Michael Soulé is Professor Emeritus of Environmental Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz. He was born, raised, and educated in California. After spending much of his youth in the canyons, deserts, and intertidal of San Diego and Baja California, and after graduating from San Diego State, he went to Stanford to study population biology and evolution under Paul Ehrlich. Upon receiving his Ph.D. at Stanford, Michael went to Africa to help found the first university in Malawi. He has also taught in Samoa, the Universities of California at both San Diego and Santa Cruz, and the University of Michigan.  He has done field work on insects, lizards, birds, and mammals in Africa, Mexico, the Adriatic, the West Indies, and in California and Colorado.  Michael was a founder of the Society for Conservation Biology and The Wildlands Project and has been the president of both. He has written and edited nine books on biology, conservation biology, and the social and policy context of conservation. He has published more than 170 articles on population and evolutionary biology, fluctuating asymmetry, population genetics, island biogeography, environmental studies, biodiversity policy, nature conservation, and ethics. He continues to do research on ecosystem regulation by highly interactive species. He is a Fellow of both the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, is the sixth recipient of the Archie Carr Medal, was named by Audubon Magazine in 1998 as one of the 100 Champions of Conservation of the 20th Century, and is a recipient of the National Wildlife Federation’s National Conservation Achievement Award for science.  Now living in Colorado, Michael serves on the boards of several conservation organizations, including the Wildlands Project, and consults and speaks internationally on nature protection. He is also co-chair of the Science Council for Australia’s WildCountry Project and is completing a book about conservation and compassion and practical means of achieving harmony between the three life-affirming movements—conservation, animal protection, and humanitarianism.