Marc Bekoff is professor emeritus of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He has published many books, including The Ten Trusts (with Jane Goodall), The Emotional Lives of Animals, Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals (with Jessica Pierce), and Ignoring Nature No More: The Case for Com­passionate Conservation. He also writes regularly for Psychology Today. His homepage is marcbekoff.com, and with Jane Goodall, ethologicalethics.org.

After undergraduate work in Botany and Zoology, four years as a naval aviator, then graduate studies in Forest Recreation and Wildlife Management, Norman A. Bishop was a national park ranger for thirty-six years. He was the principal interpreter of wolves and their restoration at Yellowstone National Park from 1985 to 1997, when he retired to Bozeman, Montana. For his educational work on wolves, he received a United States Department of the Interior citation for meritorious service. He also received the National Parks and Conservation Association’s 1988 Stephen T. Mather Award, the Greater Yellowstone Coalition’s 1991 Stewardship Award, and the Wolf Education and Research Center’s 1997 Alpha Award. He led many field courses on wolves for the Yellowstone Association Institute from 1999 to 2005. He served as the greater Yellowstone region field representative for the International Wolf Center. He is on the boards of the Wolf Recovery Foundation and Wild Things Unlimited. He also serves on the advisory board of Living with Wolves.

Franklin Burroughs was born in 1942 in Conway, South Carolina and raised there. Majored in English, and went on to get a PhD in that subject. Taught English at Bowdoin College, Bruns­wick, Maine, 1968–2002. Still lives in Maine and hopes never to live elsewhere. Married Susan Hay, in 1966. Three daughters; four grandchildren. He has written Billy Watson’s Croker Sack (1990), The River Home (1991), and Confluence (2006), which was awarded the John Burroughs Medal in 2008. Burroughs has also published a number of essays, and has had work reprinted in such anthologies as Best American Essays, The Pushcart Prize, and the Norton Anthology of Nature Writing. His work typically begins with some intersection of natural history, local history, and personal experience. It tends to move outward and backward from whatever occasion serves as its point of departure.

Christopher Camuto is the author of A Fly Fisherman’s Blue Ridge, Another Country: Journeying Toward the Cherokee Mountains, Hunting from Home: A Year Afield in the Blue Ridge, and Time and Tide in Acadia: Seasons on Mount Desert Island. He lives at Wolftree Farm in central Pennsylvania. “Fire in the Path” is excerpted from Another Country.

Camilla H. Fox is the founding Executive Director of Project Coyote, a national non-profit organization that promotes coexistence between people and wildlife and compassionate conservation through education, science, and advocacy. She is also a wildlife consultant with the Animal Welfare Institute and serves as an advisory board member to several national wild­life organizations. With over twenty years of experience working on behalf of wildlife and wildlands and a Masters degree in wild­life ecology, policy, and conservation, Fox’s work has been featured in several films and international media outlets. A frequent speaker on these issues, she has authored more than seventy pub­lications and is co-author of Coyotes in Our Midst: Coexisting with an Adaptable and Resilient Carnivore, co-editor and lead author of the book Cull of the Wild: A Contemporary Analysis of Trapping in the United States, and producer of the award-winning documentary Cull of the Wild: The Truth Behind Trapping.

James Galvin is the author of several collections of poetry, including Resurrection Update: Collected Poems, 1975–1997 and X (2003); a novel, Fencing the Sky (1999); and The Meadow (1992), a prose medi­tation on the landscape of the Wyoming-Colorado border and the people who live there. He has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foun­dation. For many years he has been on the permanent faculty at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, spending part of the year in Iowa City, Iowa, and the remainder in Tie Siding, Wyoming, where he grew up and still ranches.

Marybeth Holleman is co-author of Among Wolves: Gordon Haber’s Insights into Alaska’s Most Misunderstood Animal. She is also author of The Heart of the Sound and co-editor of Crosscurrents North. Pushcart-prize nominee, her essays, poems, and articles have appeared in such venues as Orion, Christian Science Monitor, The Future of Nature, and on National Public Radio. A North Caro­lina transplant, she has lived in Alaska for over twenty-five years.

Christine Hume is the author of three books, most recently Shot (Counterpath, 2010) and two chapbooks, Lullaby: Speculations on the First Active Sense (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2008) and Ventifacts (Omni­dawn, 2012). She teaches in the interdisciplinary Creative Writing Program at Eastern Michigan University.

Nick Jans is one of Alaska’s best-known writers, a longtime contributing editor to Alaska Magazine, and a member of USA Today’s board of editorial contributors. He’s currently at work on The Giant’s Hand (a collection of essays set in the Alaska Arctic) as well as A Wolf Called Romeo, a full-length work of nonfiction to be published by Houghton Mifflin in 2014. Jans currently lives in Juneau with his wife Sherrie, four dogs, a parrot, and a rescued mink, squirrel, porcupine, or hummingbird now and then. He travels widely in Alaska, and considers the upper Kobuk Valley, where he lived for twenty years, to be the place that most feels like home.

