least and working their people the hardest with the least benefits want to start up around the holidays and we all know what happenned then. Now, we are about halfway vaccinated as a population and there are some jobs coming back, slowly. The sad part has been the very vocal and ignorant people who think the stock market is the economy, and those who claim that some of us are "essential workers" when what they actually mean is they want to buy cigarettes and gatorade every day on their way to work and the only place they know they can do that is at the local stop and rob gas station. If we would have had done what the entertainment industry did right away at the start, stayed home, away from all people, refusing to breathe the air of others, we could have been done with the virus in a few weeks. Instead, we allowed access to our human Petri dishes to continue throughout the past year. We have had cheerleaders for a "return to normal" pushing, pushing, pushing for us to go back to work, back to our jobs, back into social situations before anyone was ready.Now we have just enough people vaccinated to not be sure whether the people we see out in the world are safe or not. There are still people who claim tha tthey don't want to be part of an experiment or take some "unproven" vaccination, but these same people don't realize that once more than a hundred million doses have been given, the trial size is many hundreds of times larger than any other drug ever gets tested on before being allowed into the marketplace. Clinging to the lies of the former Administration and denying science even as we continue to have people become infected with a preventable disease just makes these folks sound ignorant to those who have been paying attention. They say that a stopped clock is still right twice a day, but in the case of science deniers and Q-bots, they have not been right for more than a year. I feel for every person who was mad eto work during this time and I am watching closely what happens over the coming month or so, because as people begin to mix it up again and return to work, school and the nightclubs, we must not forget that as a nation, we are barely half vaccinated. Some parts of the country are still not even to that point yet. In my state alone, there are still places where the infection rates are high and this week I went through the data. There is a direct correlation between places that still think Deceitful Traitor won the election and the high rates. Often those in rural areas don't understand that if there are ony four hundred people in their town and two people get covid-19, their case rate is still higher than if 40 or 400 people get sick in a town of hundreds of thousands. Just because you do not understand the life cycle or natural history of a virus does not mean that it can't use you as a host. Once you are infected, it is too late to do anything about it either, so unless you isolate yourself completely and remain in quarantine until the illness has run its course, the only thing you can do is pass it on. I will be going back to work in an outdoor environment, and I am fully vaccinated, but I will continue to mask up and wash my hands often. I will continue to stay at least six feet away form people I'm not sure have been fully vaccinated, not because I'm fearful of catching the virus, but because I want others to understand that they need to get their heads around this issue, accept the science and stop listening to people who don't care about them. As much as I want a paycheck, I refuse to endanger your life for my freedom. As much as I want to "return to normal", what we had before was not working. I want everyone to understand that to get past this terrible illness, we all have to be considerat of others and do whatever it takes to create positive change for all of our neighbors, friends and families.