“Let Me Tell You Why…” ~ The Ecology Prime Story
“Let Me Tell You Why…”
~The Real-Life Story Behind How Ecology Prime™ Came to Be ~
by Eric McLamb
Founder
Ecology Prime™
I was born in and grew up in the city alongside the ocean, but I was raised in the country. At least that’s how I see my upbringing. All of it together had a profound impact on how I would see myself and my life-guiding decisions to help engage other people with the same kinds of realities I experienced relating to our interconnections with Earth’s nature.
You see, I learned as a child that we all live on common ground, literally as well as metaphorically. Let me tell you why…
Both of my parents came from farming families as children of The Great Depression. They moved to a medium sized city from their farm towns to raise our family, starting with my oldest brother who was born during World War II. By the time I was born 13 years later, seven years after my older brother, our family was entrenched in the city culture, but our parents kept us close to our family’s farming roots.
Two of my mother’s sisters and their families – and her father and stepmom – maintained the family’s farming trade that encompassed cultivating hundreds of acres of rural land that included commercial production of cotton, soybeans and tobacco along with a wide array of common produce like corn, tomatoes, field peas, potatoes, sweet potatoes and other varieties for both agricultural business and personal use. Of course, they also raised chickens and cows (for eggs and milk), among other livestock.
Being a close-knit family that did not live that far apart, we all visited each other often on weekends throughout the year and extended periods of time in the summers. My time on the farms included weeks each summer living around and even working with all types of agriculture. I was even paid a penny for each bushel of corn I helped pick or for each stick of cured tobacco I placed onto the giant burlap sheets used to transport those browned, itchy leaves to the market.
(It’s really important to understand that I always absolutely shunned anything related to tobacco use… but the way the farmers worked with nature in its production was fascinating. To the farmers at that time, many of whom did not personally use tobacco, it was a major cash crop they depended on to support their families. Today, these farms have turned mostly to farming healthier products, like cotton, potatoes and lima beans, along with corn and soybeans for use in biofuels as well as food production.)
It was only later in life I realized that the influence of farming in my childhood imparted to me a certain commonsense collaboration with the land… the vital methods used to sow, reap and prepare the land for the next season. But it was also super fun when it came time to play with the children of all the visiting farm workers, drive the old John Deere tractor to the fishing pond and wander up to the country store for a cold soda on those hot, sweltering summer days.
The most enlightening thing to me was how we were all in this together!
Back in the City…
But when back in the city, our family was productively engaged in normal day-to-day life, working, going to school, playing sports and growing up in the relative suburban setting. We did so as a tight-knit family, despite the extended age difference between my two brothers and me, and we loved each other dearly. Yet, our city was surrounded by rural areas and farms in almost every direction, so there was no shortage of farming products where we could go pick our own.
I remember every June my mother would take me to pick strawberries and blueberries directly off the berry farm bushes as if it were a late-spring ritual. The farms were well cultivated and fit quite seamlessly into the vistas of the healthy farming communities.
Then There Was the Ocean!
Practically surrounded by farming to the west, south and north, nothing was more dominant and soulfully inspiring to me than the great Atlantic Ocean which borders where we lived to the east. It was ever-present, endlessly vibrant, living and breathing with such great power and boundless fortitude. Going to the beach with my family was an absolute highlight of my childhood, and we went very often.
In a huge, personal way, the Atlantic Ocean gave me passage to the rest of the world. From the time of my early childhood to my early adult years, I often sat on the beach with the entire ocean before me, amazed by its vastness and majestic sounds, envisioning all the other lands it connected to and all the life contained within it. It was my constant source of hope, peace and tranquility.
The ocean captivated my senses – the unique ocean scents and sounds – as well as my intellect with how overwhelmingly large it was compared to just little me and knowing I was part of it. It was, to me, always a reminder that this planet of ours connects us all. Even though I would leave this place to follow my career path, the farms and the ocean would always be with me. Ultimately, I knew I would return to the ocean one day.
The Embryonic Beginning of Ecology Prime™
After graduating from college, working a two-year stint as a Public Information Officer for a community college and one year as a production director for a mid-market television station, serendipity intervened in my career development in 1982. I was introduced to the head of engineering for Turner Broadcasting System in Atlanta, Georgia, which led me to a production job with the fledgling CNN-2 (today known as Headline News). This was my link to a lifelong dream I had of working in corporate public relations for the media giant, and that would become reality exactly one year later when I was hired as Public Relations Manager for Turner Broadcasting’s corporate operations.
