Tom Butler Tom is Vice President for Conservation Advocacy for Tompkins Conservation. He is a longtime conservation activist and writer who has concentrated primarily on wilderness and biodiversity.

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 addition, he is a founding board member and the current president of the Northeast Wilderness Trust, the only land trust in the northeastern United States focused exclusively on protecting forever-wild landscapes. He and his family live in the foothills of Vermont’s Green Mountains.