Deborah Parrish Snyder has been a publisher and campaigner for sustainable futures and planetary stewardship for over 30 years. As the principle director of Synergetic Press since 1984, she has published more than 40 books on topics as diverse as the environment, ethnobotany, psychedelics, consciousness, cultural anthropology, and vanguard fiction and poetry.
During the eighties, Deborah began work with the team of people at Space Biosphere Ventures in Arizona where they were designing and building Biosphere 2, the world’s largest laboratory for global ecology. As acting Editor-in-Chief, her first book was The Biosphere Catalogue, an environmental science publication taking an interdisciplinary approach to the study of the Earth’s biosphere, with contributions from some of the world leading figures in the biological and technological fields. She helped to develop the educational programs at the visitor’s center and created a unique class of curriculum focusing on the new study of biospherics. In 1990 she founded and directed Biosphere Press, the publishing division for Space Biospheres Ventures, and produced over a dozen books, educational videos, and curriculum titles about the lessons being extracted from the rich 2-year experiment lasting from 1991-1993. Mission One, as it was called, still holds the world’s record for human life-support in a closed system, with a crew of eight people sealed inside the glass complex with less outside input than on the International Space Station. The experiment gave us great insight into the dynamic of biospheric systems and was a pioneer in the field of environmental engineering.
Deborah is a Director of the Institute of Ecotechnics, a non-profit ecological think-tank, helping to manage a number of the international conferences it has hosted over the years on global trends in the field of closed ecological systems. She is also Executive Vice President of Global Ecotechnics Corporation (www.globalecotechnics.com), an international project development and management company, with special focus on the pastoral regeneration on a small way station in NW Australia, Birdwood Downs. She is a Trustee of the London-based October Gallery, which showcases transvangard artists from all around the world. Deborah was born in 1958 in Normal, Illinois.