It was Ted Turner‘s unequivocal commitment to environmental concerns and television programming supporting positive ecological exploration and sustainability that helped define my path… but I was even more focused on bringing the experiences to everyone everywhere. You see, it turned out that I was the only person in the entire public relations department who wanted to embrace this special programming genre given the allure of Turner’s news, Hollywood entertainment, major league sports and other “flashier” interests.
So, by fortuitous default, I would serve as the public relations and communications liaison for Ted Turner’s three marquee environmental programming stalwarts for the next four and a half years: Jacques Cousteau and The Cousteau Society, National Audubon Society and National Geographic Television. But I would also manage public relations support for Turner’s other ventures including family entertainment, domestic and international syndication, acquisition of the classic MGM and RKO film libraries, the colorization of many of those MGM/RKO classic movies, and the Turner-inspired nonprofit Better World Society which produced such documentaries airing on Superstation WTBS and in syndication like Our Finite World and The Day of Five Billion (when the world’s population hit five billion people).
Altogether, the Turner experiences congealed around me in a way that inspired deep-rooted interest in how we could not only bring the fascinations of our planet to people around the world, but how we can enable people to engage these ecological experiences personally. And while cable television was quickly gaining prominence in the global communications landscape, it had far to go before I could see this vision even begin to become achievable.
Little did I know then that the seed for Ecology Prime™ had been planted.
Up Close and Personal
While my five-and-a-half years with Turner provided an extraordinary experiential platform for international broadcasting, entertainment and public relations businesses, it was the personal relationships I developed with the people and the projects involved that had extraordinarily profound impacts on my deep-rooted thoughts about life and living. Perhaps none was more impactful than my collective relationships with the Cousteau, National Audubon and National Geographic families. These folks captured so many different aspects of the world in all its life, natural phenomena and environmental challenges that we worked on together to bring into the homes of millions of people.
Here was Jacques Cousteau, the ancient mariner who filmed the vast undersea world to let people all around the globe see what that world is like for the first time ever in all its fascination and glory. And we continued that on Turner’s SuperStation WTBS (today it is simply known as TBS) and international syndication with his series of specials. These included, among numerous others, Cousteau’s Rediscovery of the World and his 75th birthday special filmed in 1985 at George Wahington’s Mount Vernon Estate near Washington, DC, by the Potomac River titled, Jacques Cousteau: The First 75 Years. The entire crew and staff of The Cousteau Society and the famed explorer’s ship, Calypso, were on hand for this major celebration with the late famed singer and entertainer John Denver as the host.
I had become particularly good personal friends with the Cousteau public relations manager, Tim, and we often traveled together on the various crew outings while filming, testing new equipment by the Channel Islands off the Pacific coast of southern California, and other activities. But it was the expedition to the Sea of Cortez (also called the Gulf of California) where I first came in contact with Cousteau’s revolutionary windship, Alcyone. This ship replaced Calypso as Couteau’s primary expedition vessel in 1985.
This expedition is where I spent extensive close, personal time with the Cousteau crew while on expedition, especially getting to know Jean-Michel Cousteau, Captain Cousteau’s first son, quite well. Though I had already met, worked with and became good friends with Jean-Michel, we cemented a collaborative bond that would show me how fascinating and globally enlightening what they do really is. We maintained our close connection for the years to come.
The Black-footed Ferret Guy
Now, about being the only person in public relations who totally wanted to go all in on Turner’s environmental and other goodwill projects… nothing was more pleasing, in a karma sort of way, than becoming known as the Black-footed Ferret Guy in the corporate wing. National Audubon Society produced a one-hour special about the re-emergence of the once-believed extinct Black-footed Ferret that was rediscovered in the North American Great Plains. I thought this was a fascinating story that I knew would do well, while my coworkers joked with me about the focus I placed on it. For four full months, I dealt with tons of friendly joking, including from the vice president of television ratings and performance, Robert Siebert.
Then the big night came when The World of Audubon: The Mysterious Black-footed Ferret premiered on WTBS. So, the next day, after the overnight ratings were received by the company, Robert made a beeline to my office in CNN Center to break the news to me: the Black-footed Ferret special became the highest-rated program in Turner’s history, much to his delight and with great appreciation for the promotional performance. And, by the way, television critics referred to the Black-footed Ferret as one of television’s finest wildlife programs. Yep, this was, indeed, a most rewarding experience… that this ecological programming would capture the attention of the national viewing audience so firmly despite competition from the smorgasbord of sports, film and other entertainment fare it was up against.
