Wildlands Philanthropy

Tom Butler is the editorial projects director for the Foundation for Deep Ecology, and a long-time conservation activist focused on wilderness and biodiversity. He is a founding board member and current vice president of the Northeast Wilderness Trust, the only land trust in the northeastern United States focused exclusively on protecting forever-wild landscapes. His book Wild Earth: Wild Ideas for a World Out of Balance collected essays from the conservation journal Butler edited from 1997–2005. For Wildlands Philanthropy, he immersed himself in the creation stories of parks, refuges, and nature preserves established over the span of a century. In these tales of struggle and success he found both inspiration and a greater appreciation for the way protected areas have richly affected the American experience, offering blessings of beauty, wildness, and hope to future generations. A professional nature photographer, editor, and conservationist, Antonio Vizcaíno uses beauty to help foster a new culture that respects the value of nature. A Mexican citizen but full-time world traveler, he studied at the International School of Photography in New York, and over the past two decades has published twenty books. He is co-founder of America Natural, a conservation organization that employs landscape photography as its primary means of communication. In 2001 he launched an ongoing expedition to photograph outstanding natural areas from Tierra del Fuego to Alaska. By contributing these images to environmental education campaigns, Vizcaíno seeks to increase protection for the extraordinary biodiversity of the Americas. For Wildlands Philanthropy, he photographed forty protected areas in eight countries. Tom Brokaw headed the NBC Nightly News for more than twenty years, retiring in 2004 as the most watched and most popularly acclaimed network news anchorperson in the United States. Beyond being a television journalist and best-selling author of The Greatest Generation, Brokaw is an avid conservationist and humanitarian, serving on the boards of the American Museum of Natural History and the International Rescue Committee. In 2005 Brokaw was honored with the Robin W. Winks Award for Enhancing Public Understanding of National Parks by the National Parks Conservation Association.