Green Hotel/Resort Ecomanagers

Traveling into nature to escape everyday stress and reconnect with the environment is an old pastime. It was especially favored in the 1800s and early 1900s by wealthy families such as Albany businessman Robert Pruyn, who built the Santanoni Lodge, one of the first "great camps" (a series of numerous houses and structures established over a wide swath of open land) in the Adirondacks (a mountain range that is located in northeastern New York state). People still flock to nature for their getaways, but many also sign up for trips that have lighter effects on the environment and feature conservation, local community, and/or environmental action projects in which they can participate. This type of environmentally conscious travel is known as ecotourism. It's a term that was introduced to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary in 1982, but did not really become part of our vernacular until the past 15 to 20 years.