Yet, something was always missing to me… how could people engage what they see and enjoy so they can embrace those experiences at their own personal level?
The Discovery Experience
When I left Turner and Atlanta for a brief stint with a national cable operator based in the Washington, DC, market, fate would be at play again in my career as I was hired as Communications Director for the fledgling Discovery Channel, also based in the DC market. Talk about the value of documentaries being realized as sorely needed in the plethora of programming mixes throughout television at that time, The Discovery Channel was documentaries on steroids. Being the first and only fully devoted documentary channel in television, it quickly became known as “the darling” of the cable industry because the cable operators effectively used it to show something valuable cable television offered that the broadcast networks did not.
The personal challenge for me was, Discovery showed documentaries about everything, everywhere, all over the place. Their most popular programs at the time were shows like Firepower and World War II documentaries that not only delivered top ratings, but they were also some of the most anti-environmental programs ever produced. Then they launched the famous annual summer event titled Shark Week, which, then, solidly captured people’s attraction to the fearsome aura of the shark species rather than a genuine appreciation for their life in the wild.
In absolute truth, the Los Angeles Times television reporter writing about the nascent Shark Week quoted Discovery’s founder, John Hendricks, as saying, “If it’s big enough to eat you, the ratings go through the roof!” And that’s what the operations purpose of Discovery became at that time… to deliver the big ratings through the exploitation of such ensnaring documentary programming.
I will say this about John Hendricks though… he was an extraordinary visionary and one good, very likeable and cool dude. He made documentaries popular, and it was fun and inspiring to work with him. But the other executives seemed more inclined to buy into the power trip that the documentary fare would turn Discovery into a mega media corporation, which it ultimately did.
Still, Discovery would endear itself to audiences with some of the most innovative wildlife programming of the time. And I was fortunate to guide our communications teams in promoting these gems to the public, but even more so to personally engage the action, producers, sites and scientists working on these programming events behind the scenes.
Over the next five years, I had the opportunity to work with a new breed of documentary programming that would capture both the attention and imagination of broad cable television audiences. Discovery’s popularity was uncanny for sure, and its programs were world class regardless of the topic. I felt fortunate to work with the pioneering network and its ambition to become global. But their very catchy tagline, Discover Your World, felt very strange to me, and it took me nearly five years to figure out why.
Of the hundreds of documentary programming events that we featured, it was my personal engagements with two major events, coupled with representing a company that unwittingly exploited these compelling ecological issues for ratings and advertising favoritism, that presented me with the ultimate clarity:
People need not only to see and discover their world, but they need to be able to engage and connect with their world in the way it resonates with them. That would give them the relevance and embrace they want and seek to truly make a difference.
How about Engage Your World ? Or better still, Common Ground…
Whales, the African Elephant and the Maasai Mara
In the Company Whales and Ivory Wars led me to what I felt was a commonsense view of what being human truly means. Produced by Discovery, these were world class documentaries of global human intrigue that ensnared people’s emotions, including angering viewers about the plight of endangered species. They were perfect for making their viewers part of the story. Yet, these stories stopped there… the viewer was brought to precipice only to be abandoned at the altar or at least so it seemed to me. I knew that people would want to do something with or about what they had witnessed, to know what they can do and would do if they had a way to do so.
I came to know about whales very personally as I worked on In the Company of Whales — the first feature length documentary ever produced — because I had the fortune of working with the world’s foremost cetacean biologist, the late Dr. Roger Payne, and the folks from World Wildlife Fund (WWF). Dr. Payne and WWF introduced the whales’ world and their lives to me in ways people who watched the program could not directly experience. Dr. Payne’s special connection with these fascinating creatures — particularly the Humpback Whale and the world’s largest animal, the Blue Whale — were indelibly imprinted on me. And this let me address the major screening audiences with an introduction to Dr. Payne and the show’s producers with a level of personal connection I could not have done otherwise. And the audience – composed of media, celebrities, business associates and interested dignitaries – felt it.
Touching the True Face of Nature
But it was my encounter with Africa and the Ivory Wars programming event that would bring to life my core inner compass and direct me toward what would ultimately emerge as Ecology Prime™. The plight of the African Elephant was at the centerpiece of a week-long event on Discovery called Safari Live: Africa Watch! which included live programming from the Maasai Mara National Reserve in Kenya, Africa, in co-production with the BBC Documentary Unit. To make sure Ivory Wars and Safari Live! were well-promoted, I invited several select reporters from the cable trade publications and major newspaper media including the Los Angeles Times, Associated Press and The Washington Post on-location with the BBC crew in the Maasai Mara in Kenya for one week to experience and report on the making of the event.
