Author, storyteller and musician Michael J. Caduto was born in 1955. He studied agriculture at the University of Rhode Island (B.A., 1978) and University of Michigan (M.S., 1981) with the intention of owning and working his own farm. Along the way, he became an ecologist and educator interested in Native American myths, legends and practices. He performs and gives workshops to raise environmental awareness and has taught collegiate environmental studies. His Earth Tales from Around the World (1997) won an Aesop Prize, awarded to the most outstanding books incorporating folklore and published in English for children. He is also author of Keepers of the Earth, Keepers of the Animals, Native… American Gardening, and others. His articles have appeared in numerous periodicals in natural history, including Nature Study, Vermont Life, Organic Gardening, and Vermont Natural History.
Bill McKibben grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts. He was president of the Harvard Crimson newspaper in college. Immediately after college he joined the New Yorker magazine as a staff writer, and wrote much of the "Talk of the Town" column from 1982 to early 1987. After quitting this job, he soon moved to the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York. His first book, The End of Nature, was published in 1989 by Random House after being serialized in the New Yorker. It is regarded as the first book for a general audience about climate change, and has been printed in more than 20 languages. Several editions have come out in the United States, including an updated version published in 2006. His… next book, The Age of Missing Information, was published in 1992. It is an account of an experiment: McKibben collected everything that came across the 100 channels of cable tv on the Fairfax, Virginia system (at the time among the nation's largest) for a single day. He spent a year watching the 2,400 hours of videotape, and then compared it to a day spent on the mountaintop near his home. This book has been widely used in colleges and high schools, and was reissued in 2006. McKibben's latest book is entitled, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. Bill currently resides with his wife, writer Sue Halpern, and his daughter, Sophie in Ripton, Vermont. He is a scholar in residence at Middlebury College. 030