about us
Eremos Collective is a federally and state-recognized 501(c)(3) nonprofit rooted in wild food literacy, experiential education, and ecological restoration. We work from the Ozarks — foraging, teaching, documenting, and sharing what we have learned across nearly two decades of field practice and formal research.
We exist because ecological knowledge is disappearing. The skills that sustained people for thousands of years — identifying what grows in your own watershed, processing a harvest, reading a landscape across seasons — are vanishing in a single generation. Not because they failed, but because they were replaced by systems that cannot nourish people or land the way direct knowledge can.
We are not selling expertise. We are practitioners doing the work and passing on what we know while there is still time and strength to do it.
The work.
Everything we do connects back to one thing: restoring the kind of ecological knowledge that used to be ordinary and now takes real effort to keep alive.
Education — Field-based, standards-aligned science instruction for K–12, homeschool, and microschool families. Every program is designed and delivered by a credentialed educator with nearly twenty years of experience across federal agencies, state park systems, university classrooms, and independent schools. We are an approved provider under the Arkansas Education Freedom Account (EFA) program.
Excursions — Guided foraging walks, immersive field days, and wilderness experiences in the Ozarks and beyond. These are not tours. They are place-based learning led by a working naturalist who has spent decades reading landscapes for a living.
Outfitters — Purpose-driven gear and goods designed by foragers for foragers. Every purchase directly funds our educational programming and community access work.
Workshops — Hands-on skill building in wild food identification, processing, preservation, fermentation, soil science, and ecological literacy. Open to the public, designed for all skill levels.
Community — The mycelium. Foraging days, seed swaps, trail running, volunteer work, and the slow effort of rebuilding local food webs one neighbor at a time. This is the part that actually matters — everything else exists to get here.
Paul
In wildness is the preservation of the world.
Paul started foraging at seven. Something in him knew there was more to food than what came from the freezer section and the food bank. That curiosity never left — it just got deeper, and eventually it became a life.
He holds a Master of Science in Ethnobiology from Eastern Washington University and a Bachelor of Science in Biology with concentrations in Wildlife and Botany, graduating Magna Cum Laude. He is a Certified Interpretive Guide through the National Association for Interpretation, holds teaching certifications in two states, and has spent nearly twenty years building and delivering educational programs for the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, Oregon State Parks, university biology departments, and too many schools to list.
At Oregon State Parks, he managed interpretive and educational programming across 99 parks in the Coast Region, working with roughly 550 employees and serving 30 million annual visitors. Before that, he developed twelve interpretive programs for the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service that reached over 18,500 participants annually, while contributing to multi-year biological research alongside refuge scientists. He has taught university courses in biology, mycology, botany, and experimental design. His graduate research focused on the nutritional content of wild food populations across varied soil types and bioregions — work he continues independently.
But most of what he knows came from dirt, time, and getting it wrong. Extended stays with tribal communities on the Inland Plateau. Seasons on the Pacific Coast, in the Everglades, in the Adirondacks. Two decades of learning which plants concentrate minerals from which soils, when to harvest for maximum nutrition, how phenology changes everything. He shares the mistakes alongside the methods because that is how knowledge actually transfers — and because it is how good teaching works.
Now he is in the Ozarks, living the kind of life he spent years studying. Simple, rooted, close to the ground. Foraging is not a hobby here. It is how the household works.
Paul is neurodivergent and a helpless creative. You can find him in the woods — mostly lost — or halfway through a project he will finish eventually.
Thera
Let me go into the fields and glean
Thera grew up in Elk, Washington — forest in every direction, horses, and the kind of childhood where you learn by doing. She came out of it with a love for simplicity and a practical knowledge of how to live close to the land.
She homeschools, keeps the household running, and feeds everyone. She is a self-taught cook who turns wild food and garden harvests into meals worth sitting down for. Her kitchen is where the foraging actually becomes dinner — where the chanterelles get cleaned, the venison gets braised, and the kids learn that food comes from somewhere real.
Thera holds the center of what Eremos does. She is the steady hand, the encouragement when the work gets long, the one who makes sure the life we talk about is the life we are actually living.
Why this Matters
The urgency is real.
Nature literacy is disappearing faster than the ecosystems that support it. People do not know what grows in their own yards. Children cannot identify ten plants. The intergenerational knowledge that sustained communities for millennia is being lost — not in centuries, but in years.
The window does not stay open forever. So we show up. Awkwardly, imperfectly, persistently.