Despite appearances, the Eco League is not a poor man's Captain Planet. Instead, it encompasses a growing group of colleges in the United States that hold ecological study at the center of their mission. For some of the schools, all curriculum centers around questions of consumption, environmental degradation, and ecological innovation. For others, the emphasis is on reducing the environmental impact of the campus and the people who populate it. Founded in 2003, the Eco League currently has five small-scale liberal arts colleges, all of them in rural settings. In all of the schools, the emphasis is on experiential learning and alternative educational avenues. While Green Mountain College and Northland College both have more traditional majors and preprofessional programs and athletic teams, the other three schools, Alaska Pacific University, College of the Atlantic and Prescott College have a more student-driven and observational focus. Prescott, for example, has two permanent field stations where students can go and conduct their own research. They are one of the only institutions in the world to have a permanent field station in the Gulf of California in Senora, Mexico.

College of the Atlantic was profiled in the New York Times on Sunday because they are the first college campus to become entirely carbon-neutral. At Atlantic, the entire student body of 325 follow the same curriculum, which emphasizes Human ecology. Human ecology is a relatively new field that appears in sociology, anthropology, public health and other social sciences. It is the study of how humans relate to their environment and how their behavior shapes the built world around them. Essentially, its study recognizes and seeks to understand the dynamic and ever-shifting interaction between humans and their surroundings. At Atlantic, the emphasis is on human interaction with the natural rather than built world.

At their seaside campus in bucolic Bar Harbor, Maine, students design their human ecology majors with a wide range of courses. The philosophy is that a student can become interested in any subject, so long as it is taught in a dynamic context. As one student says in a promotional video, "I rediscovered what I love - even things like chemistry, which everyone takes in high school, but most people hate. Teaching through a new perspective is something that has helped me learn a lot."

The Eco League provides great hope for a future generation of leaders who will consider the environment, regardless of their chosen field.