Raised in Colorado, Scott Lankford got lost en route to Stanford University and spent much of the next ten years as a maintenance man, musician, and mountaineering guide at Lake Tahoe. After joining the 1985 American Everest West Ridge Expedition, he completed a PhD in modern thought and literature with a dissertation on John Muir. Currently a professor of English at Foothill College, in California’s Silicon Valley, he has also served as Foothill’s dean of Language Arts and codirector of the Foothill College Center for a Sustainable Future.

Tony Rowell’s award-winning photos have been published in books, calendars, and many magazines. His astro time-lapse videos have been featured on the National Geographic Channel, and his astrophotography has been chosen as the Astronomy Picture of the Day on NASA’s APOD website. Rowell’s photography expeditions have taken him from the Arctic Circle to the mountains of Tibet, and his work has been exhibited at the Yosemite Museum, the Marin Headlands Visitor Center, and the Mountain Light Gallery in Bishop, California.

Kenneth David Brower is the oldest son of the pioneering environmentalist David Brower. His first memories are of the Sierra Nevada and the wild country of the American West. His father drafted him into service as an editor at nineteen, and under that leadership he wrote or edited fourteen volumes in the Exhibit-Format Series of photography books produced by the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth. In his mid-twenties he departed his father’s shop to become a freelance writer, and his work has appeared in The Atlantic, Audubon, National Geographic, Canadian Geographic, The Paris Review, Reader’s Digest, Smithsonian, Sierra, Islands, and numerous other magazines. He is the author of the books The Starship and the Canoe, Wake of the Whale, A Song for Satawal, Realms of the Sea, The Winemaker’s Marsh, Freeing Keiko, and many more. He lives in Berkeley, California.

Inspired by Native artists who create beauty from the intersection of history, culture, and life experience, Theresa Harlan became an advocate for them through her work as a curator and writer on contemporary Native art and photography. She administered programs for the California Arts Council and directed the Carl Gorman Museum in the Native American studies department at UC Davis. Harlan is Kewa (enrolled member of Santo Domingo Pueblo), and is the adopted daughter of Liz Campigli Harlan (Coast Miwok, Tomales Bay) and John Harlan. She lives in Vallejo, California, with her husband.

Dugan Aguilar is a Mountain Maidu/Pit River/Walker River Paiute photographer whose work celebrates the perseverance of Native American culture. He has exhibited his work at the Institute for Indian Arts, the California State Indian Museum, and the C.N. Gorman Museum. He is the recipient of several awards from the Santa Fe Indian Market.

When Kate Marianchild migrated to the oak woodlands of inland Mendocino County in 2001, she promptly fell in love with an ecosystem. After writing for Audubon and other nature-oriented nonprofits for several years, she began the research that led to the writing of this book. Marianchild studied Chinese language and literature at UC Berkeley and New Asia College in Hong Kong, graduating Phi Beta Kappa from Berkeley with a degree in comparative literature. Following years of grassroots political activism, she moved to Mendocino County in 1980 and supported herself as a carpenter while founding and running Rising Tide Sea Vegetables, a company that is still thriving today under new ownership. For the past thirteen years she has lived in a cozy twenty-five-foot-diameter yurt with no indoor plumbing except a sink and a two-gallon hot water heater. In addition to watching wildlife, leading nature walks, and giving slide presentations, Marianchild sings with two community choirs, kayaks, swims, and participates in the events of her beloved community. (Kate Marianchild was known as Kathy Roberts before she changed her name to honor her deceased mother.)

Dick Evans became interested in photography as a graduate student at Stanford University and continued his practice throughout a forty-seven-year career in the global metals industry that took him all over the world. San Francisco always remained home base, though, and he now lives in the city with his wife, Gretchen. Evans is the author of the photography book San Francisco and the Bay Area: The Haight- Ashbury Edition (InTransit Images and The Booksmith, 2011), as well as The Mission (Heyday) and San Francisco’s Chinatown (Heyday).

Kathy Chin Leong is an award-winning journalist who has been published in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Sunset Magazine, and many other newspapers and magazines. As a second-generation ABC (American-born Chinese), she grew up in San Francisco’s Sunset District and spent nearly every weekend in Chinatown visiting her grandmother and helping her mother shop for groceries.

Carlos E. Cortés is a professor emeritus of history at the University of California, Riverside. He is the author of The Children Are Watching: How the Media Teach about Diversity and is a creative/cultural advisor for Nickelodeon’s Peabody Award–winning children’s television series Dora the Explorer and its spinoff, Go, Diego, Go!, for which he received a 2009 NAACP Image Award. He performs his one-man autobiographical play, A Conversation with Alana: One Boy’s Multicultural Rite of Passage, across the country and has lectured widely throughout the world. He is general editor of Multicultural America: A Multimedia Encyclopedia.

Danielle M. Knapp (MA, art history and museum studies) has been a curator at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art since 2010. She currently manages the David and Anne McCosh Memorial Collection and Archive, presents exhibitions of American and regional art, and mentors University of Oregon students through internships and exhibition planning courses. Her research interests include modern and contemporary American art, especially of the Pacific Northwest, and the artistic and pedagogical practices of artists who teach.

Jill Hartz is the executive director of the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at the University of Oregon, Eugene. She is co-curator of Rick Bartow: Things You Know But Cannot Explain and coeditor of the publication of the same title. She has organized numerous exhibitions and is the editor of five books. Hartz is currently president of the national Association of Academic Museums and Galleries.

Charles Wollenberg, former Chair of Social Sciences and Professor of History at Berkeley City College, is coeditor, with Marcia A. Eymann, of What’s Going On? California and the Vietnam Era (University of California Press, 2004) and author of Marinship at War: Shipbuilding and Social Change in Wartime Sausalito (Western Heritage, 1990) and Berkeley: A City in History (University of California Press, 2008).