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Jack Eidt is a novelist, urban planner, and environmental advocate based out
of Los Angeles, California. He earned a Master’s
Degree from UCLA in Urban and Regional Development and a Bachelor’s from
the University of California at Santa Barbara in Environmental Studies with a
minor in Creative Writing. He has been employed by land developers,
municipal governments, and planning consultants, including three years with The
Walt Disney Company designing a theme park and resort expansion in Southern California. He
has consulted for the Nicaraguan Ministry of Tourism and the Municipality of
Senahú in Alta Verapaz, Guatemala, and studied subsistence ecology and
ethnobotany while living among the Miskito of Honduras, in villages
along the Grande Anse Peninsula in Haiti, and on an island off Sumatra.
In 2010, Jack founded WilderUtopia.com to showcase the dialectic between the earthen splendor of wilderness and visionary forms of utopia. WilderUtopia advocates environmental sustainability and protection of species biodiversity, and investigates urban landscape ecology, reporting on global conditions and threats to the earth-spirit-balance.
In 2004, he founded Wild Heritage Planners, an organization dedicated to sustainable
environmental planning advocacy, proposing solutions to fight urban sprawl and
save precious wild habitat. He has published opinion/editorials in various
periodicals, including the Los Angeles Times and Orange County Register, and
has been featured on Pacifica Radio, NPR, and local public television. He
also serves as a Board Member to a non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation
and management of wilderness and parkland in Southern California and the Biodiesel
Coop of Los Angeles. He won the Fiction Award at the Southern California Writer’s
Conference, attended Squaw Valley on a fellowship, and had residencies at the
Millay Colony and Vermont Studio Center. This year he also plans a return
to the caves and waterfalls of northern Guatemala to continue his next novel
inspired by environmental and political investigations with the Q’eqchi
Maya and the creation myth of the Popol Vuh.