ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Didi Pershouse is the founder of the Center for Sustainable Medicine, where she developed a model for systems-based ecological medicine that restores health to individuals as well as the social and natural communities around them. Over the past 22 years, her health-care practice has expanded in its scope from treating individual patients to treating whole systems. In addition to raising two sons and seeing patients in Thetford Center, Vermont, she also travels and teaches around the continent with the Soil Carbon Coalition. She teaches about the interrelationships between healthy soils, shifting weather patterns, economic forces, and human health; trains community leaders in self-care and peer support; develops curricula about biological work and landscape function; and works with farmers and ranchers to restore the living systems that run the underground carbon and water cycles that make life on this planet possible.
ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR Peter Donovan is the founder of the Soil Carbon Coalition. He has herded sheep, played piano for ballet classes, and worked on cattle ranches, but he now spends most of his time touring North America in his school-bus home, facilitating workshops, and measuring changes in soil carbon and water cycles. The drawings in this book are from his travels. He has reported widely on innovative land managers; most of his articles can be found at managingwholes.com.