I grew up on a large cotton farm surrounded by nature where tending to the life of the earth and animals was our daily business. My father, who seemed to have an interest in just about everything from a scientific perspective, was an avid hiker and his interest in archeology caused him to take me out into the woods in search of Indian burial mounds and arrow heads as a child. He was also interested in rocks and we searched river beds for unusual specimens. As a teenager, I became aware of pollution and saw how so many people were detached from the environment with no appreciation for the life it sustained. I can remember yelling at people who threw trash out of their car windows and putting up signs at laundry mats about which detergent to use that wouldn't cause algae blooms in rivers. So I guess it wasn't all that out of character when years later as an adult I did a complete turnaround in the middle of my career in the construction business and sought out to promote Eco-tourism.
We probably all know what the word means today but at the time I did this in the early nineties, it was an entirely new concept. In fact it was a hard concept to sell to those in the travel industry. No one thought enough people really wanted to give up their luxury resorts to go work on a tropical plantation or hike through the wilderness for a vacation. But after a year of research I knew this was for me and I took off to Hawaii on a mad whim and as a result of following my freshly written To Achieve Your Dreams Remember Your ABCs, to make it happen. Except for a tiny article in one small town's local newspaper there was no evidence of the concept of Eco-tourism in Hawaii which seemed really ripe for it with its rich cultural heritage, magnificent landscapes and ocean boundaries on all sides. So as I set off to develop my Eco-Tours and market them, I had to educate everyone I came into contact with about the benefits of providing experiences that protected local cultures and the environment. It sounds like an easy sell today, but back then people looked at me like I was nuts.
Did I really expect massive numbers of people would give up relaxation, group tours, being pampered or the opportunity to go on rides at Disney to have a rugged adventure instead? Yes I did. Eventually I sold international travel agencies on the benefits of having less impact on native cultures and the preservation of the beauty of nature. I also went into a more spiritual realm about the benefits to participants from the development of their appreciation of nature and the effects of accomplishing physical challenges a person may have never experienced before. I did this and with the added element of making it all fun. I know that I helped start the trend in Hawaii of relating these types of preservation and nature activities to the catch phrase Eco-Tourism which soon became the fastest growing niche in the travel business worldwide. I also helped to weed out the fakes who once they caught on to the money making aspect of it, started using the phrase to describe things that didn't really meet the criteria.
Looking back on it I now know that was the most fun I've probably ever had in my life. Taking people from around the world out into nature to have experiences and learn of the native Hawaiian culture's fascinating history was a blast. My daughter and I joked to our guests that we were the only mother daughter four wheel drive stunt team in the world. And in the early nineties it was probably true. Stunt team? Well if you had been a passenger in one of the Jeeps we drove, you would understand without a doubt, how maneuvering our way around up and down high narrow mountain ridges through a thick rain forest on roads often deep in slippery mud, to come around a corner at high speed and catch air and then charge up a steep incline to end up splashing through a stream was indeed worthy of being called "stunts." We pushed the limits of experience on the drive while we stopped to hike and visit sacred sites. We never had a group where someone in it didn't indicate that their tour with us was the most fun thing they had done in Hawaii or in some cases the most fun they had ever had!
To make a long story short, I went on to develop an Eco-Tourism section of my inspirational website which at the time was one of the few to endorse or explain the concepts and a few years later, in 2002 when the UN declared it to be "The International Year of Eco-tourism" I was thrilled. But that was before I realized they had done what they do so well which is to take a good thing and twist it into something ugly for one of their global laws and taxation schemes. Eco-tourism soon became part of their propaganda machine to influence people to think more of the earth than they do themselves, to engage them to put aside their own needs for the needs of the planet in order to take control of land and round up what they hoped would be a smaller and smaller population into city centers. Since that time many of us have become aware of this plan after becoming acquainted with the United Nations' Agenda 21.
This put me in an unexpected and precarious situation personally. As an environmentalist, unless I was dealing with a close personal acquaintance, politically I found “The Right” had a disdain for "Tree Huggers" and as an opponent of massive globalization intended to feed into the elitists pockets and control over us, I found disdain from “The Left”: A tree-hugging "righty"? Who ever heard of such a thing? As I continued on over the years promoting both it has drawn a very difficult line for me to walk on the straight and narrow. I am writing this today with hopes to help widen my path.
Those of us who grew up in a Christian upbringing and in many other religious philosophies were taught that we were to be good stewards of the earth and it is not an unnatural thing to hold this appreciation of all of God's creations near and dear to our hearts. We are a part of that nature and we gain tremendously from experiencing activities surrounded by it. The souls of city dwellers who have never body surfed in a wave, hiked a mountain, or sat and talked to an elder of another culture, for example, has an empty place where these kinds of experiences are meant to fill. God made all things and we are all made up of the same components as the rest of nature. It would be absurd to think that we are not supposed to behold nature and being in nature with some amount of reverence. But we are not supposed to worship it or hold it as being higher than we are when we consider ourselves in the scheme of life. We are here to enjoy it, use it to our benefit, and consider the needs of the other life dependent upon it for sure. But never should we allow a government to use what is our natural right given by God to control, tax us or manipulate us into cities so that the land can instead be controlled by the government and where humanity is forced to keep out based on the ideology of preservation being more important than the comfort of mankind to live in it.
We were given the ability to think and therefore we can chose how we treat our fellow inhabitants and the environment we share and we should show respect for all of it. If we have a conscience along with good moral ethics, we will act properly towards all things. We don't need to be taxed for it or made to bow to the laws of man over the laws of God in our decisions to care for our home, this beautiful planet called earth, or the creatures great and small that share it with us. Exchanging the freedom we were given to support the idea that it is more important to protect the earth was never God’s intention. We were given both and now those of us aware of the twisting of a natural right must stand doubly steadfast to protect the earth and our freedom along with it.
