Bio:
Ron Mader is a communications catalyst and professional speaker, writer, photographer, and tweeter. Among his most popular workshops are those focusing on strategies for using the social web. Ron also hosts and updates the free Digital Literacy Quiz.
Highlighting meaningful conversation and action about environmental and cultural conservation, tourism, responsible travel, and peacemaking are the core focal points.
Conscious Travel and Planeta.com:
His professional focus on ecotourism and responsible travel go back to academic research conducted in Central America in the late 1980s. In 1994 Ron launched Planeta.com, the web’s first site dedicated to ecotourism, responsible travel, and conscious travel.
Working in Oaxaca, Mexico, Ron collaborated in the development of the Oaxaca Options Dialogue and grassroots tourism events (2001-2013).
Ron has facilitated numerous seminars online and in the natural world and has won many awards, including recognition from the Mexican government for exemplary coverage of Mexico. Presidents Fox and Zedillo presented Ron with the Lente de Plata Award in 1999 and 2002. In 2010 he won the Innovation Award from the International Ecotourism Society.
Ron was featured in the 2000 and 2008 editions of American Environmental Leaders.
Collaboration:
Ron collaborated with the Convention on Biological Diversity in the creation of the Indigenous Tourism and Biodiversity Website Award and leading a practical workshop on the social web at the Biodiversity COP. Ron led similar social web workshops for Indigenous teachers at Native Innovation conferences in Arizona.
Ron contributed to the ecotourism and responsible travel coverage in the pioneering magazine / website Transitions Abroad.
Online Conferencing:
In the past few years Planeta.com has developed online events, including the Financing Sustainable Tourism, NGOs in Tourism and Conservation, Ethical Marketing of Ecotourism, Environmental Impact of Transportation, Urban Ecotourism Conference and the Ecotourism Emerging Industry Forum.
2002 was the International Year of Ecotourism, an event which sparked a lot of interest among ecotourism nerds around the globe. The United Nations and World Tourism Organization asked Ron to host the Sustainable Development of Ecotourism Web Conference which was the most attended preparatory event for the World Ecotourism Summit.
Academic Work:
Ron has a bachelor’s degree in communication (1987) from Indiana University where he resided at the Collins Living Learning Center. Ron received a master’s degree (1990) from the Institute of Latin American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.
The Recôncavo is an almost invisible center-of-gravity. Circumscribing the Bay of All Saints, this region was landing for more enslaved human beings than any other such throughout all of human history. Not unrelated, it is also birthplace of some of the most physically & spiritually uplifting music ever made. —Sparrow
"Dear Sparrow: I am thrilled to receive your email! Thank you for including me in this wonderful matrix."
—Susan Rogers: Personal recording engineer for Prince, inc. "Purple Rain", "Sign o' the Times", "Around the World in a Day"... Director of the Berklee Music Perception and Cognition Laboratory
I'm Pardal here in Brazil (that's "Sparrow" in English). The deep roots of this project are in Manhattan, where Allen Klein (managed the Beatles and The Rolling Stones) called me about royalties for the estate of Sam Cooke... where Jerry Ragovoy (co-wrote Time is On My Side, sung by the Stones; Piece of My Heart, Janis Joplin of course; and Pata Pata, sung by the great Miriam Makeba) called me looking for unpaid royalties... where I did contract and licensing for Carlinhos Brown's participation on Bahia Black with Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock...
...where I rescued unpaid royalties for Aretha Franklin (from Atlantic Records), Barbra Streisand (from CBS Records), Led Zeppelin, Mongo Santamaria, Gilberto Gil, Astrud Gilberto, Airto Moreira, Jim Hall, Wah Wah Watson (Melvin Ragin), Ray Barretto, Philip Glass, Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd for his interest in Bob Marley compositions, Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam and others...
...where I worked with Earl "Speedo" Carroll of the Cadillacs (who went from doo-wopping as a kid on Harlem streetcorners to top of the charts to working as a janitor at P.S. 87 in Manhattan without ever losing what it was that made him special in the first place), and with Jake and Zeke Carey of The Flamingos (I Only Have Eyes for You)... stuff like that.
Yeah this is Bob's first record contract, made with Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd of Studio One and co-signed by his aunt because he was under 21. I took it to Black Rock to argue with CBS' lawyers about the royalties they didn't want to pay. They paid.
MATRIX MUSICAL
The Matrix was built below among some of the world's most powerfully moving music, some of it made by people barely known beyond village borders. Or in the case of Sodré, his anthem A MASSA — a paean to Brazil's poor ("our pain is the pain of a timid boy, a calf stepped on...") — having blasted from every radio between the Amazon and Brazil's industrial south, before he was silenced. (that's me left, with David Dye & Kim Junod for U.S. National Public Radio) ... The Matrix started with Sodré, with João do Boi, with Roberto Mendes, with Bule Bule, with Roque Ferreira... music rooted in the sugarcane plantations of Bahia. Hence our logo (a cane cutter).