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Dr. Richard Alley

Rick Bass

Rick Bass is the author of twenty-one books of fiction and nonfiction, including The Ninemile Wolves, The Roadless Yaak: Reflections and Observations About One of Our Last Wilderness Areas, The Diezmo, The Lives of Rocks, and most recently, Why I Came West: A Memoir. His stories have been awarded the Pushcart Prize and the O. Henry Award and have been collected in The Best American Short Stories. Bass is a board member of the Yaak Valley Forest Council, Round River Conservation Studies, Cabinet Resource Group, and Montana Wilderness Association. For nearly twenty years he has been active in the attempts to help protect the last roadless lands of the Yaak Valley—the lowest elevation, wettest habitat, and narrowest bottleneck of the Y2Y section of the United States. Known as Montana’s only rainforest, the Yaak still doesn’t have a single acre of designated wilderness.

Rick Bass contributed "The Courage of Hope" to Yellowstone to Yukon: Freedom to Roam (Braided River, 2005).

Frances Beinecke

Frances Beinecke is president of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), one of the nation's most influential environmental action groups, which uses law, science, and the support of 1.2 million members and online activists to ensure a safe and healthy environment for all living things. Beinecke has been with the NRDC for more than thirty years, serving as executive director from 1998 through 2005. She received her bachelor's degree from Yale College and a master's degree from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. Beinecke co-chairs the Leadership Council of the School of Forestry, serves on the advisory board of Yale's Institute for Biospheric Studies and the board of the World Resources Institute, and is a member of the steering committee of the Energy Future Coalition.

Frances Beinecke contributed "A Climate for Change: Next Steps in Solving Global Warming" to The Last Polar Bear: Facing the Truth of a Warming World (Braided River, 2008).

Stephen Brown

Stephen Brown, Ph.D., is the director of the Shorebird Conservation Research Program at the Manomet Center for Conservation Sciences and has studied shorebirds and their wetland habitats for twenty years. He received his doctorate from Cornell University, where he studied restoration of wetland bird habitats. Brown is the lead author of “The United States Shorebird Conservation Plan” as well as more than twenty peer-reviewed articles on shorebirds and wetland management. He conducts field studies on distribution and abundance of shorebirds in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and collaborates on other shorebird research and conservation projects throughout the country. Based in Manomet, Massachusetts, the Manomet Center for Conservation Sciences is one of the nation’s oldest independent environmental research organizations. Manomet uses science to bring people together and guide them in the development of practical strategies that improve conditions for wildlife, habitats, and people.

Dr. Stephen Brown is the editor for Arctic Wings: Birds of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (Braided River, 2006). He contributed "Shorebirds: Imperiled Arctic Ambassadors" to the same title. To listen to one of his reports from the field, click here.

Richard Carstensen

Jimmy Carter

Jimmy Carter, the thirty-ninth president of the United States (1977-1981), advocated and signed the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, which celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2005. Carter has consistently opposed drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as fundamentally incompatible with wilderness. In 1982 he founded the Carter Center, a nongovernmental organization guided by a commitment to human rights and the alleviation of human suffering. He won the Nobel Prize in 2002 for his decades of effort in finding peaceful solutions to international conflicts, advancing democracy and human rights, and promoting economic and social development. He is the recipient of numerous other awards, including the highest awards of the National Wildlife Federation, The Wilderness Society, the National Audubon Society, and the National Parks Conservation Association.

President Carter contributed forewords to Arctic National Wildlife Refuge: Seasons of Life and Land (Braided River, 2003) and Arctic Wings: Birds of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (Braided River, 2006).

Gino Casassa

Born and raised in Chile, Gino Casassa received a hydraulics engineering degree from Universidad de Chile in 1984. During his early university years he became actively involved in mountaineering and developed a greater interest in frozen—rather than liquid—water. Consequently, he completed a Ms.Sc. in Geophysics/Glaciology in 1989 at Hokkaido University in Japan. In 1993, Casassa received his Ph.D. from Ohio State University, and from 1994 to 2002 he worked at Universidad de Magallanes in Punta Arenas, Chile, as an associate professor and the director for Antarctic Programs.