Hailed as the philosopher-poet of the environmental movement, Derrick Jensen is author of twenty-one books, including A Language Older Than Words, The Culture of Make Believe, and Endgame. He was named one of Utne Reader’s “50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World.” His book Thought to Exist in the Wild won the Eric Hoffer Award and was second place in the Animal category of the Independent Press IPPY Awards. In 2008, he led Press Action’s “Dynamic Dozen” and in 2006 he was the Press Action Person of the Year. He writes for Orion, Audubon, and The Sun Magazine, among many others. He holds a degree in creative writing from Eastern Washington University, a degree in mineral engineering physics from the Colorado School of Mines, and has taught at Eastern Washington University and Pelican Bay State Prison. He has packed university auditoriums, conferences, and bookstores across the nation, stirring them with revolutionary spirit.

Devin Johnston is the author of several books, including Traveler: Poems and Creaturely and Other Essays, reflections on the natural world. He works as an editor for Flood Editions, an independent publishing house. He teaches at Saint Louis University, where he co-directs (with Mary Gould) the Prison Arts and Education Program. Raised in North Carolina, he now lives in Missouri.

Janet Kauffman lives in Hudson, Michigan, where she farmed hay for many years before restoring wetlands on the farm, putting the land in a conservation easement and letting everything go wild. She taught writing and mixed media at Eastern Michigan University and now works for sustainable agriculture with Environmentally Concerned Citizens of South Central Michigan.

Ken Lamberton’s first book, Wilderness and Razor Wire: A Natu­ralist’s Observations from Prison (Mercury House, 2000) won the 2002 John Burroughs Medal for outstanding nature writing. He has published five books and more than a hundred articles and essays in places like the Los Angeles Times, Arizona Highways, The Gettysburg Review, and The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2000. In 2007, he won a Soros Justice Fellowship for his fourth book, Time of Grace: Thoughts on Nature, Family, and the Politics of Crime and Punishment (University of Arizona Press, 2007). His latest book is Dry River: Stories of Life, Death, and Redemption on the Santa Cruz (University of Arizona Press, 2011). The essay featured in this volume is taken from his current book project, Chasing Arizona: An Obsession with the Grand Canyon State (University of Arizona Press, forthcoming). He holds degrees in biology and creative writing from the University of Arizona and lives with his wife in an 1890s stone cottage near Bisbee.

Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) was a conservationist, forester, philosopher, and educator, as well as author of the influential work A Sand County Almanac, from which the essay in this volume is drawn.

Geoffrey G. O’Brien is the author of Metropole (2011), Green and Gray (2007), and The Guns and Flags Project (2002), all from University of California Press; his next book, People on Sunday will be out from Wave Books in Fall 2013. His chapbooks include Hesiod (Song Cave, 2010), and Poem with No Good Lines (Hand Held Editions, 2010). He is the coauthor (with John Ashbery and Timothy Donnelly) of Three Poets (Minus A Press, 2012) and (in collaboration with Jeff Clark) of 2A (Quemadura, 2006). O’Brien is an Associate Professor in the English Department at UC Berkeley and also teaches for the Prison University Project at San Quentin State Prison.

Born in the 18th century, Tsilikomah was an Oneida healer in Kaskaskia, on the Shenango River (near present-day Edinburg, Pennsylvania). She assumed responsibility for an Iroquois (Haudenosaunee) oral tradition from an Erie elder called Keeper of the Old Things, who was her patient. Paula Underwood (1932–2000), a lineal descendant of Tsilikomah, was an author, lecturer, and oral historian.

Jack Turner studied philosophy and Chinese at the University of Colorado, Stanford University, and Cornell University, and taught philosophy at the University of Illinois. He continues to lecture, most recently at the universities of Montana, Utah, Puget Sound, and Illinois, at Carleton College and Whitman College, and for a variety of other institutions including Greenpeace, the Murie Center, the Teton Science School, and the Wharton School of Finance Leadership Program. He is a Visiting Scholar in the ­College of Humanities at the University of Utah. In 2007 he received the prestigious Whiting Foundation Writer’s Award. He has led treks and exploratory expeditions in Pakistan, India, China, Tibet, Nepal, Bhutan, and Peru, and for over forty years has climbed and guided in Wyoming’s Teton Range. The University of Arizona Press published his book of environmental essays, The Abstract Wild, in 1996. Currently in its fifth printing, it is taught in more than fifty colleges and universities. St. Martin’s Press published his memoir of the Tetons, Teewinot: A Year in the Teton Range (2000), and Travels in the Greater Yellowstone (2008). He is at work on Wildness 101, a philosophical tract dealing with the concept of wildness; a new collection of essays entitled The Eagle’s Eye; and a trio of novellas set in Jackson Hole. Turner lives in Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming, with his wife Dana.

Terry Tempest Williams is the author of fourteen books including Refuge, Leap, The Open Space of Democracy, Finding Beauty in a Broken World, and most recently, When Women Were Birds. She is an environmental activist and fierce advocate for health and social justice. A recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim fellowship and a Lannan Literary Award in creative nonfiction, she divides her time between Utah and Wyoming.