Wood, Megan Eppler

BIOGRAPHY

Megan Epler Wood
Founder, The International Ecotourism Society (TIES)

Megan Epler Wood is the founder and past-president of The International Ecotourism Society (TIES). In January 2003, she is launching an international consultancy EplerWood International, an international exchange program for her home city of Burlington, Vermont in cooperation with the Institute of Sustainable Communities, and a web-based Epler Wood Report with analysis, trends, and reviews on issues in the field of sustainable development, conservation and tourism. She has acted as spokesperson, lecturer¸ and instructor of training workshops for governments, NGOs, and the private sector in Sri Lanka, Trinidad, Tahiti, Samoa, Fiji, Malaysia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Peru, Brazil, Belize, Australia, Canada, and Kenya. In 2002, Epler Wood’s book Ecotourism: Principles, Practices, and Policies for Sustainability was published by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and launched at UN headquarters in New York for the International Year of Ecotourism (IYE). She recently supervised a global stakeholder consultation process for TIES in cooperation with UNEP for IYE with regional meetings held in East Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia, the Arctic countries, Mesoamerica, and Andean South America to ascertain the status of ecotourism development and to co-develop a set of action recommendations in partnership with local institutions in each region.