Mission

Our mission is to provide educational tours while reforesting with native trees. Healing our own body as well as the environment around us is critical to attaining sustainability. ECO-Tours allow both to occur.

We urge all of our guests to read and understand the Seven Principles of Leave No Trace. Facility with or awareness about ECO-Ethics, Permaculture, Trees, Sustainability and Biodynamic agriculture/forestry may also be helpful. In addition, we are creating a School of Ecology that is a living laboratory for tools and techniques that allow higher quality of life with less input of fossil energy, creation of zero waste and systems that reflect natural processes. Our goal is simple. Restore abundance.

Over the years, ECO-Tours has developed from an unstructured group of guerilla gardeners to a state licensed not-for-profit educational and ecological organization. As such, we have planted many thousands of trees, over three million tree seeds and we continue to restore areas theat have fallen victim to the heavy hand of humankind. We continue to experiment with ways to nourish the Earth and her creatures, produce more with less and to harvest the abundance that follows, distrubuting excess production beyond our needs equitably.

We are not alone in our efforts to transform human culture. Other sources of inspiration for us have been Will Allen, of Growing Power in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Will, and his organization, have taken land that was written off as waste by those who thought that money eqates to power. Wil, along with hundreds of volunteers have restored abundance there, allowing natural systems to reclaim the land, recreating abundance. The people there have reclaimed not only the landscape, but a measure of control over the food system that exists in an ecologically desolate and environmentally crippled part of Wisconsin's largest city.

A groundswell of awareness about our precarious position as humans is leading people to look for better ways of living on planet Earth. We delight in sharing what we have learned and teaching techniques that work. The fabric of life itself has become frayed and our efforts are designed to let the Earth and all of her creaturess heal. Transforming the world one tree at a time sounds like it may not do enough or do it quickly enough, but our guests agree that spending even an hour or two learning to think differently about our place on the planet and our relationship to it, can have lifelong positive impacts.