 |
Primal Nature: About Us |
Mission
As its name indicates, PrimalNature.org is a web site that has as its mission furthering knowledge and protection of areas that have not been directly disrupted by humans or that have been carefully restored.
The site is an expansion of and a replacement for the web site www.old-growth.org and the Eastern Old-Growth Clearinghouse which were devoted to old growth forest in eastern North America. It continues to present news of eastern old growth but has added coverage of other types of ecosystems in the same geographic area. As of 2008, in a further expansion, it will also post visionary proposals and ideas concerning North America's remaining wild lands.
PrimalNature.org is sponsored by Ecoperspectives a project of Earth Island Institute in San Francisco. Yggdrasil became the sole sponsor of the Clearinghouse in 2003. The original sponsors were Appalachia--Science in the Public Interest, Wild Earth, and Yggdrasil . Wild Earth published the first edition of Old Growth in the East: A Survey, in 1993, and Appalachia--Science in the Public Interest published the second, in 2003.
The two editors or PrimalNature.org co-founded the conservation quarterly Wild Earth.. In PrimalNature.org we hope to carry on the perspective of Wild Earth, although only in electronic form.
People
John Robert Davis has been Director of Conservation of the Adirondack Council since October 2005. The Council, which has offices in Elizabethtown and Albany, New York, works to protect the ecological integrity and wilderness character of the park. Davis's responsibilities include serving as the primary point of contact for the Council with the New York state legislature.
For the previous two years he served as land steward for the Eddy Foundation, which purchases and preserves wildlands in the eastern Adirondacks of northern New York. With the foundation, he conceived and is helping to create and protect a wildlife corridor linking New York’s Adirondack Mountains with the Champlain Valley, a habitat linkage called the Split Rock Wildway. He owns Hemlock Rock Wildlife Sanctuary, a fifty-acre preserve within the Wildway.
A graduate of Saint Olaf College, in Northfield, Minnesota, with a major in environmental ethics, he cofounded and was the first editor of Wild Earth, which began publication in 1990. He left Wild Earth in 1997 to become Biodiversity and Wilderness program office for the Foundation for Deep Ecology, based in Sausalito, California, a position he held until 2003.
He is a member of the boards of the Conservation Land Trust, Eddy Foundation, Restore: The North Woods, and the Wildlands Project. He is also an avid hiker, cyclist, paddler, cross-country skier, and wildlife watcher; and a student of natural history, particularly in the Adirondacks, Northern Appalachians, and California.
Mary Byrd Davis is a freelance researcher, writer, and editor. Her publications include Guide de l’industrie nucléaire française (L’Harmattan and Wise-Paris, 1988); The Green Guide to France (Merlin, 1990), Going Off the Beaten Path: An Untraditional Travel Guide to the U.S. (Noble, 1991, published under the name Mary Dymond Davis), Les déchets militaires nucléaires français (co-author) (Editions CDRPC, 1994), Eastern Old-Growth Forests: Prospects for Rediscovery and Recovery (editor) (Island Press, 1996), La France nucléaire: matières et sites, 2002 (WISE-Paris, 2001), and Old Growth in the East: A Survey (revised edition) (ASPI, 2003). She co-authored a reference book for libraries on biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons published in 2006 by Facts on File.
She graduated from
She is vice president of the
Centre de Documentation et
de Recherche sur la
Paix et les Conflits (CDRPC)
in
Janet Powell is a freelance consultant to nonprofit
environmental and social justice organizations. In addition, she worked for
eight years in forestry research with the University of Kentucky and
has co-authored numerous journal publications on the effects of human
disturbance upon forest ecosystems, including old growth forests, with
particular concern for invertebrate macrofauna.
She is an internet technology developer and creator of the "Appalfor -
Appalachian Sustainable Forestry" web education project, which began in 1995.
She has worked with Yggdrasil since 1998. Recent works include the "Earth
Healing" and "Kentuckians for
Nursing Home Reform" nonprofit web projects.
She graduated from the University of Kentucky with a degree Environmental
Studies (concentration in Biology) and a Masters in Social Work. She is a
volunteer with the Websites for Charities project and the Central Kentucky
Computer Society.