The Maasai Mara is where I was able to touch the true face of nature, and it would forever define for me what it meant to be human on our planet. This gave me a positive power and comprehension I had not felt before.
We were there in September 1989 during the high season of the massive annual wildebeest migration heading south to the Serengeti in Tanzania. It was a phenomenal movement of over two million indigenous animals moving across the Maasai Mara-Serengeti ecosystem in search of fresh grazing and water prompted by the cyclical rains of East Africa.
I was there… what I personally encountered far exceeded the value of watching it on television or in a movie because I was able to engage it. I did not witness it… I lived it! I could see it without spin or editorial or any point of view except my own. For once, I felt part of our contiguous life systems: I was in the game, not at the game.
The Maasai Mara – Nature Unfiltered
I entered the game late that early September morning when our Boeing DC-3 – a multiuse aircraft which flourished in the 1930s and 1940s – landed on the small airstrip in the southwestern portion of the Maasai Mara after the park rangers made sure it was cleared of the wildlife. Our guide, a Kenyan national named Said, welcomed us and drove us straight to the Mara River Camp where we would reside for the next five days.
Upon arriving at the camp, we were immediately greeted with a sign that captured the golden rule of the savannah: Beware of the Wild Animals: They are Dangerous and They Have the Right of Away! Can you imagine seeing that in the city, where the first impulse would most likely be to shoot or, more sanely, to call animal control?!? And they meant Right of Way for the wildlife there.
Case in point: One day during our stay, an African Black Cobra had gotten into one of the camper’s tents while they were out for the morning. Upon their return, the camp supervisor said they could only open the tent flaps and let the cobra leave on its own; they were not allowed to engage it in any way. (The cobra ended up leaving late afternoon on its own without any coaxing from the humans.)
Perhaps more dramatic was late one afternoon when my guide, Said, and I passed one of the reserve’s armed checkpoints as we headed back to camp. When we stopped, the senior checkpoint guard spoke to Said in Swahili, then got into the back of our vehicle with his M-16 rifle in hand. Said drove him about 300 feet ahead where two covered safari vehicles with tourist photographers had practically gotten right on top of a group of lions feeding on a freshly caught zebra (yes, the lions hunted the zebra). The armed guard got out of our vehicle, then he approached one of the other drivers and spoke to him. The driver’s eyes grew, it seemed, ten times larger when the guard addressed him, after which the guard turned away, said something to Said in Swahili and then walked back to the checkpoint.
Finally realizing we were clear of any altercation with the Kenyan authorities, I asked Said with a bit of shortened breath, “What in the world just took place?” He told me that the guard told the driver that he would be arrested and his license taken away when he got back to their camp because he got too close to the wildlife. Said explained that Kenya ardently protects its wildlife, and this was an example of the supremacy of the land and its life.
At this point, I understood with absolute clarity that all life reigns together, and it was there where the wildlife, not humans, are the essence of the collaborative community.
The Most Soul-Embracing Moment…
My personal experiences in the Maasai Mara seemed endless, each one further ingraining in me absolute comprehension that personal engagement was essential for people to feel connected and thus empowered with their own linked relevance to the entire world around them. From watching the BBC crew film the elephants and the Wildebeests’ phenomenal crossing of the Mara River as they migrated south, to finding the rare Black Rhino mother and her calf far away from the large wildlife groups and observing the entire Maasai Mara gently come to life as the sun began to appear in the eastern sky, there was no doubt we were all inescapably part of this magnificence.
Perhaps the most soul-embracing moment arrived when our group came across a pride of 23 lionesses with their cubs alongside two male lions as we headed back from the Musiara Swamp to our camp. It was midday, so the lions were chilling to avoid the heat of day before their next hunt in the later, cooler part of the day. It is rare that two males would cohabitate in one pride when there is competition for food and other environmental stresses; but this was a plentiful time in the Maasai Mara, so the two male lions in the pride were not a problem.
We came to stop about 50 or so feet (about 16 meters) from these three lionesses underneath the high noon shade of an Acacia tree. I was able to snap this photograph – one was sleeping, another yawning and the third one peering out – at exactly the right instant to preserve it as the moment I realized my place on this giant world we live on. That place was to begin connecting the dots between all people and the vibrant forces of the world around us. It would be a long, challenging road, but it was time to start.
