Maria Rodale is the CEO and Chairman of Rodale Inc., the world's leading multimedia company with a focus on health, wellness, and the environment, and the largest independent book publisher in the United States. Rodale is the author of three books and has won numerous award, including the National Audubon Society's Rachel Carson Award in 2004 and the United Nations Population Fund' Award for the Health and Dignity of Women in 2007. She lives in an ecologically friendly house in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, with her husband and three children.

"Granddaughter to Rodale's founder, and its current CEO, the author offers a passionate, evenhanded, nonacademic argument for the overall wisdom (economical and ecological) for farming organic. Deeply aware of the public confusion and suspicion surrounding organic farming as a 'hippie' cause, Rodale first persuades readers that years of chemical and pesticide use have poisoned our environment�not hard to do, considering elevated cancer levels, increases in asthma, and fertility disorders, among other afflictions attributed to environmental factors. Rodale places blame for U.S. reliance on chemical saturated farming, especially employing the use of genetically modified seeds, mostly on powerful chemical companies' manipulative advertising doublespeak, but also on government protection of conventional farmers. In her strongest section delineating a year in the life of a chemical farmer, Rodale shares clarifying findings from her own focus group that these farmers become dependent on chemical companies for their products and can't see another way, even when costs keep going up, soil is depleted, and yields decrease. In the end, Rodale does a vigorous job of debunking myths plaguing both sides."�Publisher's Weekly