Since 2002, he has been a researcher of glaciology and climate change at Centro de Estudios Científicos (CECS). He is currently a member of the Steering Committee of the Program on Antarctica and the Global Climate System (AGCS) of the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR) and the International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU); a member of the Scientific Steering Group of the Project Climate and Cryosphere (CLiC) of the World Climate Research Project (WCRP) and SCAR; and vice president of the International Association of Cryosphere Sciences (IACS). He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005 and participated as lead coordinating author of Working Group II of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which was co-awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.

Dr. Casassa is an essayist for Planet Ice (Braided River, 2009).

Douglas H. Chadwick

Wildlife biologist Douglas H. Chadwick has traveled the globe reporting on wildlife and conservation, from the Congo headwaters to Siberia to the Great Barrier Reef. He is the critically acclaimed author of The Fate of the Elephant, A Beast the Color of Winter, and True Grizz, as well as The Company We Keep: America’s Endangered Species and Enduring America. Over two hundred of his articles have appeared in such publications as National Geographic, to which he is a frequent contributor, Audubon, Defenders of Wildlife, and Smithsonian Magazine. A longtime conservationist, Chadwick spent seven years studying mountain goats and other wildlife in Montana’s Bob Marshall Wilderness and Glacier National Park. He lives with his family in northwestern Montana.

Doug Chadwick contributed the introduction—"Y2Y: The Power of Connections"—to Yellowstone to Yukon: Freedom to Roam (Braided River, 2005). He is also an essayist for Salmon in the Trees: Surprising Connections in Alaska's Tongass Rainforest (Braided River, 2010). Click here to read his Patagonia "enviro essay" on the Yellowstone-to-Yukon ecoregion.

Yvon Chouinard

Yvon Chouinard, the founder of the outdoor equipment company Patagonia, is one of the pioneers of big wall and ice climbing and the author of Climbing Ice, the book that introduced modern ice-climbing technique to America. He is also an avid surfer, kayaker, fisherman, and falconer, as well as an outspoken proponent of mixing environmentalism and sound business practice.

Yvon Chouinard is an essayist for Planet Ice (Braided River, 2009).

Broughton Coburn

After graduating from Harvard College in 1973, Broughton Coburn fulfilled a destiny with the Himalayas—where he has worked for two of the past three decades. He has authored several books; developed documentary films; and overseen environmental conservation and development efforts for the World Bank, UNESCO, World Wildlife Fund, and other agencies. He has also contributed to New Age, Rock and Ice, The Denver Post Magazine, Co-Evolution Quarterly, Worldview, and other publications.

In 1997, Coburn was awarded the American Alpine Club's Literary Achievement Award for his body of work. His third book, Everest: Mountain Without Mercy, has sold over 400,000 copies—an unusual showing for a large format illustrated book.

In April 2001, Coburn’s fifth book—a collaboration with Jamling Tenzing Norgay titled Touching My Father's Soul: A Sherpa's Journey to The Top of Everest—reached number seven on the BookSense list and number twenty-four on the New York Times list; was granted an Honorary Mention at the 2001 Banff Mountain Book Festival; and was a finalist for the coveted 2001 Books for a Better Life Award. Two of his other books—Nepali Aama: Life Lessons of a Himalayan Woman and Aama in America: A Pilgrimage of the Heart—trace the life of an elderly Nepalese subsistence farmer and follow her on a 12,000-mile odyssey in search of the soul of the United States.

In addition to lecturing, Broughton Coburn is now editing a large format book on the Himalaya and is writing a series of historical fiction titles set in the Himalaya in the 1960s and '70s. He is also the special projects director for the American Himalayan Foundation, a charitable organization based in San Francisco that brings education, health care, and environmental conservation to villagers like Aama.

Broughton Coburn is an essayist for Planet Ice (Braided River, 2009). To learn more about his work, visit http://broughtoncoburn.com.

Gretel Ehrlich

Gretel Ehrlich was born on a horse ranch near Santa Barbara, California, and was educated at Bennington College and UCLA film school. She worked in film for ten years and began writing fulltime in 1978 after the death of a loved one. She had been filming on a 250,000-acre sheep and cattle ranch in northern Wyoming at the time-and there she stayed. The book that resulted was The Solace of Open Spaces, which won the Harold D. Vurcell Award for Distinguished Prose from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Her twelve subsequent books—including a memoir penned in 1994 after she was struck by lightning—have been published to critical acclaim. Ehrlich’s essays, short stories, and poems have been included in many anthologies, including Best Essays of the Century, Best American Essays, Best Spiritual Writing, Best Travel Writing, and The Nature Reader. Her work has also been published in Harper’s, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times op-ed page, The Washington Post, Time Magazine, Life, National Geographic Adventure, National Geographic Traveler, Outside, Audubon, Anteaus, Architectural Digest, and the Shambala Sun, among many others.