Back in the Corporate Offices…
Back in the Discovery corporate offices, life would not be the same. I could not help but think about the last, “defining” line of the Ivory Wars documentary, passionately narrated by the awesome narrator James Earl Jones, which was frankly, in my opinion, a huge statement of hopelessness for the viewers despite its poetic rapture. The entire program was devoted to exposing the illegal ivory trade and elephant poaching, mainly of the African elephant because the males and females of that species both bear the highly prized tusks. So, the program ends with the heart-wrenching message: “If they vanish, we shall miss them when they are gone.”
I realized I could no longer be part of this kind of commercial exploitation of nature for ratings and the related advertising revenue they bring. The time finally arrived in 1993 when Discovery and I felt my ecological commitments were in conflict with their business expansion plans, and I knew I had to follow this mission apart from that kind of corporate culture.
I had already begun developing an all-environmental company with my good friends Tim from The Cousteau Society and Brian from The World Wildlife Fund that would focus on public messaging to provide personal connectivity, primarily as a dedicated environmental television channel. When Discovery and I parted on mutual terms, I was convinced this move was right when Discovery’s President at that time, Ruth Otte, told me in a final meeting that they could not focus on environmental concerns since they had just acquired The Learning Channel and had begun establishing retail outlets in the US.
Indeed, the freedom to put together my collective experiences to start an engaging ecological platform for all people had finally emerged. I knew early on that we would need to follow the technology to find the ultimate path of engaging people with their world in meaningful ways. It would be challenging and, in many ways, painful… but never daunting. The next 15 years would see communications capabilities permeate global societies in ways never before envisioned, and we would be there.
Now, WE ARE THERE! The core group of us who banded together over the years finally put it all together in 2016 when my good friend, Dr. Jack Hall, who is the founding chairman emeritus of the Department of Enviromental Sciences at the University of North Carolina Wilmington (UNCW), and I decided the path for Ecology Prime™ after we completed a live webinar – titled Environmental Unity. The seminar was produced on the UNCW campus with students, featuring Hollywood’s foremost ecologist, Ed Begley, Jr., as host and Jack as the environmental science expert.
Our veteran startup group included Jack, Jane, Mary Lou, Aleta and Bob (who sadly passed away pre-Covid), all of whom would be joined over a short period of time by others from all aspects of science, ecology, education, ecological psychology, web technology and international business development to bring the world’s first unique user engagement platform for all things ecology to fruition.
The prototype Ecology Prime™ platform began rolling out in December 2022/January 2023, never looking back.
Returning to the Ocean… and the Farms
Looking back on this life journey, I realized I never left the ocean or the farms, but I carried them with me every day, everywhere and with everything I did. It is the vast treasure trove of my experiences with nature that have indelibly become interwoven with the farms and the ocean of my childhood. I have returned to my childhood beach on the Atlantic Ocean every year of my professional life, and I will soon move back there as my final destination.
And I will sit by the shore, knowing first-hand that the great ocean and the rest of the world are eternally connected.
Eric McLamb is the Founder, Chairman and CEO of Ecology Prime Inc., the home of Ecology Prime™. With over 45 years of experience in mainstream multimedia, cable/satellite/broadcast communications, environmental media and journalism – including extensive work with Turner and Discovery networks and numerous environmental groups such as The Cousteau Society, Audubon and World Wildlife Fund, among many others – Eric envisioned a world where everyone can connect, share and communicate with each other through media on the environment and the day’s ecological dynamics. He leads a top-flight veteran team doing just that, with a deep commitment to bringing relevance and understanding of the realities of living to all people on common ground.
Personal Note: It is important to understand that this story is about so many other people and events that I was fortunate to be associated with and part of. I was asked to share my stories by my colleagues who felt that it was important for people to understand why and how Ecology Prime™ truly came to be. I dedicate this story to all the people I productively encountered on this path — my cofounding partners who ultimately formed the backbone of our venture, the wildlife that accepted my presence, and mostly to my very loving family who supported me and this vision beyond the normal capacity of embrace, patience and love. Without them, Ecology Prime™ would not be what it is today. As the African proverb says, it takes a village to raise a child, and Ecology Prime™ is everyone’s child…. everywhere. — EP
© 2024-2025, Eric McLamb and Ecology Prime Inc. All rights reserved.