One of the world's preeminent natural scientists, Edward O. Wilson (1929-2021) grew up in south Alabama and the Florida Panhandle, where he spent his boyhood exploring the region's forests and swamps, collecting snakes, butterflies, and ants--the latter to become his lifelong specialty. The author of more than twenty books, including the Pulitzer Prize winners On Human Nature (1979) and The Ants (1991), Wilson was a professor at Harvard University for more than forty years. In retirement he established the E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation, which advances the Half-Earth Project, Wilson's vision for a healed world of restored wilderness.

David Quammen, one of America's leading science and nature writers, is the author of more than a dozen books including The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction (1996), Spillover: Animal Infection and the Next Human Pandemic (2012), and The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life (2018). He lives in Bozeman, Montana.