The National Geographic Society (NGS), headquartered in Washington, D.C., United States, is one of the largest non-profit scientific and educational organizations in the world. Founded in 1888, its interests include geography, archaeology, and natural science, the promotion of environmental and historical conservation, and the study of world culture and history. The National Geographic Society's logo is a yellow portrait frame—rectangular in shape—which appears on the margins surrounding the front covers of its magazines and as its television channel logo. Through National Geographic Partners, the Society operates the magazine, TV channels, a website, worldwide events, and other media operations.
Publishing is the activity of making information, literature, music, software and other content available to the public for sale or for free. Traditionally, the term refers to the distribution of printed works, such as books, newspapers, and magazines. With the advent of digital information systems, the scope has expanded to include electronic publishing such as ebooks, academic journals, micropublishing, websites, blogs, video game publishing, and the like.
Permaculture is a set of design principles centered on whole systems thinking, simulating, or directly utilizing the patterns and resilient features observed in natural ecosystems. It uses these principles in a growing number of fields from regenerative agriculture, rewilding, and community resilience.
Bruce Charles "Bill" Mollison was an Australian researcher, author, scientist, teacher and biologist. In 1981, he was awarded the Right Livelihood Award "for developing and promoting the theory and practice of permaculture".
Forest gardening is a low-maintenance, sustainable, plant-based food production and agroforestry system based on woodland ecosystems, incorporating fruit and nut trees, shrubs, herbs, vines and perennial vegetables which have yields directly useful to humans. Making use of companion planting, these can be intermixed to grow in a succession of layers to build a woodland habitat.
David Holmgren is an Australian environmental designer, ecological educator and writer. He is best known as one of the co-originators of the permaculture concept with Bill Mollison.
EBSCO Information Services, headquartered in Ipswich, Massachusetts, is a division of EBSCO Industries Inc., the third largest private company in Birmingham, Alabama, with annual sales of over $3 billion according to the BBJ's 2013 Book of Lists. EBSCO offers library resources to customers in academic, medical, K–12, public library, law, corporate, and government markets. Its products include EBSCONET, a complete e-resource management system, and EBSCOhost, which supplies a fee-based online research service with 375 full-text databases, a collection of 600,000-plus ebooks, subject indexes, point-of-care medical references, and an array of historical digital archives. In 2010, EBSCO introduced its EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS) to institutions, which allows searches of a portfolio of journals and magazines.
Geoff Lawton is a British-born Australian permaculture consultant, designer, teacher and speaker. Since 1995 he has specialised in permaculture education, design, implementation, system establishment, administration and community development.
Sandor Ellix Katz is an American food writer and DIY food activist.
Dr David Fleming was an economist, cultural historian and writer on environmental issues, based in London.
The Savory brittleness scale is used to describe the position on a simple 1 to 10 scale of any environment based upon the distribution of humidity throughout each year, to assist with management decisions. It was developed by Allan Savory, a Zimbabwean biologist, because scientists were only recognizing desertification taking place in low rainfall or “fragile” environments. Savory recognized that desertification was the extreme or terminal form of man-made land degradation, but that this began with simple biodiversity loss that was occurring at all levels of rainfall from high to low. Fragile environments did not cover the situation because Savory thought all environments were fragile. The scale is used in land management because the annual distribution of humidity affects the way entire biological communities function on the land, and in particular to conservation or resting the environment to maintain or restore biodiversity. He also noted that the distribution of humidity and thus position on the brittleness scale influenced the effects of such things as fire and grazing by large herbivores.
Dynamic accumulators is a term used in the permaculture and organic farming literature to indicate plants that gather certain minerals or nutrients from the soil and store them in a more bioavailable form and in high concentration in their tissues, then used as fertilizer or just to improve the mulch.
Patrick Whitefield was a British permaculture teacher, designer, author, and consulting editor for Permaculture Magazine. He was regarded as one of the leading and pioneering permaculture authorities in Europe.
Hügelkultur is a horticultural technique where a mound constructed from decaying wood debris and other compostable biomass plant materials is later planted as a raised bed. Adopted by permaculture advocates, it is suggested the technique helps to improve soil fertility, water retention, and soil warming, thus benefiting plants grown on or near such mounds.
Low-impact development (LID) has been defined as "development which through its low negative environmental impact either enhances or does not significantly diminish environmental quality".
Paul Wheaton is an American permaculture author, master gardener, software engineer, and disciple of the natural agriculturist Sepp Holzer. He is known for writing his book, "Building a Better World in Your Backyard", founding Permies, the largest website devoted to permaculture, as well as for creating and publishing articles, videos, and podcasts on the subject of permaculture.
Ianto Evans is an applied ecologist, landscape architect, inventor, writer, social critic, and teacher. He is known for his work building, writing and teaching about natural building, cob and high-efficiency solid-fuel stoves, ovens and heaters.
Regenerative agriculture is a conservation and rehabilitation approach to food and farming systems. It focuses on topsoil regeneration, increasing biodiversity, improving the water cycle, enhancing ecosystem services, supporting biosequestration, increasing resilience to climate change, and strengthening the health and vitality of farm soil. Practices include recycling as much farm waste as possible and adding composted material from sources outside the farm.
Chelsea Green Publishing is an American publishing company which specialises in non-fiction books on progressive politics and sustainable living. Based in Vermont, it has published over 400 books since it was founded in 1984, and now releases between 25 and 30 titles each year.