Her awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Humanities grant, a Whiting Foundation Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 1991, she collaborated with British choreographer Siobhan Davies on a ballet that opened in London’s South Bank Theatre.

Ehrlich divides her time between Calfiornia and Wyoming.

Gretel Ehrlich is an essayist for Planet Ice (Braided River, 2009). For more on her work, click here.

Jeff Fair

Jeff Fair is a wildlife biologist with four books to his credit, including Moose for Kids and The Great American Bear. His essays have appeared in Alaska Magazine, The Christian Science Monitor, the Boston Globe, Equinox, Ranger Rick, Audubon Magazine, and Appalachia, where he is a contributing editor. In 1998 he received the National Wildlife Federation’s Farrand/Strohm Writing Award, and in 2001 he was selected for the Alaska State Council on the Arts’ first Tumblewords roster.

Jeff Fair contributed "Angels in the Mist" to Arctic Wings: Birds of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (Braided River, 2006).

Daniel Glick

Daniel Glick is the author of Monkey Dancing: A Father, Two Kids, and a Journey to the Ends of the Earth, a Colorado Book Award-winning account of the trip he took with his son and daughter to places of great ecological wonder that are threatened by human development. A correspondent for Newsweek for thirteen years, Glick co-authored the 2004 National Geographic cover story entitled "Global Warming: Bulletins from a Warmer World" that won an Overseas Press Club award. He has written for numerous other magazines, including Smithsonian, Outside, Rolling Stone, the Washington Post Magazine, and Harpers. Glick also wrote Powder Burn: Arson, Money and Mystery on Vail Mountain, an investigation into the most infamous act of ecoterrorism in U.S. history. In 2001, he was awarded a Ted Scripps Fellowship at the University of Colorado, one of five journalists chosen annually to spend an academic year researching environmental law, policy, and science. In 2006, he spent four months as a Knight International Journalism Fellow in Algeria with his two children.

Dan Glick contributed "Fever Pitch: Understanding the Planet's Warming Symptoms" to The Last Polar Bear (Braided River, 2008). For more information, visit www.danielglick.net.

Karsten Heuer

Recipient of the 2003 Wilburforce Foundation Conservation Leadership Award, Karsten Heuer has spent the better part of the last decade studying and, in some cases, actually following wide-ranging and threatened wildlife on foot. He has worked as a wildlife biologist and park warden in the Madikwe Game Reserve in South Africa; in Canada’s Yukon Territory; and in Banff and Jasper national parks in the Canadian Rockies. Accompanied by his wife, Leanne Allison, and his border collie, he walked 2,200 miles from Yellowstone to the Yukon in 1998 and 1999, and another 1,000 miles to Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge with the 123,000-member Porcupine Caribou herd in 2003. He is the author of Walking the Big Wild: From Yellowstone to the Yukon on the Grizzly Bear’s Trail (The Mountaineers Books, 2004) and Being Caribou (The Mountaineers Books, 2005). He is currently working on a third book: Finding Farley. Heuer lives with his wife and son in Canmore, Alberta.

Karsten Heuer contributed "The Wilder Side of a Wild Walk" to Yellowstone to Yukon: Freedom to Roam (Braided River, 2005). To visit his "Necessary Journeys" website, click here.

Denver Holt

Denver Holt is the founder of Montana’s Owl Research Institute and Ninepipes Wildlife Research and Education Center. Holt conducts fieldwork on many different species of owls, including Snowy Owls on Alaska’s North Slope. His work has been featured on CNN Science News, Audubon’s Up-Close series, PBS’s Bird Watch, David Attenborough’s The Life of Birds, and National Geographic.

Denver Holt contributed "Through Arctic Eyes" to Arctic Wings: Birds of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (Braided River, 2006). To learn more about the Owl Research Institute, click here.