Horace Kephart is, or should be, in the pantheon of anyone working on entrepreneurial conservation initiatives in or near wilderness areas.  Particularly if you have ever been lucky enough to camp in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.  Even more so if you have also walked through Cornell Plantations.  The book that Kephart wrote, Camping and Woodcraft, has supported both of those amazing places financially.  You could take a look at the contents of this book here or here for a free ride.  But according to this article the royalties from the book were originally donated by Kephart’s descendants, several of whom attended Cornell, to the Plantations.  The article (from which the photos here are rendered) also states that proceeds…

…from the new edition benefit the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

We will have to investigate further how that works, since Amazon offers a new edition that does not look like the one mentioned in that article.   If you have any information to share on this, please post a comment here.  Meanwhile, anyone who would aptly describe their life as biophilia-driven might understand why this man spent his later years in a sort of Thoreauvian seclusion.  Born the same year that Thoreau died, it would seem these kindred spirits might have found solace in one another’s company; his personal life (1862-1931) story had its difficulties, not least for his family, but we celebrate his direct entrepreneurial/authorial contribution to conservation. The Great Smoky Mountains Association seems to agree: