Press

April 6, 2000

Ann Arbor, MI - The "click" that helped save the world reverberated in the tiny EcologyFund.com office at 5:00am on Wednesday, April 5th. That one click meant that one square mile (27,878,400 square feet!) of wilderness land had been preserved. The milestone proved to the site founders that this idea would really work.

What idea?
EcologyFund.com, launched just seven weeks ago on Valentine's Day, is an innovative Web site that gives the public the opportunity to "click" to preserve wilderness at no cost to them. Visitors to EcologyFund.com can save 276 square feet of land each day by clicking on projects in the Patagonia Coastal Steppe, in wilderness near U.S. National Parks and in the Amazon Basin Rainforest. EcologyFund.com works with the Rainforest Trust and the Wilderness Land Trust who purchase the threatened wilderness lands with the money received from the site sponsors. Sponsors of the site currently include World Journeys, iPrint.com, Novica, CharityMall.com and CoolSavings.com.

"We modeled it after the Hungersite.com," said EcologyFund co-founder Tim Kunin. "We are interested in using the Internet to help solve world problems." Another site under the company's CharityUSA banner, CharityMall.com, is the largest virtual shopping portal that gives 100% of the merchant's standard affiliate commissions to charity.

EcologyFund.com has seen a 2400% growth in the seven short weeks since it's launch. Kunin sees the explosive growth as a sign of the times. "The Internet is creating a whole new town square-where people can make their opinions known. The success of EcologyFund.com shows that people care about the wilderness. But," Kunin notes, "hopefully, this is only the beginning. There is practically no end to the amount of wilderness that needs to be saved by visitors to EcologyFund.com."

One square mile sounds like a modest amount of land, but co-founder Greg Hesterberg puts it all in perspective. "It's kind of like our first dollar bill on the wall-it says we're in the land saving business and we're not leaving until the job is done."

CONTACT:
Jessica Frost, Publicity Director
CharityMall.com/EcologyFund.com
216 E. Huron St., Ann Arbor, MI 48104
ph: 734-213.7777
fx: 734-913-5555
[email protected]