Writer Tom Butler is the editorial projects director for the Foundation for Deep Ecology. He is a long-time conservation activist focused on wilderness and biodiversity. Butler is a founding board member and the vice president of the Northeast Wilderness Trust, the only land trust in the northeastern United States focused exclusively on protecting forever-wild landscapes. His books include Wild Earth: Wild Ideas for a World Out of Balance, which features collected essays from the conservation journal he edited from 1997 to 2005, and Wildlands Philanthropy: The Great American Tradition, a celebration of the natural areas established over the past century through private initiative and funding. In these tales of struggle and success, he found a greater appreciation for how protected areas have affected the American experience, offering blessings of beauty, wildness and hope to future generations.