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What is Eco Tourism 2.0?

by Kenneth Pavloff, EPS, May 2011

Eco Tourism 2.0Since 2009 the Eco Preservation Society has been working with the Costa Rican government and tourism companies to develop a new form of Eco-Tourism, one we call Eco-Tourism 2.0. EPS Founder Kevin Peterson talks about Eco-Tourism 2.0 in a brief interview.

According to Kevin, Eco Tourism 2.0 involves three primary characteristics.

”The first characteristic of Eco-Tourism 2.0 is engagement and education. The idea is to move the tourist beyond a passive observer and engage them in important conservation projects and the deployment of sustainable technologies. The idea is to provide the participants with both the tools and the inspiration to take these concepts back to their home communities and to make conservation work a tangible part of their daily lives.”

The second characteristic of Eco-Tourism 2.0 is social media. The rise of social media in our modern world has changed the way people consume information and how they organize themselves. According to Kevin, “demographics are dead. In the old media the idea was to segment people by various demographic characteristics and send out mass messages to the “stereotypes” that marketers arbitrarily created. Those mass marketing techniques are gradually fading away. Now people aggregate themselves around causes and products they believe in and age, sex and other demographic information is more and more irrelevant as this new media environment takes over.”

The third characteristic of Eco-Tourism 2.0 is radical transparency. One of the reasons so many good causes suffer is because the projects are managed by organizations with bloated bureaucratic institutions. Because of the rise of social networks, you no longer need a bureaucracy to organize the activities of a lot of people. The cost of organizing talent in the new social networking environment is next to nothing and the costs of maintaining large administrative staff is less and less necessary, and can even be counterproductive to fulfilling the mission of the organization. We outsource everything to people that really care about the cause instead of relying on people who are only in it for a paycheck. These people seldom care more about their salary and their benefit package than they do about the mission of the organization.

The people involved in EPS, our global network, are truly committed to the cause. Because we do not have a bloated bureaucracy to support, we are able to practice radical transparency. The funding from our events and other revenue sources related to the projects go directly into a project fund that is fully transparent to all of the stakeholders. We focus on raising funds for projects, not for our administrative and infrastructure needs.

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